Has this ever happened to you? You are listening to a friend (an intelligent friend) talking about an intelligent thing. You are in awe and at attention: your very interesting and intelligent friend is saying something very interesting and intelligent to which you will soon have a mildly interesting response. All of a sudden there is a break in the music: your interesting and intelligent friend has said something unintelligent and therefore very interesting. They have broken character. They have said, almost in passing, something outrageous that you know to be untrue. 

Like for wildly-hypothetical-example, they were telling you a suspenseful story of a heist in a dragon den and had you hooked until you hear them say, almost in passing, that the sky in their story is yellow. Not as a metaphor but as a reflection of what they think the sky looks like in reality. You think, “Well, this is…disturbing.” Not with disgust or contempt or fear (which you are very well capable of wielding and have wielded for lesser offense). But with wonder. And a flooding of tenderness. Why does my friend believe the sky is yellow? And not blue — like I know it to be? And sometimes with rage — who taught my friend to see the world like this? 

What I mean is: from time to time the people we love and esteem reveal to us, almost in passing, their madness. A false belief about the world or themselves that catches us off-guard.

This is not surprising conceptually. We all hold false beliefs (silly ones that would surprise us if we said them out loud). For example, until my sophomore year in college, at 19 or 20 or 21, I did not know that Jack does not survive in Titanic. In my mind, the movie ends with Jack and Rose on the raft with a rescue boat on the horizon. I CANNOT EXPLAIN WHY I THOUGHT THIS. There is no good reason for it–not even wishful thinking; I wasn’t that invested in Jack’s survival. I had just misunderstood or drawn the wrong conclusions about an otherwise straightforward thing.

The Titanic isn’t something that tends to come up for me in everyday conservation and so this story went unchallenged for over a decade. Until one day (I cannot recall how) someone told me Jack did not make it. My mind split: one part went duh and the other said, nah, they’re pranking you. I demanded proof. Got proof. And spent the afternoon in a kind of stillness, looking out at an unfamiliar world which had rearranged itself without my willing it and the click! back into place was necessary and kinda rude tbh…not rude…sad…bewildering. Maybe even wondrous. As in this poem by Robert Creeley: 

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

But there are more consequential beliefs than who survives in Titanic. For example, if you are paying attention while in conversation with a friend, you might intuit, from a passing word or gesture, who your friend believes they need to be in order to be loved i.e. the place they go to when they leave themselves i.e. the mask they wear. This is a funny and curious thing: artifice reveals what sincerity obscures.

Take for example, a friend saying “I am not sad. I am okay,” except their voice is breaking and their eyebrows are so slanted, they are almost falling to the ground. Interesting. You wonder, which friend will I be loyal to: the one who is sad or the one who says she is over it? This is not a trite matter. The whole universe depends on it. Or it feels that way. The wisest choice, I think, is to find a way to be loyal to all three: the friend who is sad; the friend who wants to believe they are not sad; and the friend who may one day say, I was so fucking sad.

I have skipped over humility (double-checking that the blindspot you think you are witnessing is your friend’s and not your own…be warned, you may never know for sure; sometimes it is both) because that isn’t the point. The point, for me, is the flooding of tenderness. I know that I am capable of contempt and disgust and fear and yet, from time to time, I witness my friend’s humanity without collapsing, without rushing to correct. I find my friend undiminished, in fact made more. I have proof that imperfection can be met with tenderness because I am meeting it with tenderness. And then I wonder, which of my madness is my friend holding with tenderness?

Photo by Marcel Ardivan on Unsplash

One day, I found myself in a familiar place, feeling hysterically claustrophobic in my own life, as I tend to do. I wanted out. But my unconscious belief was that I did not have permission to step away from my obligations and relationships, even temporarily. You either stay and burn or walk away and never return _{(if it is not true then why does it rhyme?!)}. But that day, as I was struggling to unzip myself out of my own skin, my friend S said to me, You can always leave and come back and be loved just as much by me. And something in me went click! — and I understood everything.

I understood for example that the purpose of friendship is to loosen the paradoxes we carry within ourselves.

But maybe this is only one of the things.