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Best Friend.
Jun. 22nd, 2007 01:55 amFriendship. I'm not good at communicating what's going on deep inside me. This is partly through sheer inability and partly through fear of how folks would react to the real me. Instead, I often find it easier to talk about a subject which is distantly related to what's really going on inside me, so as to come at the subject obliquely. Usually I come at it so obliquely that no one but myself sees the connection. Still, it seems to help me put things in perspective.
As a case in point, today was an emotional one for me, and it stirred up a bunch of feelings; feelings I'm still trying to process. Rather than try to talk about them, instead I'll talk about Best Friends.
To start with, the term "Best Friend" is one I never use. Don't ever ask me to choose between my friends. They all mean too much to me, each in their own unique ways.
Its also a phrase loaded with emotional baggage from my earliest schoolboy memories. "I'll be your best friend!" was the typical promise of someone who was only interested in you because you had something they wanted. Still, its the closest I ever came back then to being called a 'Best Friend'.
Although the term was never used, thats not to say the state of being was foreign. When I was going to Westmount High School, Norman Lange and I were best friends and inseparable, although we never once voiced that fact. I was hurt for years afterwards that he seldom responded to my mails after he moved away. He did put my address on his family's newsletter subscription list (he was a preacher's kid) so that for a while I got a year's synopsis of his family's doings, every Christmas. Then they stopped coming too.
So, I went through the first 42 years of my life without anyone ever calling me their best friend. And then, this year, two different friends have each referred to me that way. As is typical in such things, my reaction is to be both flattered and flabbergasted. I don't suppose that either one knew of the phrase's cachet in my psyche, or how odd it would seem to gain that title after all these years.
So, I am flattered that anyone would think that much of me. At the same time, I'm flabbergasted because its a label that I find it hard to believe I deserve. My friends are some of the most wonderful folks I've ever known. Surely, something whispers from deep inside me, I can't possibly be the best they've found, can I?
On this subject, as on so many others, my emotions and my intellect are at war. My intellect has no difficulty accepting the label as a simple statement of fact. My emotional side simply can't believe it. The ensuing internal conflict is not that pleasant to endure, but the alternatives all seem worse.
My intellect tries to tell me that I'm simply too close to me to see my own value. From my perspective all I see are the flaws; the pockmarks and cratered surface of what might look like a serene heavenly body from far enough away. So far, my emotions aren't buying it.
As a case in point, today was an emotional one for me, and it stirred up a bunch of feelings; feelings I'm still trying to process. Rather than try to talk about them, instead I'll talk about Best Friends.
To start with, the term "Best Friend" is one I never use. Don't ever ask me to choose between my friends. They all mean too much to me, each in their own unique ways.
Its also a phrase loaded with emotional baggage from my earliest schoolboy memories. "I'll be your best friend!" was the typical promise of someone who was only interested in you because you had something they wanted. Still, its the closest I ever came back then to being called a 'Best Friend'.
Although the term was never used, thats not to say the state of being was foreign. When I was going to Westmount High School, Norman Lange and I were best friends and inseparable, although we never once voiced that fact. I was hurt for years afterwards that he seldom responded to my mails after he moved away. He did put my address on his family's newsletter subscription list (he was a preacher's kid) so that for a while I got a year's synopsis of his family's doings, every Christmas. Then they stopped coming too.
So, I went through the first 42 years of my life without anyone ever calling me their best friend. And then, this year, two different friends have each referred to me that way. As is typical in such things, my reaction is to be both flattered and flabbergasted. I don't suppose that either one knew of the phrase's cachet in my psyche, or how odd it would seem to gain that title after all these years.
So, I am flattered that anyone would think that much of me. At the same time, I'm flabbergasted because its a label that I find it hard to believe I deserve. My friends are some of the most wonderful folks I've ever known. Surely, something whispers from deep inside me, I can't possibly be the best they've found, can I?
On this subject, as on so many others, my emotions and my intellect are at war. My intellect has no difficulty accepting the label as a simple statement of fact. My emotional side simply can't believe it. The ensuing internal conflict is not that pleasant to endure, but the alternatives all seem worse.
My intellect tries to tell me that I'm simply too close to me to see my own value. From my perspective all I see are the flaws; the pockmarks and cratered surface of what might look like a serene heavenly body from far enough away. So far, my emotions aren't buying it.
