Being a real friend to those in need
When mental health landed in the recent news cycle of the bad, the worse and the absolutely inexplicable — the pace and volume of all of this constant shock means it could have been last week, it could have been 1,000 years ago, there’s really no way to know — it was accompanied by a call to arms, to check in on friends who might be dealing with something, to let them know that someone has their back.
This, alone, was hopeful. It was love, pure and useful, in an era defined mostly by constant shock, when every day seems to bring new traumas and tragedies, to decide (insofar as millions of social-media accounts can decide) that we’re going to have eyes on each other, and are going to agree that it’s not, it’s just not, OK to squirm away from someone’s basic humanity because it’s awkward, embarrassing or uncomfortable.
A day or two later, the conversation — or, the booming, massive formlessness that passes for conversation — shifted, somewhat obliquely, toward how much of this “help” is contingent on trust, on friendships where vulnerability is shared and required and ongoing. Someone who is drifting or suffering or disappearing — which is sometimes obvious and urgent and linear, and sometimes not — is more likely to accept the help being offered by someone they’re already deep in it than someone more tangential, who senses something is up and drops a text. (I mean, do both.)
If ever there was a time for a sub-movement of tenderness, it’s now — nothing is more evident than the fact that we, to get Pinterest-y about it, “belong to each other.” The work and rules of friendship rarely make their way to a social-media moment, in part (or in total?) because friendship is the relationship we think about, and definitely talk about, the least. It’s supposed to just exist, unattended to, even though friend breakups are — anecdotally, but obviously — just as painful as romantic breakups, and even though the divorce rate is still trucking, and even though loneliness is an epidemic.
Friendship isn’t bound by blood or law; there are few ceremonial ways to mark it, to mean it. (One good idea I’ve heard is an annual “friendiversary pie.”) When school ends and we’re without the people we were thrust toward by virtue of circumstance and geography —“proximity” being a key indicator of who you’re going to be friends with — and have to (and get to) start choosing who we want to belong to, especially after turning 30, time starts to dissolve until a month becomes a handful of days you can’t really remember (like, did June actually happen?). I would not have guessed, before, that the people who shook out of my 20s would be the girl I met at a summer class — Faulkner, I think? — the girl I met at a temp job, the girl I met at a weird TIFF party I went to alone. True friendship is, inherently, random, but — or, because of that — it demands some of the most careful work.
Where this conversation about a new paradigm, or at least the potential for one, hasn’t gained any ground (yet) is the extent to which that principle of care, courage and vulnerability also applies when a friend is doing some dirt, from stepping out on their spouse to supporting political policies that don’t reflect their values. There are different kinds of holes to be down. Calling this out takes more of that courage, and vulnerability, than asking someone if they need you to help them make a doctor’s appointment, or do the laundry. It’s stickier with judgment, even more open to rejection, like passing a black light over the details of the friendship.
I sometimes wonder why my friends didn’t refuse to have brunch with me when all I was bringing to the table were stories about that one guy, where nothing changed, not the relationship or my insights about it or my interest in talking about it until the restaurant closed. They would have stepped in if I was super-depressed, in bed, but no one told me I was being stupid. They should have.
We have obligations to our people, to be courageous enough to show up, and vulnerable enough to make it matter.