Losing hold
In the wake of a historic election, Faith Brown was left questioning one of her oldest friendships. She reflects on a world increasingly divided and how we navigate personal connection when it feels like we’re more apart than ever.
OBAMA’S ELECTION IN 2008 was the first presidential race I was old enough to remember. Granted, I was nine years old at the time, but even through a child’s eyes I’ll never forget the countless fundraisers my mother hosted and her insistence that we volunteer at the campaign office. Like many other black households in America, the cultural and racial significance of his presidency – and what it could mean for black families like ours – was discussed at the dinner table every night. My best friend and her family held different views – I could tell from the contrasting signs fixed in our front lawns – but it didn’t matter then. We were nine, after all.
As we matured, I gravitated towards the left and she gravitated towards the right, but still we filed those differences away. Instead of engaging, we abstained from political discussions entirely. And while our lunchtime topics may have erred on the side of the superficial, I took comfort in knowing that at least they weren’t divisive.
Even Trump’s election in 2016 couldn’t shake our stable bond. In fact, we took pride in having contrasting political ideologies. Admittedly, I had no great understanding of politics then, or the power President Trump would abuse to create divisions that would threaten even the strongest relationships. A Reuters study in 2017 showed that one in five respondents stopped talking to a loved one due to the election and 14 per cent admitted to ending relationships entirely. I watched as people around me started to draw their own lines in the sand, but I remained hopeful that it wouldn’t come to that for us. I believed that my best friend and I would beat the statistics.
Then 2020 happened.
In April, as Covid encroached, I escaped from Milan where I was studying abroad, to join my family in Sydney, their new home. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, I watched in horror from half a world away as the worst of America’s racist past resurfaced. Beyond heartbroken, I was rendered helpless. Seeing some of my white friends use their social media platforms to call out systemic racism and to amplify the messages of the Black Lives Matter movement fed me some comfort. But the silence of others felt like a personal attack. My best friend’s voice was noticeably absent from my timeline. I counted 76 hours from when the protests began, and I still hadn’t heard from her. Finally, I worked up the courage to reach out. I could no longer ignore that her silence weighed heavily on my heart. An hour before our scheduled talk, a perfectly colour-blocked illustration mourning George Floyd went up on her Instagram Stories. Still, I was compelled to know what had taken her so long. She apologised for her absence in the national conversation and then explained what finally got her to hit the reshare button was the realisation that this was not a “political thing,” but a “human thing”.
I couldn’t see a distinction between political issues and human issues. Humans killed George Floyd. Politics did too. To me, the death of George Floyd and the many brutal police killings before and after him felt inherently political. If you singled out the issues one by one, she would tell you ‘of course black lives matter,’ ‘duh climate change is real,’ and ‘obviously women should have control of their bodies.’ But somehow those beliefs and values didn’t translate to her larger political affiliation. Still, I naively concluded that our 15-year-old relationship was more important than any single
argument that would arise if I told her how I was really feeling. If I told her it terrified me that she couldn’t see how I, her best friend, her only black friend, was so deeply affected by this death, how this death could not exist in a vacuum. Our nation was deeply divided, and we were starting to crack too.
In reflecting on the broader era of division that the Trump administration ushered in, American journalist and CNN political commentator Steven Roberts told me: “The rivalry between political factions are more visceral, more emotional and more deep-seated than ever before.” Maybe that is why I wanted so badly to return to my nine-year-old self, before the divisiveness of politics escaped from Pandora’s box in my little world. But part of growing up black is recognising that there was never a time before politics, only a time when my proximity to whiteness and my own privilege blinded me from seeing the full effects of it.
Spending time in Sydney allowed me to see that. While every country has a racist past, it is how a nation confronts these ills in the present that determines its character and its ability to heal. I may have had to watch from afar as the president callously handled the racial reckoning of my country, but I was returning more motivated than ever to vote in my first presidential election – a sentiment I assumed I shared with all of my peers.
I arrived home at the end of the American summer to finish my senior year of university in Washington, D.C. That’s when my best friend told me she was not planning to vote. Her decision, again, felt like an attack. I feared that her neutrality spoke more to her morality than her political ideology. I couldn’t help but think of James Baldwin’s famous quote: “We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
The impending election forced me to grapple with the dimensions of my identity that were consistently threatened throughout Trump’s first term – my race and my gender. Psychotherapist Karen Dale describes them as the issues I put in my ‘top box’. She tells me: “Sometimes we can create space where something that is in our top box and something that’s on our second shelf can coexist. However, when it’s not in alignment with what’s important to us, we end up trying to compromise in a way that harms us.” If a relationship is built on shared values, I was struggling to see how my relationship with my best friend could continue to exist without a harmful compromise of my ‘top box’ issues.
However, clinical psychologist Dr Rachelle Zemlok explains that when there are deep emotions involved, we should be wary of setting extreme rules for determining if a relationship can or cannot continue. She says relationships are not built just on shared values, but shared experiences, too. “It would be hard to even think of a relationship where we share every value we have with one person,” she notes.
Dr Zemlok’s insight reminded me of the tenure of our friendship, the moments that tethered us together beyond casting a ballot. This was the girl who let me sit with her at lunch in the third grade when no one else would, the girl who was there for me through my parents’ divorce, the girl I cried with over boys and bad haircuts. We endured every formative life moment together, and yet while my political consciousness awakened, she remained asleep.
In helping me navigate the difficult conversation I knew we had to have, Dr Zemlok introduced me to The Gottman Method, which is rooted in 40 years of rigorous research based on nearly 3,000 couples. Whether it’s a partner, friend, or sibling, the method provides a framework for navigating difficult conversations in relationships by laying out the steps to a productive dialogue. Researchers found that 69 per cent of the problems couples discuss are ongoing ‘perpetual’ issues – unsolvable problems rooted in fundamental differences between individuals. They found that even happy couples discussed these very same issues years down the road without resolution.
I thought back to the different signs that coloured our front yards since our very first election; surely the political differences between me and my best friend were a fundamental problem, instilled in us from the start. But while I was grappling with a way to heal what fractured us, Dr Zemlok shared that: “The Gottman blueprint for working with these ongoing fundamental differences within a relationship is not by ‘solving’ them, but by creating productive dialogue about them.”
Though the 2020 election and its result felt deeply personal, the fundamental problems my friend and I confronted are universal. We saw this with Brexit, as the question of whether or not to leave the EU divided families and a nation. We’re seeing this in real-time in Poland, as the conflict over newly imposed abortion laws rages on. We are living in an era of global division. But while, individually, we cannot control the outcomes of society’s most crucial debates, we can control the conversations we have with the people we care about the most.
My best friend’s decision not to vote required us to have the first of many difficult conversations. I wish I could tell you that we came to a resolution, that she saw the light, or that I am able to tolerate her indifference and let it all go, but I can’t. Maybe that’s what is most important though – not that our differences be instantly resolved, but that we open ourselves up to the dialogue in the first place. Just as my perspective has shifted, so has our friendship. I know now that neither can exist the way it once did, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up on us just yet. Instead, I am committing to continuing the conversation.
What I’ve learned is that I can’t change someone’s deeply ingrained beliefs – even if they hurt me. But I can channel that pain into staying engaged in the issues that are most important to me. Our conversations, while still a work in progress, are a significant improvement on our silence. According to Dale, there is something to be said for choosing knowledge over blissful ignorance: “The fact that there is this level of candour and transparency on the table gives everyone a reasonable place from which to start”. Her insights have shown me that though our conversations may never bring about my desired outcome, I was able to start them in the first place – and that must count for something.
“I watched as people around me started to draw their own lines in the sand, but I remained hopeful that it wouldn’t come to that for us. Then 2020 happened”