The White Lily (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thewhitelily) wrote2006-12-13 05:39 pm
thewhitelily) wrote2006-12-13 05:39 pm
Entry tags:
Feeling like a bad friend
I’m new to this whole friendship thing.
Apart from Hubby, I’ve been pretty much a loner all through my life. I had a couple of friends in primary school, but in hindsight they weren’t so much best friends as people who enjoyed having someone follow them around. I was socially useless before I decided to shift the goalposts and claim victory by redefining my social life to include the Internet. Not-so-coincidentally, I started managing to fake it face to face.
Dealing with people is still intensely confusing, immensely tiring, and unbelievably time-consuming, but I was considerably more useless before I discovered that I could express myself in the written word if I gave myself long enough to try. (Come to think of it, my relationship with Hubby only developed in the first place because we started exchanging email.)
But I just can’t help but feel so inadequate for the task of being a friend.
I find it hard enough to deal with friends on the surface level – remembering to spend time with them, remembering to ask them how their week/month/year was, remembering that it’s actually important to stop procrastinating and pick up the darn phone or write the darn email. I care about the answers – I want to talk to them, I want to spend time with them... it's just something that slips my mind because doing so takes so much more effort than not doing so. And because I procrastinate the important until it's urgent, and these things almost never become so.
But![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
iviolinist's post this morning regarding the responses of some of her friends to her mention that she was down reminded me of an incident where I failed a different friend. I googled for "Friendship for Dummies", more in desperation for a laugh than anything else, and their number one tip is the golden rule: "treat others like you would want to be treated". Which sounds fair enough, but it just doesn't work for me.
When my father died in early high-school, the teachers arranged to have a small busload of “friends” to come to the funeral. They hadn’t realised, of course, that I didn’t actually have any friends, and in fact I didn’t even know the names of some of the people they’d managed to round up. It was quite possibly the worst thing they could have done in the situation. My memory of being hugged by one of these big-hearted, well-meaning strangers is one of the more intense I have. I was already off balance by the situation, and I hadn't had time to steel myself, so the feeling of wrongwrongwrong was so strong that it actually translated to physical pain in my mind. My palms were sweaty, my heart was dancing to some kind of techno beat in my chest, and my vision was tunnelled and my head swelling like a balloon because of the way I was hyperventilating. I suppose, at least, the panic attack got my mind off the fact that my father had just died.
If my husband died, I don’t think I’d even want to hold a funeral, although I guess I’d have to. I wouldn’t want people to come and talk to me; I wouldn’t want people to hug me or try to comfort me; I wouldn't want to have to deal with thanking everyone for their sympathy. It’s not that I don’t feel the emotions, because I do – it’s just that my emotions are a private thing. Unless I choose to share them with someone, they’re mine, and the last thing I would want is someone hunting me down to make me talk to them. No matter how much they care, or how much they can relate, I would just want and need every friend I had to go the hell away until I had the energy to deal with them on top of everything else.
I don’t understand why other people want what they do from me in that situation, because I wouldn’t want it from them. But I’m still a good listener when people approach me – at least I'm told I am. If someone wants to rant about something that’s going on in their life, I'm very happy to make appropriate sympathetic/enquiring noises until they get it all off their chest. If they’ve got a problem, I can ask rational questions, play devil’s advocate, and throw their own words back at them until they reach a solution - or at least become slightly more at peace with the idea that there isn't a solution.
I like hearing about people’s troubles. I’m interested in them, I care deeply about what’s going on with them, even if I can't express that very well, and I don’t want people to stop feeling they can vent to me and lighten their burden a little by sharing it. I like knowing they trust me enough to tell me – although in general it probably means less for them than it would for me in the same situation. It makes me feel closer to them. It makes me feel good to listen, because it’s something I can do, something that I know how to do, because once they’re talking it’s straightforward to work out what they need me to do next. It makes me feel like I’m actually helping, in some small way that I’m capable of managing, because I can sublimate my social anxiety and gibbering internal terror and just try, because nothing I have is a good enough reason to not be there for someone if they want me - and if they want me, then I must be doing okay, all in all. It’s good for not only the person I’m talking to, but for myself. I wouldn’t give that up for anything.
It’s the rest of it that gets to me. The time before that point, and after that point, where I’m aware there’s a problem - or find out that I wasn't aware there was a problem - and I know I’m just not helping because I’ve got no idea how I can help. I find out that someone I’d considered quite close has been going through something big all by herself for the past few weeks, and is upset and angry with me because - after I found out through someone else - I continued giving her the space I assumed she wanted. Or I chase someone down with advice and sympathy that only makes things worse because they never wanted to hear it from me in the first place.
How can I tell? Where’s the guidebook for the completely the utterly socially inept who’ve learned to fake it well enough to inexplicably find themselves with friends depending on them? It's certainly not "Friendship for Dummies". How do I know whether to just sit there until someone approaches me or whether to chase them down? Do they understand the amount of mental energy it takes to psych myself up to making an unsolicited phone call? Is it just me, or does everyone suffer days of nausea, nightmares, and panic attacks that recur even years afterwards, whenever something reminds them about such an incident that didn't work out perfectly? How can I be sure enough that I’m going to do the right thing to stop myself from avoiding even thinking about it, and put in the Herculean effort required to do anything at all? Why didn’t she just ring me rather than sitting around feeling even more rotten all weekend because I hadn’t called?
And how can I stop feeling so selfish for making everything, even other people’s troubles, all about me?
It’s just so hard sometimes, guessing, and dealing with the consequences of having guessed wrong. I can’t help thinking that it was a whole lot easier to be a hermit. At least then I didn’t feel so bad about being so bad at all this stuff and letting people down.
Maybe what I really need is an old fashioned etiquette guide, so I can feel more confident with some the rules of engagement, and can be considered excruciatingly polite rather than uncaring. Maybe I just need my friends to understand that this is who I am, and that I'd love to be there when they need me, if only they'd help me out in understanding when they need me in the first place. That I'm not trying to be a bad friend, I just... need their help, sometimes, figuring out how to be a good one.
Apart from Hubby, I’ve been pretty much a loner all through my life. I had a couple of friends in primary school, but in hindsight they weren’t so much best friends as people who enjoyed having someone follow them around. I was socially useless before I decided to shift the goalposts and claim victory by redefining my social life to include the Internet. Not-so-coincidentally, I started managing to fake it face to face.
Dealing with people is still intensely confusing, immensely tiring, and unbelievably time-consuming, but I was considerably more useless before I discovered that I could express myself in the written word if I gave myself long enough to try. (Come to think of it, my relationship with Hubby only developed in the first place because we started exchanging email.)
But I just can’t help but feel so inadequate for the task of being a friend.
I find it hard enough to deal with friends on the surface level – remembering to spend time with them, remembering to ask them how their week/month/year was, remembering that it’s actually important to stop procrastinating and pick up the darn phone or write the darn email. I care about the answers – I want to talk to them, I want to spend time with them... it's just something that slips my mind because doing so takes so much more effort than not doing so. And because I procrastinate the important until it's urgent, and these things almost never become so.
But
iviolinist's post this morning regarding the responses of some of her friends to her mention that she was down reminded me of an incident where I failed a different friend. I googled for "Friendship for Dummies", more in desperation for a laugh than anything else, and their number one tip is the golden rule: "treat others like you would want to be treated". Which sounds fair enough, but it just doesn't work for me. When my father died in early high-school, the teachers arranged to have a small busload of “friends” to come to the funeral. They hadn’t realised, of course, that I didn’t actually have any friends, and in fact I didn’t even know the names of some of the people they’d managed to round up. It was quite possibly the worst thing they could have done in the situation. My memory of being hugged by one of these big-hearted, well-meaning strangers is one of the more intense I have. I was already off balance by the situation, and I hadn't had time to steel myself, so the feeling of wrongwrongwrong was so strong that it actually translated to physical pain in my mind. My palms were sweaty, my heart was dancing to some kind of techno beat in my chest, and my vision was tunnelled and my head swelling like a balloon because of the way I was hyperventilating. I suppose, at least, the panic attack got my mind off the fact that my father had just died.
If my husband died, I don’t think I’d even want to hold a funeral, although I guess I’d have to. I wouldn’t want people to come and talk to me; I wouldn’t want people to hug me or try to comfort me; I wouldn't want to have to deal with thanking everyone for their sympathy. It’s not that I don’t feel the emotions, because I do – it’s just that my emotions are a private thing. Unless I choose to share them with someone, they’re mine, and the last thing I would want is someone hunting me down to make me talk to them. No matter how much they care, or how much they can relate, I would just want and need every friend I had to go the hell away until I had the energy to deal with them on top of everything else.
I don’t understand why other people want what they do from me in that situation, because I wouldn’t want it from them. But I’m still a good listener when people approach me – at least I'm told I am. If someone wants to rant about something that’s going on in their life, I'm very happy to make appropriate sympathetic/enquiring noises until they get it all off their chest. If they’ve got a problem, I can ask rational questions, play devil’s advocate, and throw their own words back at them until they reach a solution - or at least become slightly more at peace with the idea that there isn't a solution.
I like hearing about people’s troubles. I’m interested in them, I care deeply about what’s going on with them, even if I can't express that very well, and I don’t want people to stop feeling they can vent to me and lighten their burden a little by sharing it. I like knowing they trust me enough to tell me – although in general it probably means less for them than it would for me in the same situation. It makes me feel closer to them. It makes me feel good to listen, because it’s something I can do, something that I know how to do, because once they’re talking it’s straightforward to work out what they need me to do next. It makes me feel like I’m actually helping, in some small way that I’m capable of managing, because I can sublimate my social anxiety and gibbering internal terror and just try, because nothing I have is a good enough reason to not be there for someone if they want me - and if they want me, then I must be doing okay, all in all. It’s good for not only the person I’m talking to, but for myself. I wouldn’t give that up for anything.
It’s the rest of it that gets to me. The time before that point, and after that point, where I’m aware there’s a problem - or find out that I wasn't aware there was a problem - and I know I’m just not helping because I’ve got no idea how I can help. I find out that someone I’d considered quite close has been going through something big all by herself for the past few weeks, and is upset and angry with me because - after I found out through someone else - I continued giving her the space I assumed she wanted. Or I chase someone down with advice and sympathy that only makes things worse because they never wanted to hear it from me in the first place.
How can I tell? Where’s the guidebook for the completely the utterly socially inept who’ve learned to fake it well enough to inexplicably find themselves with friends depending on them? It's certainly not "Friendship for Dummies". How do I know whether to just sit there until someone approaches me or whether to chase them down? Do they understand the amount of mental energy it takes to psych myself up to making an unsolicited phone call? Is it just me, or does everyone suffer days of nausea, nightmares, and panic attacks that recur even years afterwards, whenever something reminds them about such an incident that didn't work out perfectly? How can I be sure enough that I’m going to do the right thing to stop myself from avoiding even thinking about it, and put in the Herculean effort required to do anything at all? Why didn’t she just ring me rather than sitting around feeling even more rotten all weekend because I hadn’t called?
And how can I stop feeling so selfish for making everything, even other people’s troubles, all about me?
It’s just so hard sometimes, guessing, and dealing with the consequences of having guessed wrong. I can’t help thinking that it was a whole lot easier to be a hermit. At least then I didn’t feel so bad about being so bad at all this stuff and letting people down.
Maybe what I really need is an old fashioned etiquette guide, so I can feel more confident with some the rules of engagement, and can be considered excruciatingly polite rather than uncaring. Maybe I just need my friends to understand that this is who I am, and that I'd love to be there when they need me, if only they'd help me out in understanding when they need me in the first place. That I'm not trying to be a bad friend, I just... need their help, sometimes, figuring out how to be a good one.
no subject
Because really, if those people weren't selfish themselves, they wouldn't make such a fuss about you not calling.Yeah, it's not that she made a fuss - she really didn't. But when I'm actually getting the social cues of "damnit I'm really hurt" overlaid in her voice, I know she must have been pretty upset by it. It's not that she yelled at me or something that makes me feel bad - it's knowing that I hurt her, that I made a difficult time worse for her by not being able to get over myself, and that even though I sent her a big bunch of flowers to apologise and I'm pretty sure she's forgiven me, I still can't take back those two days she felt miserable. In a sense it's also jealousy from me, because in those two days I wasn't there she was surrounded by other friends who were there for her, and I can't help but feel like it should have been me - only it's all my fault that it wasn't.
I think I'm used to if cause dah bf was an introvert. the mother is an introvert. and every friend I've ever been *good* friends with have been intoverts. me on the other had, is the complete opposite.*laughs* It's nice being friends with extroverts. It's like... taking a walk on the wild side every time you're with them. :)