I told my wife, so proudly, that I let
catch me when I was falling off the steps in front of their apartment last week. I actively requested their help. I said, "Ahhh! I'm falling!" and they reached out and nudged me back upright into a steady, standing position. Stacy wondered what in the world the alternative was, which is silly. I would have just let myself roll right off the steps and into the New York City street, obviously. I did, of course, spend our entire hang-out on Valerie Anne's stoop, and the rest of the night once I got home, worrying that I'd hurt them by throwing my full weight onto them, and downhill too. They were on the bottom step. I had the high ground. Or that falling had made me look clumsy and weak. "It was Valerie," I kept saying to myself. "It's okay, it was Valerie."You're probably thinking, "Heather, do you not have autonomic dysfunction that steals the blood from your brain and makes you dizzy upon standing, and also is your cervical spine not held together with toothpicks and dreams?" And, friend, yes. All true things. I'm not allowed to stand on ladders or even step stools for that reason. I'm not, generally speaking, supposed to be goofing around on stairs. So falling would have been pretty bad for my broken down old body, and Valerie was standing right there — but I didn't want to inconvenience them. I didn't want to look feeble.
I am an excellent wife. I am an awesome sister. I am a solid acquaintance. But I am not a very good friend. I have struggled with friendship my entire life. Being real friends to people and letting people be real friends to me, it does not come naturally. Honestly, Valerie Anne is one of maybe five people in the entire world I'd call out to for help as I was lilting toward catastrophe. Most other people, I'd have just let myself crash into oncoming scooter traffic.
I have two main problems, friendship-wise:
1) I've been living most of my life like The Giving Tree, letting people take and take and take and take from me, and so I've felt kind of like a stump for a long time. I don't want to be a stump, but people with axes can spot me from a mile away. So I'm afraid of getting close to almost everyone. I also never, ever want to take more than I give and make a stump out of anyone else. I live in constant fear of asking for too much, even though I almost never ask for anything.
2) There's always been weird power imbalances in my life because I was forever the team captain and then the assistant youth pastor and then the college/career minister, all to people my own age, my friends and my peers. And then I left church and came out and almost immediately became a professional lesbian writer on the Big Gay Internet. I hate being the boss of people, but my professional positions have given me so much relative power over folks' dreams, some of whom I have loved very much, and I worried that I'd accidentally take advantage of that authority, that I'd inadvertently force people into being my friend, that they wouldn't feel like they could say no to what I asked for. So I didn’t ask.
I've been saying "I miss Natalie" — my friend and former co-worker — out loud so much since I left my last job that Siri has picked up on it and started responding. "Do you want to text Natalie?" "Do you want to call Natalie?" "Do you want to send an email to Natalie?" My wife has been saying the same thing, but more gently. I met Natalie a hundred years ago when I was writing for a publication that doesn't even exist anymore, and then we worked together, every single day, for years and years and years. I care about her so deeply, I value her opinions so much, I will read everything she writes forever, she makes me laugh in a way that no one else can, she is my kindred spirit in so many ways. But I didn't want to bother her, you know? Maybe I was just her work friend. Maybe it just made sense to talk about everything every day because we were always in Slack for our jobs.
Natalie texted me recently about WNBA free agency, and then we just kept on texting, and kept on texting, and when I realized that maybe she'd been missing me too, that maybe she was going to be my for real, not-just-work friend, I broke down in tears. I thought I'd lost her.
But I didn't know how to say that. I'm a 45-year-old woman with a wonderful wife and an exciting career and everywhere I go in my neighborhood, people wave and chat and know my name. I have enemies, sure, but I'm pretty well-liked by most people. And yet, I still couldn't figure out how to ask someone I've known for over a decade and loved for many years, my most prolific co-writer, someone who has supported me through health scares and surgeries and professional fuckery, if they wanted to talk sometimes about our shared favorite topics over text message. It's amazing that I have made it this far in my life by being kind and affable and I still don't know how to be a real friend. In fact, I don't know anything that scares me more than real friendship.
I'm working on it. I really am, for the first time in my life, working on it. I'm not going to accept another job that takes over my life, one where I'm required to do more than regular job stuff, one that leaves me a pile of frustrated, furious, demoralized bone dust. I'm going to stop saying yes impulsively so I can stop also canceling everything all the time. I'm going to let the people I love and trust — all five to seven of them — see me weak sometimes, see me really sick sometimes. I'm going to hang out with them even when my brain is fuzzed over and I can hardly talk. I'm just going to bask in their company with nothing to give, like sitting in the sunshine on a cloudless day. As soon as it gets warm I'm going to have people over to my backyard, even if my house isn't spotless and I don't have the energy to go get wine and cheese. I'm going to reach out and make amends to all the people I've failed to text back because of social overwhelm. (I'm going to work on the way social situations are so overwhelming.) I'm going to freaking text Natalie when I want to talk to Natalie! I'm going to holler that I'm falling when I get woozy on the stairs at Valerie Anne’s place! And I'm going to do all of that even though it makes me feel weird and terrified!
There's this scene in the series finale of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power that gets me every time. She-Ra's powers are glitching, the world is falling apart, and she can't save her friends and she can't stop the bad guys. Her predecessor grabs her hands and says, "You are worth more than what you can give to other people. You deserve love too." It's not just that the sentiment is true, it's that her friends have always loved and valued Adora far beyond what she what she’s able to do as She-Ra. Sure, it's cool that she can turn into a seven-foot sword-wielding warrior, but they'd love her if that had never been true and if it stopped being true. She just doesn’t know it because she’s afraid. Not of dying or pain or Hordak or his evil army. She’s afraid to let herself really be seen and really be cared about, especially if she has nothing superheroic to give back.
That night I almost tumbled off that stoop, the night I surprised myself by yelping for help, Valerie Anne caught me so easily because they were leaning in to hug me before I even started falling.
Love this. That beautiful final line! 💖
damn Heather, why do you always go and make me cry 🥲