As a young adult, I thought I owed anyone I met the true story of my life. I would meet someone at a cocktail party (yes, I went to cocktail parties and gave them in my 20s and 30s) and tell them that I’d married at 19 because I was pregnant (the most humiliating detail of my life then). A somewhat older woman, girlfriend of my husband’s best friend, a woman with a very colorful reputation, pulled me aside at one party to say privately that I did not owe anyone this information. In case it is not obvious, she was being kind and trying to help me grow up.
I stopped telling people this detail. In fact, I started reflecting on what I did want to tell people I met about me and what I wanted to know about them. I also stopped taking on other peoples’ causes as my own when I had the audacity to speak to power and they did not. I learned to keep my own council and, for the most part, that has served me well.
This past Sunday I went to a memorial for a friend, Susan, who had died from cancer. She’d had an illustrious career in public health. It was a joyful celebration of a remarkable life. Five women stood at the microphone to say they were Susan’s best friend. After the second speaker it was clear that nearly everyone in the room (300, another attendee tells me) thought they were Susan’s best friend because she paid attention to each of us as if we were the most important person in the world to her. That was one of her gifts to us and a generous one.
Elsa, Susan’s wife, was the last speaker. She said that lest we think Susan was a saint, she wanted to assure us she was not. She spoke with humor and tenderness about Susan’s tendency to want to control things and people. Well, maybe it was more than a tendency. And then she offered one more piece of evidence, a kind of horrifying thing. Susan would sadly tell Elsa, and some others, that she didn’t have any friends, that she wasn’t good enough to have friends. This, when we’d just been told in this room full of friends, that she had at least 300.
How we perceive ourselves perhaps never exactly matches others’ perceptions of us. My belief that I owed others my biggest humiliation, and Susan’s belief that she didn’t have any friends were both false. I was helped by an unlikely angel. I know that Susan was assured many times that she did have deep friendships. We need others to be our true mirrors when we can’t do that for ourselves.
