For some strange reason, a lot of my friends are going through some really tough times with illnesses, or personal crises, or whatever right now and seem to think they haven't been paying enough attention to me. Maybe I ought to name names, just so you know who you are and stop feeling guilty about not paying enough attention to my crisis, important as it is. Jeez, people. Take care of yourselves, too. I've got plenty of friends who aren't going through major (or minor) surgery or taking care of somebody who's battling a life-threatening illness or two, or trying to put themselves through one of the toughest nursing schools in the country on a shoestring budget to spread some love my way. In fact, I went out with a couple of pals from work Thursday night, had a major bitch-fest, and felt oh so much better (although I think the infused pear martinis played a significant role in that, as well). So quit beating yourselves up for only sending a goofy email now and then, okay? Those help too, even if I don't always have the energy to tell you so.
And if I haven't heard from you, well, that's okay too. There's this strange reaction a lot of fundamentally good people have in the face of someone else's pain: they run away. Sometimes it's just where they are in their life at the time. Sometimes it's their own delicate constitutions, their thin skin, their emotional sensitivity and lack of boundaries that drive them away. I'm speaking here of people who really do have good hearts and mean well and love us. The thing is, empathy really is a sort of pain and sometimes we just can't bear it.
One of my pals who's been having a hard time lately wrote that "when times get tough, the 'Not Actually Your REAL Friend' friends, vanish just like cocaine around Paris Hilton." They don't call, they don't come around, they're just gone, scared off by our pain. Wow, did that make me wince. I've been in the "scared off" category more often than I like to admit, so now I'm trying hard to remember what that was like, and be grateful for whatever my friends can do, even if it's not visible to me. I'm trying to learn that just having people think good thoughts for me, or send a prayer somewhere is enough. Nobody's sure if that actually affects anything on a larger scale, but somewhere on the quantum level, I like to believe, my electrons get a little positive jolt—a quantum massage, if you will.
If I'm really honest, this is in part so I can let myself off the hook for not doing enough for my other friends who are currently waist-deep in the Big Muddy, as that Pete Seeger song goes (Richard Shindell just did a great cover of this on Mountain Stage yesterday, which is why it's on my mind.) I'm not used to cutting myself much slack when it comes to this, but I also haven't felt this emotionally beaten up in, well, I can't remember when, actually. Even when I was in therapy for depression in the early 90s, it wasn't like this. So I don't know quite where the balance of giving and getting is yet, and I hope my friends will forgive me for my inattentiveness.
It's true that certain of your friends will really rally when you're down, but I've come to believe that's when you find out who you can count in a crisis, not who your friends are. My concept of friendship has evolved over the years and I have different levels of friendship, like musuem memberships: There's the $25 Go for Drinks level; the $50 Supper Club; the $100 House Sitting Donors; the $500 Help You Move Associates; the $1,000 Bail Bonds at 4 AM; and the $5,000+ Lifetime Kidney Donors. Give generously, give often, give what you can. Or just drop me an email and say hello.
It's great (and relatively easy) to have compassion for people who are really suffering from obvious things: illness, catastrophic loss, natural disaster, war, famine, plague, unscheduled visits by the Four Horseman. It's harder to have compassion for people who don't really seem to be suffering at the moment when you are. It's not fair to compare pain, but our pain is always worse than somebody elses, just because it's ours. And frankly, nobody knows how much somebody else is suffering unless you're plugged right into their pain receptors. Granted, there are those people whose pain is always worse than yours, no matter what's happened to you. You could be on your last breath, and they've already been there and are here to tell you that your suffering could not possibly be equal to theirs. The trouble is, who's to say that to them, it's not, annoying as they may be about it?
And sometimes just seeing someone you love in pain is almost more than can be borne and so people stay away. That's not always an option. Sometimes you have to just suck it up. Another friend of mine, whom I admire very much because I actually have sort of been where he is and he's doing a much better job, is suffering enough to take antidepressants, though he doesn't like them, because he knows he has to be strong enough to take care of his partner.
One of the things that makes it damned hard being around people who are suffering is that nobody teaches us how to do this. So half the time, we fumble and botch it and do it all wrong. Our attempts are feeble, or over the top, or just wrong. Sometimes we wind up hurting the people we're trying to help just because we don't know what we're doing. So we think it's better to do nothing that to hurt them or do the wrong thing. Truthfully, sometimes, I'd rather have people do nothing than lacerate me a bit more, and there are people I'd most certainly rather see the back than the front of when I'm in pain.
But one of the other truths about suffering is that it's easier to deal with somebody else's suffering than it is to deal with our own. Not only that, it takes our mind off our own problems to deal with someone else's and often puts a new perspective on ours. And if we all spend a little time shoring somebody else up, eventually, somebody, somewhere, in the middle of their own pain, will be shoring us up. It's a beautiful reciprocating (e)motion.
Comments