Fraud in the Garden (1930), Yves Tanguy
Hi Polly,
I’m so grateful to have this corner of the internet where I can be honest with myself about my ugly feelings. This is probably the ugliest (feelings-wise) I’ve been in a long time.
Last year I had a falling out with the closest friend I’ve ever had due to some infidelity in her marriage she’d confided in me about. She really wanted my support in pursuing what she wanted, and I couldn’t give her that support for moral reasons. She was very hurt by this, and I was shocked that she would do what she did. It made me feel like I couldn’t trust her, and we are no longer close. We do still share a close-knit group of college friends, with whom we’re still in touch.
We update this group on our lives fairly regularly, and while I’m on an upswing after a stressful move and acclimation to a new job, she is having the worst year of her life.
I’ll keep the details vague to preserve her anonymity:
She has had to move back in with her parents because of the end of her relationship (see infidelity above). She is dating her affair partner, but he is not in a position to move in with her, and we live in an expensive city.
She is struggling to find full-time work
A loved one was diagnosed with a long-term terminal illness
A member of her extended family suffered an injury and needs around-the-clock care
Another extended family member passed away and left behind a burden of paperwork and a house full of stuff
A close family member had a life-altering mental health crisis
I got a text today that one of her cats was struck by a car and killed.
I feel extremely sorry for her. Really, I do. I also feel incredibly sad that our friendship ended and that it’s not appropriate for me to show up for her in the way I would have a year ago. I can imagine myself coming over to help clean, drop off dinner, run errands, or just be a shoulder to cry on. She lives almost two hours away, but when our friendship was good I drove to her house at least once a month so we could see each other (she doesn’t have a car). She supported me through some difficult things, but neither of us have ever been through anything like what this past year has thrown at her.
I have no idea how to show up for her now that I’m not welcome in her life. In my defense, even if we were still close, her situation at home is precarious and volatile and visiting would likely not be helpful. I do my best to check in and tell her that no matter what, she can call me if she needs me. I mean it when I say it. She never calls.
It’s hard knowing that I’m not the person she goes to for support, and it makes me regret ending our friendship and not staying close to her because now I’m not around when she needs help. She is suffering so much and there is nothing I can do.
As a result, I’m feeling completely exhausted by the constant stream of bad news. I’m even annoyed by it, which is completely unfair to her. I know these feelings are coming from my own sense of inadequacy, knowing there’s no way I can make any of it better. She has been standing tall under fire and when she texts and says she’s had a nice day or done some chores or run an errand, we all cheer for her.
I am still holding onto a lot of resentment and pain from our “breakup” (which was actually her breakup!) last year. I’m struggling to process all of that while also being hit with wave after wave of her personal trauma. My ugly truth is that I am resentful of the positive attention she gets and I’m so tired of coddling her through every point of bad news. At the same time, I want to be supportive, I want to be attentive, and I want to be kind to someone who is in so much pain and dealing with so much. It’s amazing that she is still getting through each day as well as she is.
Is there a best way through this that I’m missing? How can I continue to support her if things don’t get better any time soon? How do I forgive myself for the horrible resentment and even borderline jealousy I’ve been feeling?? Am I a terrible person for feeling oversaturated with her tragedies? I can only imagine how oversaturated SHE feels!
Ugly & Overwhelmed
Dear U&O,
Before we discuss any of the details here, I want to congratulate you for expressing the drama of your mixed emotions so well. You did some extremely vulnerable work in writing this very honest letter to me. No one likes to admit what gets kicked up by old friends — their questionable choices, their recurring needs, their despair, their optimism. ALL of it is intense, and thanks to modern texting habits, it’s fucking relentless. As a rapid-fire quadruple texter, oversharer, and frequent flyer on Questionable Choice Airlines, I want to raise my hand and claim my status as PART OF THE PROBLEM here.
In our high-speed, ultra-modern nightmare world, a relentless avalanche of other people’s lives clobbers us every single day — sometimes every few hours, occasionally every few minutes. We’re ordinary animals, trying to keep it together, digging for our own little store of nuts, barely surviving, barely holding our heads up to look for stray hawks circling, and suddenly, five notifications flash across our eyes: terrible news, pain, anguish, emojis, comforting words, concern, more emojis, a growing feeling of dread, DO SOMETHING! WEIGH IN RIGHT NOW, YOU INSENSITIVE BITCH! WHAT’S YOUR REPLY???
It’s not natural.
Let’s acknowledge that. Some days, it honestly doesn’t matter who’s texting, we just don’t want it. We can’t handle the interruption. We can’t process the words.
The group chat amplifies these problems, combining all of the terrors of GROUPS with all of the horrors of CHATS: Not only is there an absolute calvalcade of updates and thoughts and feelings and news, but they’re all reduced to the lowest common denominator of complexity in order to be rendered digestible by all. Dead cats are greeted with loudly crying emojis, which almost seems to hint at laughter. Funeral arrangements are encountered with omg u ok, are there faint traces of mirth here? Words and cartoon hearts pile up, but it just gets more confusing, we just feel more alienated, more bewildered, more lonely.
Group chats are the devil’s playground. They are designed to twist you into knots, erode your bonds, undermine your confidence. This is why, instead of waterboarding or sleep deprivation, KGB agents now break prisoners by asking them to make a simple weekend plan with friends over a 6-person group chat. Within an hour without fail, the prisoner is on his knees, shaking and crying, begging for mercy.
You’re in a particularly unnatural situation, because your friend broke up with you after you refused to be supportive during her affair. You’re not in each other’s lives anymore except through this text thread. You don’t want to be excluded, but it feels bizarre to know so much about her sorrows without having any way of supporting her, talking to her, finding out more, showing up in person. It also feels unnerving to hear about her good days. Everyone is cheering her on and there you are, the one person she’s done with. That’s got to be a terrible feeling.
Meanwhile, she knows you’re there. Maybe she’s still angry or resentful. How could you possibly avoid interpreting some of her comments as pointed or even overly triumphant? I'm not saying that’s real. I’m saying the unnatural hell of group chats gets the imagination spinning.
Social media offers a global version of the same uncanny feeling: You know the people on some feeds, almost know the people on others, and are surrounded by strangers with similar jobs or interests on others. In some cases, you’ve half-forgotten who certain people are or why you followed them years ago. So when sorrows and joys show up there, a piece of you feels unnerved, like Congrats but also who ARE you? That sucks but who ARE you?
I used to blame myself for those alienated feelings. I used to tell myself, “You’re bad at loving people” or “You’re too grumpy and removed” and “Why can’t you welcome every single drop from this firehose of other people’s lives and intimate emotions?”
But now, whenever I go online (infrequent!), I remind myself, “This isn’t natural, so don’t stay here too long, don’t take this too personally, keep this at a distance because it’s confusing and unhealthy.”
That’s the advice I’d give you about your friend and your group chat. It feels wrong for a reason. You’re in a group but you’re not close anymore. Silence your notifications from this group so they don’t interrupt you several times a day. Let yourself check the chat once a week but otherwise stay away. You don’t need this. You might think it’s important but trust me, it’s not. Ask a friend to text you separately if something urgent comes up that needs your attention.
This group chat erodes your peace and calm. It unnerves you. The sensations begin in your feelings then those feelings move to your head and set up permanent camp. Your brain becomes a repeating song, a skipping record. Now it’s like you’re in prison being interrogated and tortured — asked for answers, expected to fix something.
GET OUT.
So that’s the practical side of this: Turn off notifications, hide chat. She doesn’t want to be friends, so keep her out of your head. She doesn’t return your calls. Respect her boundary and let it go for a while. You’ve showed your concern. You’re not going to fix her despair and at this moment, you probably can’t mend anything. Even if you were open to rethinking your position or apologizing or she was open to hearing you out, it’s unlikely that this could happen while she has so much pain in her life.
My deeper advice: You’re processing how you feel about her, how you feel about yourself, how you manage your emotions, and what you want from friendships and intimacy in general. I applaud your bravery in working your way to the center of your very mixed emotions. This is EXACTLY the kind of difficult process that will benefit you and bring you more clarity.
The key is to stay inside the vulnerable emotions and try them on for size without judgment. You started down that path very courageously in your letter: You miss her and you also resent her. You want to support her and you also recognize that being there for her right now would be difficult and maybe even irritating. You love her and you’re also envious of the way she shows herself, expresses her pain, and gets support and validation for it.
Maybe you wish you could do that. Maybe you don’t want to be that kind of person, but you still struggle to ask people for what you need. Maybe at some deep, buried level you consider it weak or unethical to lean on people too much, or to ask for attention.
I want you to notice how often in your letter you refer to helping your friend. Do your friendships take this shape a lot? Does this feel more comfortable than asking for help or admitting your own sadness or mixed feelings about your life? Can you ask your friends for support when you need it, or tell them the truth about your most embarrassing internal struggles? Do you feel strongly that you should be there whenever a friend needs you, even when you feel overwhelmed or indifferent? Does this standard apply to others, or do you feel mortified at the idea of even asking unless it’s a true emergency? If you do feel mortified, is that partially because you assume others have mixed feelings and feel alienated and indifferent, even when they offer their help?
I know these are leading questions, but I come to this inquiry honestly! Because sometimes when I’m SUPERSERVING MY MOST DIFFICULT FRIENDS (lol) I think: No friend does this for me. Why can’t I get this level of service? Maybe some part of me is trying to ask for what I want by pantomiming it! But is that even SANE? Is it even RIGHT to give people hours of your time when your heart is somewhere else some of the time?
My absent, sometimes indifferent attitude starts here: I don’t lean on my friends enough. I’m trying hard to do this more. But when I dig into my own mixed feelings and process my own thorny emotions, first I think “But I don’t need much help!” Then, slowly, I can recognize that I am very, very afraid to lean on anyone, and I’m very VERY afraid to say, “I’m at capacity, I need a week off!”
This is not a saintly position, to be clear. It’s embarrassing. The deep emotions and fears that dictate my mixed feelings on this front are just as bewildering and wild as the fears that cause a person to lean on others a little too much, to demand people’s attention repeatedly until they’re exhausted or resentful. These emotions live right next to the emotions that drive married people to have affairs, which live next to the emotions that lead other people to condemn those affairs. Trauma lives right down the block from these affair emotions, of course. But we disown neighboring emotions and our own! We work hard to decide which emotions are acceptable and which need to stay out of our conscious minds as much as possible!
In other words, it’s not all straight lines and clear rules and obvious infractions and rigid morals down there in the depths of our emotions and our experiences and our archaic belief systems, which we decided on decades ago. It’s a swirling, chaotic mess!
But let’s come back up to the surface now: It’s a LOT to show up for intense, emotional friends you’ve known for years and supported for years. IT IS A LOT. You know so much about them, and that’s such a gift, but it’s also draining to show up and listen for hours when someone is in an extended crisis. More specifically, it’s very intense to trust other complicated women, simply because 1) you have one or two memories of getting hurt by them and 2) you recognize how complicated your emotions are, so you’re quite naturally afraid of their buried fears and resentments, and 3) do you even trust YOURSELF, my god?!!! *room spins, colors blend, floor drops out*
Very close friendships are rarely simple or easy. SOME are. But many aren’t.
Saying no and stating your limits: This is just as important as saying yes and doing everything you can to support someone. Likewise, refusing to help someone who has made it clear she doesn’t want your help is just as important as offering to help every now and then, just to make your support clear.
I have very smart, emotional friends who, like me, want to explore all that life has to offer. This position often includes becoming entangled with smart, sensitive partners, some of whom are rigidly determined NOT to dive into the confusing, deep emotions and traumatic experiences we just described above. Things get interesting! But if I’m truly honest with myself, I am at once living vicariously through them and also distracting myself from my own intense emotions when I drop everything to field their calls.
Remember how I wrote about Bruce Tift’s book Already Free, in which he asserts that neurosis is a substitute for experiential intensity? Well, trying to get my one friend to stop solving puzzles all day and start feeling her emotions — and also trying to coax her into just living on the simple, thoughtless terrain of being a regular animal who doesn’t know shit about shit — is actually my way of, yes, AVOIDING MY OWN EMOTIONS AND CHALLENGES. Likewise, looking (anxiously?) forward to getting on the phone with my other friend whose entanglements sometimes strike me as dangerously intense is a way of living vicariously through that risk (enjoying its drama and thrills!) while also setting myself above such choices.
Again, why would I do that? Why would I relish the drama and tsk-tsk her risky choices in the same breath? Because I’m distracting myself from my own longing for closeness, escape, engulfment, risk, passion, love, and HIGH STAKES. Meanwhile, though, my real life is packed to the gills with high stakes that I’m actively avoiding: My youngest daughter is moving away in a year. Old age is accelerating towards me like a speeding truck with faulty brakes. I’m trying to write a novel which is humbling as fuck.
I AM VERY AFRAID.
Let’s dig deeper: I want more love and attention, always, even when I’m completely calm and aligned with my ideals. That’s not about my ego. I crave deep connection, particularly now that I’m capable of it without disappearing. My parents didn’t show me enough love for my taste. Only my husband is completely trusted for this. So I’m constantly puzzling through ways to get more love out of the landscape, squeeze more affection out, become more indispensable. This isn’t a conscious thought at all. This is not a top-of-the-mind goal I work hard to accomplish. It’s a subterranean compulsion that rules my actions when I should be writing or exercising or showing up for some important but boring practical tasks in the here and now.
My PLATINUM-TIER SERVICE to my most high maintenance and smart and tumultuous friends is a way of evading my own high maintenance and smart and tumultuous nature. I’m not feeling my own feelings, I’m analyzing theirs instead. There’s so much intimacy and connection there; it’s real and good and important. But sometimes my actions are compulsive and irrational. I’m avoiding my own life.
I would guess that the same might be true for you. You’ve got this ex-BFF trapped in your head, and your body and your heart resent that for very good reasons. You’re tired of her. She’s not even your real companion now. But her actions feel personal to you. Judging her is a way of not judging yourself. Feeling for her is a way of not feeling for yourself. Longing for her and resenting her, loving her and envying her, feeling sorry for her and feeling sorry for yourself: these things are all wrapped up in a big, tangled ball for you, in part because that’s how love feels sometimes, but also and more importantly because
IT’S NOT NATURAL.
So that’s what you always have to ask yourself when you engage with your group chat, or your ex-BFF, or your next BFF, or social media, or the internet at large: Is this natural? Does this feel right? Do I know how to say “I’m at capacity now, unexpectedly, and I’m sorry for that but let’s talk later”?
Do your judgments sometimes feel rigid and unfair? Do you see yourself as the one person who behaves ethically? Do you retreat into morals at the exact moment when you feel vulnerable, or confused, or more engaged with someone else’s problem than you can stand? I ask these questions not because I think having affairs is the best. I think people who give way too much of themselves and feel uncomfortable with taking or leaning on others (like me and you!) often have a lot of MORALS around their feelings and other people’s feelings. You will never NEATLY unravel feelings from morals, to be clear. But noticing how WED they are to each other can be helpful.
Here’s what I think is the source of some of my dread and my judgments of others: I hate to let anyone down the way I was let down as a little kid. I hate to get off the phone and leave someone feeling needy and lonely. There’s a visceral feeling of empathy and despair I get when I feel that I’m leaving someone all alone.
See how there’s something so tender at the center of so much anger and judgment and fear?
I think that’s the center of this for you, too. You’re feeling so tender for your friend, and that feels so vulnerable for you. THAT’S NATURAL! What’s less natural is when those sensations move into your head and then you try to convince yourself that you need to do something or change something. The move to your head is the problem.
If you want to process your emotions, your judgments, your vicarious living through this friend, your envy, your wish that things never ended, that’s good work. But if those emotions move into your head and become A COMPULSION TO FIX EVERYTHING or a NEED TO BE THE ONE WHO’S SUPERIOR OR KNOWS MORE or a DESIRE TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT, then that’s not good for you.
I know how it is. But you’ve got to just drop that hot plate on the ground and walk away, because it doesn’t matter. You can’t fix everything. You don’t have to be the one who’s wise and ethical. You don’t have to set the record straight. You can just let reality be what it is. Let her be in pain. She is not yours anymore.
Important reminder! Friendship doesn’t have to be all about support and keeping someone from their own loneliness and sadness and regret around the clock. Friendship can be about dumb fun and thoughtless joy, too. That’s what friends are fucking for most of the time, if things are working the way they should be!
Life itself should be about dumb fun more often!!! We need empty-headed pleasure regularly. We need to be wrong and know nothing. We need to be sweet and gentle, with nothing at all to say. We need to admit when we are unsure, or sad but who knows why.
Flexibility. That’s what grows out of letting go of puzzles and refusing the temptation to give WAY too much of ourselves or to obsess about people who aren’t actively in our lives. We can say to ourselves, “This situation is not natural. I am not helping, I have mixed feelings, and I’m not convinced that she would extend this level of concern to me if the roles were reversed.”
Then we can look closely at how we feel, and keep it dumb and simple. Do I love her? Not always. Do I trust her? Not really.
I’m curious how abruptly this friend cut you off when you admitted to her that it was hard to support her through an affair. I wonder if she gave you a chance to gently share both your harsh and tender feelings on that front. I wonder if she could respect your honesty and also accept that many (married?) people grow a little flinty when people up and leave their perfectly good-seeming spouses out of the blue.
Something about what you’ve described suggests to me that she is a person who bails at the tiniest hint of scolding or disapproval. Her shame is extra LARGE, but she has no intention of digging into the depths of her most primordial sensations.
We all know friends like this. And even though it may also be true that your own shame and fear prevent you from re-examining your lack of compassion around infidelity (although you might be very compassionate, just not supportive of it!), my sense is that you would be more than willing to dig into these difficult realms with her, if she would let you. She will not let you.
So let’s sit right here and mourn that together: Some truly beautiful human beings will not let us share ourselves with them or vice versa. They will not go into the dark with us. They will not sift through the madness, the chaos, the longing, the fear, the deeply-held values, the loneliness, and the trauma with us.
Shout out to the ones who will. They’re precious. That’s why we HAVE to say no to them when they call in the middle of the night for the second night in a row. We have to show up and be real. We have to admit our limits. We have to silence our notifications. We have to warn them that, at times, we will be unreachable. We have to go to Al Anon, sometimes. We have to remind ourselves that our vulnerable emotions matter, too. We have to ask for what we need.
We have to notice what we need. For you and me, that’s the really hard part. We have to admit that we have needs. We have to admit WAY more than we want to.
You struggle to admit how much you need. Your exfriend does not. That’s why your exfriend has become an obsession for you.
COMMON.
Don’t THINK through this. FEEL your feelings. You are envious. You want more attention and love for yourself. You miss the friendship. You wish you could have it back. You are disgusted by her behavior and also worried about that disgust. You feel so strongly about loyalty and commitment, and you also wonder what it would be like to just DITCH a motherfucker — whether spouse OR friend! — and move on.
Try on all the feelings, because it’s fine. We can feel things without wrecking our lives. We can understand our animal selves without doing harm. IT IS POSSIBLE to feel everything, to stay flexible, to let everything in, without losing it and hating yourself and everyone else.
You humble yourself with reality. You let the truth in. It hurts and it’s important.
You allow space for intense emotions.
And then you move on. You keep your feelings rolling. You let the waves pass through you. You don’t let your mind trick you into thinking that you have a problem simply because your exfriend has a problem. You let her live her life without you.
I’m sorry for your loss. Maybe some day, you two will find your back to each other. But listen, even if she were open to that, she still needs to prove that she can weather the slightest whiff of disapproval without bailing. She might be suffering right now, but her sudden departure HURT YOU. You imagined that all of your love and care would prevent that, but it didn’t. Learn from this. Stop offering a platinum tier of service just so you can feel loved and secure. You need more from your closest friends. This particular friend isn’t one who has more to offer. Look for the ones who do.
Polly
Thanks for reading! It’s so gratifying to create a corner of the internet where we can discuss complicated and conflicted emotions without stigmatizing each other for them. And it’s also precious and important to collectively CELEBRATE DUMB FUN! Don’t forget that part, overthinkers and overfeelers and oversharers! We can be bumbling, stumbling clown babies together, too! Go read Black Bag by Luke Kennard because that’s the next Ask Polly Book Club pick and we need to DISCUSS what a dip into madness that book is!!! And if you’re somehow not a subscriber, get on that, because the book club is members only. I love writing this column so much, and your support makes it possible.
This is such a good analysis of the dynamics of group chats, Heather! Just as it was important to me to dissect novels growing up (to understand wtf is happening between people AT ALL TIMES), I think we need more of this: serious examinations of how we connect *digitally* and what it does to our central nervous systems and to our relationships. This explains so much to me about why I've left--and in fewer cases joined--various spaces in recent years.