Best Friends - Part 2:

[Judging from the private responses to the previous post on friendship, I've apparently struck a nerve.  Here are more thoughts on friendship between adult women .... thoughts still not fully formed, still conclusion-less.  Would love to hear your feedback on this topic, especially if you have a different - or more fully developed - perspective!]

Turtle in a Social Whirl'd :

Once upon a time, a bright, curious, engaging little girl grew up to be a middle-aged woman who went to a retreat advertised as, well, a retreat: a time to get away, to be refreshed, to be quiet, to "let go of the need to have it all together". It was billed as being different from those other retreats, which were, well, actually conferences.

This middle-aged woman, mother of four, was looking forward to quiet. Refreshment. Letting go of perfection (or the striving for...). To being with like-minded women.

The venue was peaceful. The guest speaker was kind, and welcoming. The other women were genuine. And gregarious. And eager to hear each other's life stories. And exchange contact information. And refer to each other as “dear friend” on social media only hours after meeting for the first time ......

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I came to the retreat to actually retreat. I thought others had, too. I thought (silly me) that was the point.

I was wrong.

I didn't attend all the offered meetings, and workshops, and sing-around-the-campfires, and early-morning-yogas, and late-night-snacks. I wanted to. I just needed retreat more than I needed fifteen new best friends.

And so …. even though a few of the lovely women I met friended me immediately on social media, I soon noticed, after I went home (refreshed, I might add, despite feeling like a disappointment socially), that the “dear friend-ing” continued – nay, escalated – in earnest. Was there a prize? I began to wonder, for attaching yourself to the most new people? Did you get a discount at the next annual event if you got the most new followers? The most comments from previous attendees?

I still don't know. I slowly unfollowed most of my new “friends” as my feeling of fraudulence increased, since I wasn't actually in friendships with any of them.  There was no one-on-one, heart-to-heart, back-and-forth, outside of reading and occasionally commenting on social media posts. I prematurely decided that it was probably all just a facade, for all parties involved.

And then I saw a photo of several of them together. Together. In person! (One of them had been my roommate!!). The first thing I thought was not (God help me) “How lovely that they could all get together!”

Nope. The first thing I thought was - “I'm not there. I'm not with them. No one invited me. I'm not wanted.”

There it is. All the bright, curious, engaging little-girlness gives way to the ancient fear of not being wanted, lived out decades later, on a regular basis.

I confess that as I approach my fifth decade in life, I still occasionally wonder “How is this friendship stuff supposed to work, exactly?” What is it supposed to look like? Does everyone else have that One Person who texts them (or if they're really loved, calls!) whenever something good or bad happens, and who reciprocates in turn? Does everyone else have a friendship playbook except me? Did I miss a memo (or a facebook meme) somewhere?

In middle school, my physical coordination was rather behind the other kids', which, coupled with the fact that I'd been pushed ahead a grade in school, putting me even more behind coordination-wise, meant that I was usually chosen last for team sports.

Middle age felt just like that, today, when I saw that photo of the happy-without-me group of retreat women.

What's wrong with me now, I wondered? Being able to hit or kick the ball at the right time in the right way doesn't matter anymore, and I actually thought I was a pretty good friend. (More than one friend has told me just that, as it happens, so surely it's not arrogance to believe them?) 

 Maybe I'm just not that sort of friend, the kind you invite on a girls' road trip, or have over with your other friends, or pick up your phone to tell about the thing that just happened, or call to check up on when you haven't heard anything for awhile?

I don't know. I am in the dark. Playbook-less.

I have good friends (I thought) who tell me sometimes in the middle of our deep, intense, meaningful conversations that they can't talk to anyone else like this, about these kinds of things. So I apparently have some value as a friend. Sometimes. When it comes to being real about what really matters. But these friends do not tag me on their “best friend” posts. We don't take selfies together and commemorate our friendship in the public eye.

Maybe I'm not fun (or photogenic!) enough for those kind of friendships. (But just the other day I was with two friends laughing till we couldn't breathe or – a more immediate crisis – swallow the coffee in our mouths! Okay, granted, that would not have been photogenic!)

Or maybe I'm too quirky to want to hang out with too frequently, or too embarrassing to combine with other friends. Maybe I'm not a good mixer.

For whatever reason, I was not chosen, at that retreat, for anyone to get to know* in real life, beyond the artificially-structured time. In that small, intimate crowd of 30+ women, despite the fact that I enormously enjoyed getting to know some of them, sharing stories, talking about things that matter, somehow none of them “stuck” in a way that translated into friendship once the retreat had ended.

So I am left mystified.

Maybe if I gaze at that photo long enough, I'll find a clue ….
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*[It occurs to me as I type that phrase - “not chosen … for anyone to get to know” - that I also did not choose to get to know anyone at length once the retreat ended, either. I didn't attach myself to any of the apparently pre-formed groups there; I didn't pursue post-retreat closeness with anyone whose story I'd heard. So in a way, I participated in the not-choosing … by also not choosing. This is something for me to chew on. Something different, granted, from the left-out feeling that I'm not doing friendship “right” in general, in life, but still …. Perhaps there is more initiating that is my responsibility than I have previously acknowledged. And perhaps – there is just simply the fact that I prefer a slower pace than many today seem to …. and so I am literally left behind. I don't know. Do you?]

Best Friends

 Tomorrow is National Best Friends Day. I know this because a few times a year I hear about a cool “National” day (usually a day or two after the fact) and decide that I want to keep up on what the National Days are so that when something cool like “National Eat-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies-in-Bed-Day” comes up, then I'll know in advance so we can celebrate it as a family, earning me those all-important Fun-Mom points that I'm always so short on ….

As an aside, there IS no “National Eat-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies-in-Bed-Day” because at the time that I submitted the idea they were no longer accepting nominations for National Days. I was nominating it to be on my birthday, I think, along with a nomination for “National Random Acts of Kindness Day” to be held on Mother Teresa's birthday. Both were turned down, so at least I had no good reason to take that rejection personally.

Which is as good a segue as any, I suppose, for the topic of this post, which is related both to National Best Friends Day, and to rejection, and taking things personally.

As much as I abhor writing about (or reading about, for that matter) pain, and personal pain especially, and rejection, and anything that sounds even remotely self-pitying (because we all know that victimhood is practically the worst modern sin there is in the current era of self-sufficiency) …. every time I pick up, well, my laptop, to write anything in the past year or three, it always ends up a puddly pool of self-pity. Or at least it sounds that way to me. It's possible that I'm oversensitive to that particular nuance; I don't know.

But since that's apparently what's in me to come out, I've decided I might as well just run with it. Own it. Face up to the fact that evidently I am a self-pitying victim-y sort of person, at least right now. (And really – there is an awful lot to be self-pitying about in your 40s, I'm just saying*....)

The thing is – National Best Friends Day:   I don't have a Best Friend. Not the kind with capital letters. Not the kind you can confidently tag #BFF on a facebook post without worrying that she'll be surprised, or worse yet, in her head (or to her REAL BFF) be like “Wait, what?! She thinks we're Best Friends?!!! Oh NOOOO!!!”

This – not having a Best Friend – worries me a little. Or at least it makes me wonder if it should worry me. And maybe some days it worries me more than a little. (Please tell me I'm not the only one that has those “I'm probably the only one who [doesn't] ______!!” days....) I mean, in some ways I thought grown-ups were beyond Best Friends. That feels a little like grade school to me, and yet if I spend too much time on social media I'll inevitably run across posts (by adult friends – always, strangely, female) proclaiming just that: that So-and-So is their Best Friend. So maybe we haven't outgrown that?

Which brings me back to the question: Am I the only one without a Best Friend? How common IS this “Best Friend” phenomenon among adults?

I do have wonderful friends. I have friends who have known me since high school (and before!) and friends who I just met in the last couple of years, friends with whom I can talk theology and grammar and current events and literature and psychology and personal growth and child-rearing and gardening and cooking and pretty much everything under the sun. I have friends that I've cried with and friends that I've laughed-till-I've-cried with. Friends who walk with me, shop with me, drink coffee with me, eat with me, give me – or ask me for – advice. Friends who swap recipes with me, recommend books and CDs (and even loan them), send links to that awesome shirt she just got from Amazon or links to good movies or links to cool DIY projects or links to free therapy. Friends that I give to and friends that I receive from. Friends that in some seasons I feel very close to, and in other seasons we seem to drift apart. I've had friends that we could spend years without contact and pick up right where we left off, and friendships which ended painfully, and still bring pain today.

But when I think of a Best Friend (and this is, of course, always in capital letters), I think of having one friend who it would always be them that I'd call with good news or bad news or a stupid question about how to clean a dryer vent, and who would always call me for those things.

And I don't have one of those. Do you? Are we supposed to? Does not having one make me less of a woman? Is it proof that I'm not a good friend, or am undesirable Best Friend material somehow?

I'm not being facetious. I really want to know.

Someone fill me in? (But whatever you do, please, I beg of you, do NOT show this to your own Best Friend and laugh at me behind my back. Because that would really usher in the self-pity, and goodness knows we wouldn't want that!)

*and YES I know about gratitude and how important it is and how healing and magical it is.  Yes.  I know.  And guess what?  I am just complex enough to be a gratitude-freak AND a self-pitying victim-y sort of person.  Not that I'm angling for a trophy in complexity.  Just saying.

coward?

[looking back, today....]

According to wikipedia (sorry, Webster) a coward is someone who "is perceived to fail to demonstrate sufficient robustness and courage in the face of a challenge."  Hmmm..... I find life to be vastly challenging, and some days I'd love to be rescued from it all.  

I think I might be a coward. 

Parenting, for starters, feels like driving in a high-speed race – the smallest actions fraught with peril & significance; one false move and you total the car. Marriage, and friendships in general, are likewise complex and easily injured.  Thanks to psychology, even cleaning and eating and simple pleasures are redolent of internal neuroses.  

If I have a finite task in front of me – change this diaper, say, or clean out this closet, or navigate with love this one conversation about mother-daughter relationships or welfare or faith vs. works – difficult or messy though it may be, a single task feels doable. The challenge in life's difficulties is not knowing their boundaries, how long they'll last.

I just read something recently on the subject of difficulty, and escape.  I've been worrying it in my mind, trying to find out the truth of it:

"The Christian walk is not a quiet escape to a garden where we can walk and talk uninterruptedly with our Lord ... The Christian life is going to God. In going to God Christians travel the same ground that everyone else walks on, breathe the same air, drink the same water, ... pay the same prices for groceries and gasoline, fear the same dangers, are subject to the same pressures, get the same distresses, are buried in the same ground.

"The difference is that each step we walk, each breath we breathe, we know we are preserved by God, we know we are accompanied by God, we know we are ruled by God; and therefore no matter what doubts we endure or what accidents we experience, the Lord will preserve us from evil, he will keep our life." [from A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson]

I guess I've thought that "the Christian walk" could (or should) be a "quiet escape to the garden" ... in fact, that's what I'd like some days - deliverance from difficulty, not merely help as I walk through it.  (You could say that I appear to lack sufficient "robustness and courage in the face of life's challenges".)  But, lacking a viable escape, I bluster on.

I wonder if this lack of robustness could stem from inaccurate expectations.  

Elsewhere in his book, Peterson says, 

"The world, in fact, is not as it has been represented to us.  Things are not all right as they are, and they are not getting any better.

"We have been told the lie ever since we can remember:  that human beings are basically nice and good. ... The world is a pleasant, harmless place.  ... If we are in chains now, it is someone's fault, and we can correct it with just a little more intelligence or effort or time.

"How we can keep on believing this after so many centuries of evidence to the contrary is difficult to comprehend, but nothing we do or nothing anyone else does to us seems to disenchant us from the spell of the lie.  We keep expecting things to get better, somehow. ... Convinced by the lie that what we are experiencing is unnatural, an exception, we devise ways to escape"

There's the rub.  If "life is good", if I alone in all the world am suffering, then the injustice, the loneliness of it burns more sharply than the suffering itself.  If all the world is wounded, though, then those around me are fellows in my grief, understanding sojourners helping and being helped in turn.

The optimist in me (despite it all) does not want to believe in a wounded world.  I want to see the blessings, choose to look at life with wonder and gratitude.  So is life good?  Or is it "but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage"?  [Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5]

Where to turn?  How to reconcile these two conflicting views?

The Master Potter, He who wields the clay to fit his will, reminds me of a verse I read this morning (the answer's always there):  

"let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith ....  Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.  Let us not give up meeting together, ... but let us encourage one another ..."  [Hebrews 10:22, 24-25]

The world is wounded, but life - together - nevertheless is good.  We have God's grace, equipping us to love in the face of libel, do good despite our weariness and lack of trust.  We have God, and we have each other.

Courage! then, my fellow cowards - onward and upward!  Let us link arms and spur each other on, and be "robustness" for each other, filling in the gaps.

[first published 8-4-11]