The Stories We Tell Ourselves
...almost always miss the mark
Hi!
I haven’t always been a great communicator. It’s part of why I’m interested in relational work in general: I often wonder how people are supposed to relate to each other “healthily”. Is that even fully possible? I think adult life would be much easier if we had a class called Relationships 101 at school. Most of the time, I guess at what’s normal.
I’m still living that nomad life. This week I’m in Canada visiting some friends, which is a great opportunity to test out my subpar improved relating skills. My friends had a baby last year, and I haven’t seen them since their wedding three years ago (thank you, pandemic). I presided over said wedding, and it remains one of the most gratifying and terrifying experiences of my life. If you would like me to officiate your wedding, you can dial 1-855-PRIESTESS, and I will happily assist.
As with any new parents, there are sleepless nights, endless meals to provide, and lots of loads of laundry to be done. I will never cease to be in awe of all the parents in my life. The closer I am to people doing young parenthood, the more I realise what a monumental effort it is to grow a human. Not to mention all the other life-ing that has to happen in between. There is also an inordinate amount of cuteness to witness daily.
My friends are what some might call Type-A: they are both whip-smart, high achieving and endlessly generous. My friend the mother makes all the food for her baby in a way that seems completely effortless (though, of course, it’s not). She makes her baby homemade tots with broccoli shoved in there from scratch. Sugar-free kale muffins on rotation are chucked in the freezer, so he has a steady stream of healthy snacks. There is a gourmet-looking oats and banana thing that goes in the fridge the night before for his breakfast. She honestly needs to be a foodfluencer. This kid eats better than I do. I confess that I have stolen some of his snacks.
On the first night I was here, she whipped up a batch of pizza dough and casually made us pizza the next night. My friend the father has an insanely savage job that’s had my jaw on the floor when he recounts tales from his work life. Then he makes a restaurant-quality meal for everyone in five minutes flat with vegetables he expertly grew in his garden, barely breaking a sweat. You can picture it. Infuriating.
My mother used to say that a guest is like fish: after three days, they start to stink. I booked this trip in a fever dream, so excited to see them after so long. I didn’t think twice about how I would descend upon them for over a week. They happily agreed. I come with all my needs, neuroses and the psychotic need to be useful and helpful even when it’s not necessarily the move. After a few stressful days together, with my friend the dad away for work, a baby off his sleep schedule and me constantly suggesting meals to make that aren’t baby friendly: things between my friend the mother and I came to a detente.
In an effort to entertain me (the guest who never leaves), we went on an early morning walk to get a coffee. The walk was quiet. Her baby wasn’t sleeping, and it was driving her up the wall. Meanwhile, I had eaten too much stone fruit mixed with yoghurt and granola for breakfast and was about to vomit but holding it in because I had no desire for my friend to have to take care of another (big) baby. Obviously, our problems were on par.
As we walked, I worried, in the neurotic fashion I am wont to do. I worried that I absolutely should not have booked to visit friends with a one-year-old for TEN FULL DAYS. What was I smoking when I set those dates in motion? It was truly the choice of a childless woman. She worried about her baby not sleeping, if she was doing something wrong and the sometimes lonely path of motherhood. She stopped in her tracks about 10 minutes into our promenade:
“I’m sorry I just really need to be alone right now. I’m going back to the park.”
I responded:
“Of course, I completely understand. I’m so sorry; I’ve definitely been here for too long. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
She looked surprised. That wasn't it at all, and she actually couldn’t believe I said it (way to make it all about you Nora). She had enjoyed my visit and had actually found me to be helpful. Not the nuisance I told myself I was. What ensued was a really honest conversation about the stories we both told ourselves. Tears were shed. I cried, almost with relief, that the story I had been telling myself wasn’t at all true. We both felt relief to have an opportunity to say what was present for us at that moment. And it turned out that neither of us even wanted the coffee (see aforementioned stone fruit crisis).
We’ve been friends for long enough that it’s easy to be honest with each other. We’ve been through a lot of life’s ups and downs together, and we’ve both worked on ourselves extensively in an effort to be able to communicate better.
We also both feel a lot. Believe it or not, we’ve had multiple moments like this throughout the week where we have honestly divulged the story we told ourselves during tense, activated or stressful moments. It almost feels radical to have the opportunity to repair and reset continuously. It’s always worth it. The way I used to relate was by bottling up everything until I exploded. It was not pretty. Sometimes I still do that, and for me, it’s probably going to be a lifetime of unraveling those coping mechanisms.
Though my friends do not live and die by the moon as I do, I think we probably experienced some full moon-induced heightened emotions over here, chez-baby. They have consistently ripped the piss out of me for a good ten years for carrying crystals in my bag and on my person and roll their eyes when I try to talk to them about astrology, but I think I managed to convince at least one of them that we could be crying because of the moon. And this week has helped us to create deeper grooves for a better relationship. Honestly, what else is there?
Thanks for being here,
Nora x
Another out-of-the-park essay on this thing called life and those monuments we call friends! Brava, principessa! I am sorry I ever repeated that supposedly hilarious bon mot about fish and guests--it came from some celebrated crank pot, I'll have to look (Wilde? Sartre? Mr. Burns?) and it has screwed me up plenty, always trying to be the number one gold medalist of all House Guests Ever in the History of Houses, and slithering out the door in a few days (unless we had separate residents, i.e. The Cottage, Sheila and Chris's, or a nearby hotel/motel). Why oh why? It just got harder and harder to do as I got older and didn't have the magic key of welcome that was my cute little baby/toddler/girl/teen/adult child.
But mainly, I played the perfect guest because I didn't possess the grownup ability to look at what I had been doing that was annoying and have a good honest conversation and a clearing-out kind of cry with my host. At the first sign of me being tiresome, irritating, or just too much THERE, I either packed that night for a morning getaway, hid in my room for days, or doubled up on the gifts and services I'd always try to rain down upon my kindly boarding folk.
We sure had a lot of house guests when we lived in Hong Kong and even more in London, and I ALWAYS was grateful that I could see people like this--intimately, sharing private jokes that naturally occur in communal living; sharing painful stories or clearing up ancient misunderstandings that would be impossible over a quick lunch or a long dinner. For a week or two weeks, all those friends and family that we were so lucky to be able to put up in their own rooms in our flat in the middle of London, became so much more firmly in our lives than ever before--and these are people I grew up with so that's saying something.
Moving home from London to NY was a wrench in so many ways. I felt set adrift and no longer part of my friends' lives in that unique and beautiful house-guesting way. We might catch up at a lunch or a party, but these became fewer and farther between. Due to my own relationship defects coupled with a couple of serious mental illnesses that the move to NYC flooded with Miracle Gro, I started to lose friends. No feuds, just misunderstandings or severe Lala Exhaustion. There were two instances of words flung at me by my oldest friend who was going through the hardest time of her life, and our friendship suffered, or at least I did). I started to not see much of them, I only rarely made the effort to have dinner parties as I'd done in London, which had resulted in making so many deep and dear English friends. I can hardly believe it's been 14 years since my last London dinner party that typcally ended in rousing games of Charades. I miss my life there (I miss my age there too).
Thanks to our generous families, it's only been a few years since I've played charades and all the holidays have been offered to us most kindly. But I haven't done any holidays myself, no dinner parties to speak of, no weekend house guests, no being a house guest. My door and all the doors once wide open to me have become squeaky with wood rot. It hurts, and it hurts the most because I have seen, felt, and internalized the depths of friendship that grows between oneself and the people for whom you make a new key for them to keep, with which they can come and go as they please. This is true pleasure, a treasure without measure; keep it going! Try to have a comfortable spare room in some marvelous city or gorgeous rural village and build a reputation as a warm, welcoming host who doesn't count the days that people want to visit. As my life starts winding down, I see that I forgot to (1) Keep working on a career that need not end (no professional sports) and (2) Move into places that are specifically built for having house guests (that spare room, that partitioned off dining room.....or an elegantly designed tent if you have land).
Life can be isolating, but only if you let it, or have a pandemic that lasts too long, or are not a person who's kind and honest enough to buoy the relationship with fearless discussion upon a pond of tears, as your excellent essay just taught me. Freud said Love and Work are the secrets to life, someone said "Only connect" and some asshole said houseguests, like fish, stink after three days. THAT asshole stinks after three minutes.
Forgive me going on and on, but you know how I am, and if you can keep it private that's best.
Thanks for NOT keeping it private, and I’ll be reading both pieces again.