The closest of friends could still be closer
My brother was one of the people in this world who I felt closest to. Of course some of our closeness came from the intimacy of knowing each other our whole lives. We walked into brand new schools side by side after our family moved twice, we had decades of well-polished memories and stories, and had countless, mostly good-natured, battles on putt-putt golf courses and across ping-pong tables.
In addition to all of that, even more of our closeness came from the friendship we formed as young adults, as we started our families within a year of each other, as we worried and wondered together about how to be good parents, as we bounced back and forth good and less-good career choices, and as we fumbled around together trying to figure out how to help when it became clear that our mom’s mind was slipping away.
Until his death by suicide, I would have said that he knew everything that mattered about me and I about him. But clearly there were things he held back. Stories he didn’t tell me. Feelings that he did not share with me. And, when I am determined to be clear-eyed about it, I see that the same is true for me. I also kept things to myself that I thought might be uncomfortable to share, or that weren’t polished up enough for “public” consumption, or that would make him think less of me or feel frustrated or (worse) disappointed in me.
Tucking your messes away where no one can see them doesn’t help anyone
Speculating about how things might be different if my brother had been willing to share his hidden secrets and pain is a slippery slope to nowhere good. But when I look at the things I held back, I see that every one of them was a missed opportunity for deepening our friendship. Every time I chose to tuck a story or a mess away instead of bringing it into the light of our relationship, I missed an opportunity for feeling better, for feeling less alone, for deepening our friendship.
In a song, “Home,” that Sara Bareilles wrote after listening to Anderson Cooper’s conversation with Stephen Colbert, she sings “What is broken cannot heal ‘til it’s known and loved by name.” Healing, she says in a conversation with Cooper, comes from sharing our stories. It’s so easy to decide to keep quiet. It almost always feels safer to shove pain or grief or frustration to the side, to protect your friends from the mess you are inside. But rather than protecting your friend, you’re preventing them from really knowing you, which is, in the end, all that a true friend wants.
Being willing to share your messes takes some courage and yields some clarity
How does sharing our messes and turmoil and pain lead to healing? In the beginning, it might be the case that all you can do is cry. And crying is necessary and good. We humans are built with this feature. Crying allows our emotions to move, to begin to pass through us rather than getting stuck as they will do when we shove them away or stuff them down.
Crying with or to someone else is even better. As the raw emotions subside (and I swear that they will), because you are with someone, words will eventually come. Your friend may say something you hadn’t considered, or offer a different perspective, or be willing to simply agree that what is happening is awful. More importantly, you will start to talk, and as you do, your understanding of what you’re feeling will start to clarify. Are you sad? Are you mad? Are you scared?
Putting words to our feelings helps us to know ourselves better. This self-understanding is the beginning of healing. For many of us, talking things through, telling the story of what’s happened, is less about our friend understanding and more about our own understanding. Until we can see clearly what’s going on inside of us, why what has happened is so upsetting, why we are so afraid, we can feel subsumed by our big feelings. To go back to Sara Bareilles’s words, until we can name what is broken, we could confuse the magnitude of our current mess with our identity and our worth.
Having someone to listen to our stories reminds us of all that we have to offer even in our current messy state. While we may initially share in order to help ourselves feel better, our stories do way more than that. They open the way for deeper connection in our friendships – and this connection runs two ways. When two people are brave enough to share the beauty and the pain of their lives, the friendships that develop are priceless.
Connection. It’s really the only thing that matters in this life
Given this, it’s probably no surprise that in the years since my brother died much of my healing has come from talking about him – not only from telling my messy, emotional stories about losing him, but also the sweet, hilarious and fun stories about loving him. I could not have done this without friends willing to listen – and willing to share their stories with me. While my heart aches that my brother and I were not able to experience such a boundaryless connection, I will forever be grateful that losing him led me to understand that friendships like this are what sustain us through all the ups and downs of life.
Truthfulness (satya) (YS 2.36) and developing self-understanding (svadhyaya) (YS 2.44) are two of the practices that yoga promises will draw us closer to the serenity we yearn for. Friendships are even more rewarding places to practice these skills than a yoga mat. For friendship to thrive, we must be open and truthful with one another about how we are doing. An added benefit to such openness is that it can help us better understand ourselves.