Reciprocity's Wild Kindness

My dear friend was generously sharing her vulnerability with me. Why did I feel like I had to have everything figured out before I could share mine?

About a year into the pandemic, my oldest friend gave me an immense gift. The kind that shows you to yourself. That actually changes you. The two of us have known one another since high school, and there’s always been a fierce thread between us. At the time I’m writing about, my friend was going through a very difficult season, managing a devastating break up amidst lock down, on top of a stressful reorganization at her work. And so, when the two of us met up around this time, she would tell me of her grief for the lost relationship, often through tears. She would describe the frustrating politics at work, wondering about the safety of her career or if she even wanted it anymore. And she’d describe the stresses of lock down as a single woman with two elderly, anxious parents who depended on her.

My friend’s troubles never felt indulgent or dark for darkness sake. She was in the active work of facing the hard stuff of life, wrestling it, trying to rend some order from the chaos. And if you’d asked me at the time, I know I would have said it was my privilege to listen, my honor to mirror her strength and wisdom, even through the vale of her dark night. I loved my friend. But all of this being true, I began to notice a small, but growing weariness in her from visit to visit. I was getting ready to ask her about it, when she said this to me:

“Jul. I feel like when we’re together, I share these hard things with you. And I’m right in the middle of them. I’m grateful that I can talk to you about it all, truly. But I have to say, it feels like it just goes one way, and it kind of makes me feel like a mess. If you tell me about anything that’s hard for you, it’s in the past tense, after you’ve figured it out. And there’s always wisdom in what you share, Jul. I appreciate that. I do. But you could also talk to me when you’re in the middle of something you haven’t figured out. It might be a kindness to me if you did.”

Well, shit. Sometimes you’re made to see yourself, and things aren’t quite so adorable as you’d hoped. There was queasy contrition on the spot. “Dammit,” I could only say. “You’re right. That’s just what I do.” I sat in silence for a good long moment, blinking into my exposure. A shadowy part of me that had been hidden only a moment before, was suddenly right in front of me. Compassionately called into the light by the friend who’d known me longest.

I’m filled with emotion as I think back to it. Because what I was offered here wasn’t a scolding, but fierce, left-handed grace. She showed me that pain or uncertainty hoarded to myself was actually a form of stinginess between true friends. But that if I was willing to share of myself in the midst of actual feelings of loss or uncertainty, this had the possibility of performing a unique feat of generosity.

“Dearest friend,” I might have said, “I’m human too. I’m fallible too. There’s much I’ve gotten wrong about this world, and still so much I don’t know. But I’m here with you.”

Nobody guards their real vulnerability unless they’ve had it scorched a bit, and I’m not special here. Alas, I’d been operating on auto-pilot from a fairly deep imprint of mine, one that insisted my challenges were mine alone to solve. That what I owed my friend wasn’t my vulnerability, but some tidy aphorism—an answer!—with zero exposure to my enduring questions, of which there were—and still are—so many.

It bears saying that there’s a shadow of pride in an endless capacity for another’s vulnerability, particularly when we’re intolerant towards our own. When my friend told me she was feeling like a mess around me, I believe she was picking up on my unconscious pride. Not malicious, it feels important to say. Just unconscious. An imprint I came by honestly, but one it was time to invite out of the shadows.

And that’s what my friend offered me. Not an ultimatum, but an invitation into a different kind of intimacy. She asked me for a willingness to live my questions with her. She asked for reciprocity. That reciprocity might be our wild kindness to one another.