By Joan Doyle
The silence was deafening when my boyfriend moved out. I rattled around in my empty heart, waiting to hear a footfall or a voice calling out, “I’m home.” It was as if I was waiting for life to begin. Alone, all was silence and I, invisible. A long way from home, a year in my new country and the strain of cultural strangeness, abandonment and loneliness pressed in on me.
It was Saturday afternoon after a long week in which I had cried in my office every day, not caring who walked in and saw me. I felt I was holding so much in and I did not know what to do with it. Flailing about in a hell of my own making I wrangled with my choices, berating myself with tortuous critical thoughts. No wonder being alone was something I had avoided. I was between a rock and a hard place, and the hard place was my own mind. Fighting it every step of the way, this experience was breaking down my usual means of survival and I felt threatened, vulnerable and angry.
I had picked up a book of grief rituals at the library feeling a loss of a relationship is a death. Following its recommendation of taking my anger out on some pillows, I had broken open a dam of tears, and yet the pain was not subsiding. Where was the cathartic release it promised? Already on my knees I begged God to take this crushing weight away. I began to feel desperate. I needed a friend. And I needed a friend now!
I called Gary. He lived a couple of blocks away and could get here quickest. He was a sympathetic and sweet-natured guy and I was very happy when I found he was home. “Can you come over right away?” I asked. “I just can’t be alone right now.” Gary heard my need and very soon he was at my door.
He came in and I immediately began to tell him how I was feeling, crying and laying out my impossible predicament before him. He sat quietly listening as I paced and ranted. I kept thinking, “Make me a cup of tea, why don’t you?–that’s what a friend would do. Just make me a cup of tea!” Very Irish, I know, not something an American would do as a comfort gesture at all, but that’s what I wanted, that’s what I knew would soothe my tortured soul. But Gary just sat there. Slowly it began to enter my awareness that Gary was becoming catatonic in the face of my distress.
Snapping out of my drama then, I heard myself say in a calm voice, “Gary, can I make you a cup of tea?” With no help coming from an outside source I had to find it within myself. I also realized my tormented state had brought up for him an old reaction to his schizophrenic mother for whom he had cared in his high school years. In that pivotal moment I learned three profound lessons.
Firstly, I have resources within me that I don’t even know are there. There is a witness to my thoughts that came forward as my strength in that moment and it is always there. And this knowledge grew over the months that followed and most especially when I began to meditate.
Secondly, we need each other. Even if Gary couldn’t be what I wanted in that moment, he was what I needed, and I could not have seen my own resilience without him. I found I could be a friend even when I felt I had the least to give. I began to see situations that did not look ideal in a new way; there is always something to be known or learned from them.
Thirdly, I am my own best friend. When I made that call and asked for help I allowed myself to be cared for as I was, not composed and in control, but a complete mess, at rock bottom. I allowed Spirit, as love, to enter into my experience and show me what I needed to know. The asking was the important part, in fact the essential part, of the flow of giving and receiving. It is often easier to give, we feel strong and in control. If we don’t learn to also receive, we deprive others of a chance to give; we block the flow and miss the opportunity to feel acceptance in our human imperfection. There is strength of a different kind in exposing vulnerability and trusting a friend.
As to the cup of tea, it might not have been what Gary wanted just then, but hopefully he got what he needed too.