Part of growing up with someone is learning how to grow apart too. When we started high school we drifted a little. Our senior year we had anatomy together and became friends again. We spent every morning together in the commons area eating breakfast. Our friend, Emily, dubbed us "The Breakfast Club" and decided which characters from the film we were. The night we graduated we all rode together to the local movie theater still in our graduation regalia and we watched back to back movies before going home. My own family had pizza and gathered together, but we went out together instead. I still think about it a lot: the way friends become family.
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Tabitha Blankenbiller is a Pacific University MFA grad living outside of Portland, Oregon. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Catapult, Narratively, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Hobart, and a number of other venues. Her debut essay collection EATS OF EDEN is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press in March 2018.
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Lyon: Together we invented something called The Accountability Institute—which is really two imaginary institutions, The Lyon Accountability Institute and The Tipton Accountability Institute, both of which are dedicated to holding us accountable. One practice that these institutes "sponsor" is the daily (or several-times-weekly) emails we exchange about what we've been up to, career-wise and creatively. When we want to talk about relationships or other, more personal matters, we use a different thread, which we call The Heart. I love this idea so much that I want to share it with everyone. On one level, we’ve organized our friendship into these two categories, and that feels very clean to me. But on another level, I am just so delighted by the idea of the Accountability Institutes. I love feeling like I am the sole member of this one little institution whose whole purpose is to hold me accountable. It makes my creative work so much more playful. I even had a designer friend make me a logo.
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