Please note: If you are under 16, please talk to your parent or guardian before reading. It started, for me, with a text full of understatement about things being "a bit tricky", and then a heart-rending phone call in which my friend told me she was suicidal, the mental health crisis team were involved, and the realisation that while I’d been busy celebrating my 40th (she didn’t want to spoil it for me) the walls of her life had collapsed. It started, of course, way before that for her, and even as the shock hit deep in my stomach, I knew I’d felt this coming three months earlier when I last saw her and I’d failed to register the warning.
Worrying about someone you don’t live near is strange. We’ve been unwavering best friends for 27 years, but we first lived apart pre-internet in student houses with no phones, and our communication has always been, well, crap – saved only by the fact that neither one can outdo the other in crapness. Suddenly I needed her to know - intensely, verbally, but also gently and steadily - how important she was to me. I needed to hold on tight, without being close enough to even give her a hug. Texts became the best I could do. Her sister told me that what I said on the phone had helped, so I tried to reiterate how very much I needed her alive, how much I loved her and what a part of me she was. I asked her how she was, a lot, then realised that was getting boring (I needed to know, but that didn’t mean she needed to be telling me all the time). So I tried to entertain, and keep her connected to the details of the world with the daily minor disasters of my family life. I never knew if any of it was helping, but felt sure it was better to risk the wrong communication than none. Is it weird to say I had a good time when I finally went to visit? Yes, everything was different, nothing was okay – random weeping, walks so long I got blisters, carefully avoiding triggers, encouraging eating. But we still had loads to talk about, and a black tasteless sense of humour comes in particularly useful for mental illness. We’ve known each other since our hormones first started messing us around, but her rawness now opened us up like never before. When you don’t know how you’re supposed to be, or what you're supposed to say, the only option left is honesty and love. Our texts after this, even in the darkest times that followed, are different: covering the whole of life; funnier, stupider, deeper and more direct. At first, and again when it got very bad later, I woke up each morning with her name at the front of mind, a dull lurch in my stomach and a mass of questions I couldn’t ask anyone. Not her husband, who was busy just surviving and holding it all in some kind of order; not her – I’d said she didn’t have to tell me optimistic things just so I felt better, so didn’t really get many progress reports. I long to be closer so I could be present, helping and assessing, feeling the situation rather than looking for clues in short sentences. I also recognise that distance protects me from the exhaustion of a carer and gives me the reserves to keep on being a friend, whatever warped humoured, waffly texting form that might take. Long distance, but in it for the long haul.
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AuthorThe Kick Back Club is a collection of written works on friendship and mental health recovery Archives
February 2016
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