Give or Take
Flash memoir from round 2 of The Chain | Some tender and tentative thoughts on friendship
Written in a 40 minute sprint on 8 February in the final session of the second round of The Chain, a flash memoir co-creation experiment facilitated by Lindsay Johnstone. Each week, Lindsay selects as a prompt a piece written the previous week, and participants gather in a live Zoom session later that day to write together and at speed a piece of flash memoir inspired by the prompt. Immediately after the session, we post our responses in the comments of the first post, from which Lindsay will choose the prompt for the following week, when we go again.
The piece below was written in response a prompt piece by Barbara Ratcliffe , which you can read here. You can also read some of the other responses to Barbara’s piece here and here.
Sometimes I think that I am not very good at friendship. Or only good at particular kinds of friendships. The situational friendships forged in having something in common: a shared class or course, working in the same office, living in the same house, having children the same age. Once that shared experience ends, I find that my friendships often wither or fade, the colours bleaching towards a paler acquaintanceship. We’re still friends, maybe, but we don’t see each other so often, phone calls and text messages become infrequent. The heartbeat slows.
I worry that I am not good - maybe even rubbish - at the deeper kinds of friendship. The known each other since we were 5 years old friendships, the went to school together friendships, the met on the first day of university and still in touch 20 years later friendships. The longstanding friendships that take real and sustained effort on both sides to keep alight. I give both too much and too little, perhaps. I mean give in the sense of my ability to stretch and bend under pressure. Is it that I am inflexible, or too flexible? I feel like an elastic band: I will stretch further and further, spreading myself thinner than I should over time and space to accommodate a friend’s needs and wants - real and imagined - until sometimes, finally, I snap. And if I snap, then that’s it. The friendship might not be over, not yet, but I won’t be putting in the effort needed to keep it burning. I’ve been pushed too far. The friendship sags.
I don’t know whether it’s me or them. Am I the one pulling away, or do they not care enough to keep the friendship alive once the thing we had in common, our shared experience, has ended? I worry that maybe I think we are better friends than we ever were. Maybe I was just an acquaintance to them. I don’t want to impose myself on them if that is the case, if they’re content for our connection to become intermittent - a chance meeting in the supermarket, a catch up over coffee every six months. I fear the possibility of rejection, and so maybe I try to pull away first in an attempt to protect myself from something that isn’t really there.
I envy people my age with longstanding friendships of many years, reaching back to university or high school or even earlier. I don’t know how they do it. I feel like I missed an important lesson somewhere along the way. And it’s hard making new friends as an adult, especially now my children are growing up. I’ve lost the easy and immediate camaraderie of the nursery and primary school days, a circle of mums (and some dads) waiting in the yard at pick up time, validating each other’s stories of a baby that won’t sleep, an intense toddler tantrum, a particularly fussy eater.
It’s like dating, trying to make new friends as an adult. And I was never any good at dating. Everyone is busy, being pulled in multiple directions by competing responsibilities of work to do and bills to pay and exercise and raising children and looking after elderly parents and trying to remember who they are outside all of that. It feels like no one has the time - even if they wanted to. Even in longstanding friendships making a plan to meet up can take months to arrange, finding an evening or weekend that works for both friends almost impossible.
I worry, perhaps, that everyone else has those longstanding friendships to sustain them. That they don’t need any more friends. I don’t want to put myself somewhere I’m not wanted, or try to force a friendship that isn’t really there. I am scared of the possibility of being rejected, so it feels safer not to risk it, to remain in the safe shallow waters of friendly acquaintances, of situational friendships. To enjoy what there is - because so much of it is good - but not to try for anything deeper. Try for more and you could end up with less.
I hesitated for a long while over whether to publish this post or not. Doing so feels like the sting of a graze when you fall on gravel, or like pressing a bruise. It’s an unfinished piece, a stream of consciousness that poured out of me somewhat unexpectedly during 45 minutes on a cold damp morning in early February. It feels a little like publishing a diary entry, and also like picking a scab. Writing about friendship, about feeling like I’m bad at friendship, about how hard it is to make new friends in my 40s, feels like admitting to something we’re meant to keep hidden. But I set out to publish each of the four pieces I wrote during this round of The Chain, so that’s what I’m going to do. And I know that I’m not alone in feeling some of these things, however much it might sometimes feel like I am.
I love the images you’ve chosen to go with this piece Ellen. And I totally understand about feeling exposed publishing outside of the chain. I felt exactly the same about the post-natal piece, but I think that so many people will be grateful that you did.
It was lovely to read this again. I agree about feeling exposed when you post pieces outside of the Chain but l feel it’s important to do this. Your images are perfect for the piece. So much of what you say applies to me. I think we’re duped by the social media hype about friendship and if people were honest with themselves they’d agree with you.