How would you feel when a very close friend decides it’s time to share his secret with you?
It’s often the darkest moment of his life, the most painful memories. And because you had no idea about it, the friend changes in front of your eyes, almost like magic. You feel as if you are meeting him for the very first time.
I just had a biggest gift dropped on me like that.
Yes, what a gift it is! He is a very dear person to me, and I thought it was impossible for him to grow dearer. I stood corrected. He became bigger and more brilliant. Instantly. I felt tremendously honored that he trusted me enough to show another layer deeper of himself.
Telling about your darkness is very difficult, my friend was shaking after he was done telling, but it’s slightly easier to tell, actually, than to listen. When you are ready to tell your story, you have taken time and worked it out, and you are more or less in peace with it. Telling it might bring back high-voltage emotions to the surface again, but you have tamed them before, you can deal with that. Or, if it is about a very recent event, at least you know what happens in your story. When you are the listener, on the other hand, you don’t get a prep time. It just comes upon you and BOOOOM! hits you right in the chest. This, I thought while listening to my friend, must be what some people call a burden. “I don’t want to burden you,” they would say. They must hate to be responsible for making others feel this kind of intense sorrow, so they would rather not tell.
But the pain I felt in my chest was for my friend, not for me. I was given an opportunity to exercise the most beautiful of human virtues: compassion and empathy. Without them, we cannot coexist. There would be no meaningful connections between individuals. Life would be a total waste.
One could argue that the reason why he is not “burdening” others with his mess is because of these qualities. He might say that he thinks about the listener’s discomfort and can’t bring himself to inflict pain upon others, that it is from empathy that he’s not sharing. To me, it sounds like arguing we shouldn’t let a child eat because he might get sick from bacteria. There are different kinds of eating, of course, but healthy eating is essential for sustaining life, especially for the growing body of a child. We even need some of those bacteria to stay healthy. Human connection is similar in my mind. We need wholesome connections in order to grow as individuals and make our lives deeper and more substantial. And yes, some connections can be bad or rotten and make you sick. But those are also beneficial to us, if we didn’t get drown in them; they are great learning opportunities, they make us stronger. If you say, “Oh, my sad story would make you sad, so I’m not telling,” then you are denying the nutrients that I need for healthy living.
Of course, “I don’t want to burden you” can mean a lot of different things. Maybe he is not ready to examine his scar himself. Maybe he doesn’t trust me enough to show his vulnerable side, or he thinks I wouldn’t care. Maybe he worries about ruining the relationship with me somehow. Maybe he has a self-esteem issue and thinks his story is unimportant. Or maybe he thinks sharing is a sign of weakness. Which is the total opposite of my truth. Sharing painful experiences takes a good amount of courage and a leap of faith. It’s really hard, to quiet down all the voices telling you destructive things in your head — sugar-coated as advices — that make you worry, and to stick with your gut feeling and trust the human goodness. This is not for the weak of heart.
But if you could muster courage and trust to tell, your story is sure to enrich your friend. There is no such thing as a boring life story. And if it is a loaded one about your emotional wound, it could make the connection between you and your friend stronger than the Gorilla Glue bond. If your friend recoiled while listening to your story, that’s his problem, not yours, and maybe you need to take a closer look at the friendship itself.
When my friend showed me his scar on his soul, it was as if I found out that the puzzle I thought I had completed was only one flat side of a large cube. Now all the things he had said and done have different meanings deep below. You can never assume what you see is all there is.
Everything in life is made of light and shadow. If it’s made of only one of them, you can’t draw a picture of it. I went to an art college in Tokyo. As with all colleges in Japan, the entrance exam was a one-time deal, the weight of which in determining admittance was huge, about 98% of the factors for consideration. The entrance exam for the graphic design major in my college came in 2 steps. The first step was academic. When I passed them, I could proceed to the second step, which was 2 artistic skills tests: the first day was a pencil sketching of a bust for 6 hours, and the second day was a poster-color composition for 6 hours. Those skills tests need special training, and there are art college prep schools for that purpose (and for those who didn’t get in; it was very common to spend 1 to 3 years in those prep schools after graduating from high school. I was lucky enough to get in at first try, but almost all of my classmates were older than I). I started going to a prep school right before I became a sophomore in high school. In my first-ever sketching class, I sat willingly right in front of the bust, facing it directly in the face, with a big window on my back. In other words, I sat on the dead-on full-light spot. That was a total disaster. No wonder the spot was wide open with room to spare in a crowded studio. I had no idea until then that the best spot for basic sketching was where you could see the object in one-third light and two-thirds shadow. That’s the best light to create depth in your drawing. At the exam the seats would be assigned, so we needed to practice at all angles and light conditions (which bust it would be was also a mystery, and there were some students and teachers who analyzed the historical tendencies and made bets. My entrance exam was modeled by Caesar). I learned that the full-light made insufferable drawings with poor depth, so did the full-shade.
People are like that, too. If you are allowed access to only the brighter side of a person, you cannot draw deeper picture of him and the connection with him feels thin and superficial, no matter how nice and fun and caring he is. When you are allowed to put shadow on him, he becomes much more human, 3-D, so real. And because of the shade, the light in him appears even brighter. The opposite is just awful. If a person shows you only the dark side of him, it’s impossible to build a relationship. Those people are often so blinded by their own problems that they are living in the darkness, they can’t even see themselves. I can’t expect them to see me.
Sharing didn’t come naturally to me; I had to learn it hard way. I didn’t have a willing listener in my family, and I grew up believing I wasn’t important to anybody. If your own parents didn’t have time and ear to listen to you, if they didn’t show interest in your life, who would? I also tried to be perfect, for that was the only way to get my mother’s attention. I couldn’t stand it when I noticed my imperfections, which were fantastically many, and the more I tried to cover them up, the more alien myself became to me. By the time I broke down I had two distinct personalities within myself; one was always perfect with a great big smile no matter what, while another hid and suffered in the darkness. I had light and shadow, but not together. I was living in both of the extreme light conditions that created insufferable drawings of myself. When the me in the dark said, “Enough already! I need to be looked at! I have to come out into the light!” that’s when my life changed dramatically. I started seeing my wounds, felt their pain, and reclaimed them as my own. The full-light me acquired shades, and the full-shade me stepped out into the light and showed herself. Two of them walked toward each other slowly and merged. I feel I’m pretty much well combined now, nice and muddy and gray.
Sharing was unthinkable before this happened. I couldn’t let other people look at the side of me that I myself refused to look at. The first thing that was pointed out to me after the breakdown was that I couldn’t ask for help, and that was one major problem. Asking for help meant admitting that I was incapable and inadequate, but at the same time I felt nobody cared about me because no one helped me. I couldn’t see this paradox at all. My therapist said, “You can’t expect others to read your mind, you have to ask them to help you.” Ahhh, that’s how it works! As I started asking for help, I noticed something wonderful; people were actually willing and happy to help. Growing up, I sensed I was a big burden to my mother, and asking for her help was to double that weight on her. She often became angry and yelled at me when I asked for help. I now know that it was her issue and nothing personal toward me, but when you are a child your parents are your gods; I took what she said and how she treated me as how she felt about me. But this time with my friends, not only I didn’t get yelled at, they also asked if they could do more for me. That was incredible.
When my friends showed how much they cared, I felt I owed them to show myself. So I started to share. Some people can’t take others’ emotional stories, but it’s because they haven’t tamed their own demons, it’s nothing to do with me. One person visibly recoiled, looked at me as if I were sprouting tentacles out of my face, and stayed away or he would catch it. I didn’t tell him my story, but he found out enough about it from his wife, who is one of my best friends. They are now in the midst of a bitter divorce. Not surprisingly, the ones I care most turned out to be the ones who are the most understanding. They didn’t withdraw from me, nor did they change how they behaved in front of me. I learned it’s OK not to be OK all the time in front of the people I held dear. I feel more comfortable, more genuine, with them and with myself.
At first I worried how I would be seen after I shared my shady side. Would I be judged? Would I be seen as dirty, weak, disgusting, freaky? Would I disappoint them? But as almost all of my friends accepted my past warmly, I realized that it was I who was doing the judging. I had been extremely judgmental and hard on myself. I guess that’s the definition of a perfectionist. The question now was if Iwould see myself as dirty, weak, disgusting and freaky. No, I didn’t want to anymore. When that thought popped up, it didn’t matter to me any longer if people saw me through blue lens or green or red or yellow. As long as I saw myself clearly without any filter, the others could put on outrageous funky glasses and I could care less. I felt very free.
I hope I am becoming a better listener, too. Listening is slightly harder for me. Again, my sage therapist gave me an insight on this one as well: “‘Listen’ and ‘silent’ are anagrams; they use exact same letters. If you really want to listen, you have to be silent. Not only being physically quiet, but you also have to be silent inside. When your ego is silent, you become a good listener.” In other words, when my friend tells me she is hurting, I can’t tell her, “I’m hurting, too.” She would shut herself up as soon as I say that, because it sounds as though I am saying, “It’s not only you who is hurting, so get over it. I don’t care about your suffering, I have my own problem.” She decided to share her pain with me because she thought I would acknowledge it and validate her feelings, she wanted to feel closer to me, but instead she would feel pushed away. Also once her empathy for my pain starts working it’s really hard for her to go back to her own problem. And if I repeatedly highjack her sharing and change it into my sharing, she would stop trusting me. Sharing is not a competition, and taking turns is a good thing also outside of a playground.
Silencing of my ego is hard, but also hard is taming this instinct of trying not to appear stupid while listening. I don’t want her to feel worse, I want to show her how much I care. But I didn’t get the prep time, so I’m kind of panicking. Should I say something or should I stay silent? Can I ask this or would it be too much? Did I make a smile when I wanted to show her a frown? Did I make that exclamation too strong or too matter-of-fact? When she gets giggly from nerves, should I laugh with her or should I keep my frown? What would be the right word to express how I feel about her pain? I’m worrying about all kinds of stuff when I should be silent inside and listening, when I should be feeling her pain. Then, an hour or two later, when my panic subsides, I feel her pain again right in my chest and cry for her. I tend to write to the person a lot after the sharing is all done. This reminds me: when I was in Tokyo last month, my sister and I tested if my cell phone worked there or not. I auto-dialed her with my American phone, with the international out-going code and the country code attached to her number. She was standing right in front of me, but my call went up to the satellite and came back down to her phone. There was a significant delay in sound. My reaction to my friends’ sharing is sometimes like that; I have too many attachments on me and my reaction is a bit jet lagged.
Speaking of jet lag, there is another thing I noticed. The tale that my friend shared with me recently, the big gift, is almost a decade old. We had met only 3 months before that event occurred in real life. Since we were new acquaintances, he didn’t think of sharing with me and I didn’t detect anything at the time. Now his wounds have healed somewhat and he can talk about it, but to me it is as if his suffering happened just now. I feel so sad for what he went through, and I want to shower him with all the hugs in the world. But then I remember it was a decade ago; I don’t want to bring back painful memories by being overly sad for him now. This has been a bit of a time machine experience, as if we are living in two different decades.
But I am blessed by his sharing. If they insist on calling it a burden, I would say it is the most beautiful burden of all. It’s a burden that doesn’t weigh you down; rather it can lift you up into the realm of the most precious of all human experiences.
Originally posted on Tomo-ese on January 20, 2010