Anger Was Once Love

I think one of the saddest things recently is realising how many people are perfectly happy to know you without ever really caring about you.

They’ll remember your birthday if there’s a party attached and they’ll remember to invite you if there’s a table to fill, a photograph to take or an event worth being seen at. They’ll tell you they love you at four in the morning, three bottles into a night neither of you will remember particularly well. They’ll call you their best friend because you’ve shared a bathroom in a nightclub and discussed the intimate details of somebody else’s relationship.

But when your life falls apart, you discover just how conditional some of that affection was.This week, while I was in hospital, questioning nearly everything about my life, I received a message. “You’ve been uninvited to a bottomless brunch.” And with a full stop. Morales I cannot understand.

I actually laughed.

Not a “How are you?” Not a “Do you need anything?” Not even a “Are you still alive?” which, given the circumstances, would have demonstrated a fairly impressive level of situational awareness. Just a rude show of character and another “friend” not even a message at all.

I suppose I should be grateful because nothing says friendship quite like an opportunity to pay eighty dollars to drink cheap prosecco in the company of people who haven’t asked how you’re doing. Or I have bed for you to stay, it’s an act. And maybe that’s why it hurts because I know id drop everything.l

And the thing is, I’ve begun to realise how much of modern friendship operates like this. We are extraordinarily good at showing up for things we want to be seen at, and remarkably bad at showing up when there is nothing to gain.

People can find four hours to attend an influencer event, queue for the opening of a restaurant, photograph a complimentary cocktail and repost somebody else’s carefully curated life. They can respond to a brand invitation within seconds and spend an entire weekend documenting how wonderful their friendships are.

But somehow finding thirty seconds to check whether somebody is okay becomes an impossible administrative burden.

I’m not suggesting everyone should abandon their lives because somebody else is struggling. The world cannot stop every time a person is unhappy. We all have our own problems, most of which nobody else knows anything about but I cannot help questioning what we’ve started to value.

When did being invited become more important than being included? When did being seen become more important than seeing somebody else? And when did we become so concerned with the appearance of a beautiful life that we stopped noticing the people quietly disappearing from it?

I’ve spent much of my life questioning my own morality. Whether I was selfish to leave home and was wrong to pursue the life I did. Whether travelling to countries suffering under oppressive governments made me complicit in something. Whether I had any right to speak about the people I met, or whether I had simply mistaken access for understanding.

But fuck.

I look around sometimes and wonder why I have spent so much time putting myself on trial when so many people seem perfectly comfortable moving through the world without ever questioning what they stand for and just live for the weekend or next bender.

I’m talking about the very ordinary morality of how we treat one another, how we notice somebody is suffering and when we’re kind when nobody important is watching. Whether we are capable of caring about something that offers us absolutely nothing in return.

I’ve met people in Afghanistan who had very little and still insisted on sharing it. I’ve been invited into homes in Iraq by people who had absolutely no reason to trust me. I’ve sat with families in Syria whose circumstances I could barely comprehend, and watched them make room for a stranger at their table.

These experiences didn’t make me morally superior, if anything, they made me painfully aware of how little I knew and how much I have learnt this error .

I have found it increasingly difficult to reconcile those experiences with a social world where people seem to have everything and still behave as though kindness is something they cannot afford.

Perhaps the people I’m angry with have struggles I know nothing about but perhaps I’ve disappointed them in ways I haven’t recognised (even though them flaunting on instagram). I’m certainly not innocent. I’ve been careless, demanding, dramatic and occasionally an absolute nightmare to love. I have used humour to disguise pain and anger to disguise fear. I’ve said things I regret and I’ve expected people to understand situations I was barely capable of explaining myself.

But I have tried, God, I have tried.

I’ve tried to be the person who turns up, the person who makes something happen. The one who organises, remembers, gives, forgives and makes room. I have gone into friendships and relationships offering almost everything I have, sometimes without stopping to ask whether there would be anything left for myself.

And I am beginning to understand that giving everything does not guarantee that anybody will give anything back. There is something almost embarrassing about admitting how much that hurts.

I don’t want fucking grand gestures.

There is a very particular kind of pain in realising you have hundreds of contacts in your phone and no idea which one to ring.

And then there Cameron, from the other side of the world who checked in when people much closer didn’t. Not because there was a party, or a favour to ask, or something exciting happening. I am so sorry.

And it reminded me of something I’d almost forgotten: the goodness of people is not measured by how loudly they announce their affection, but by the quiet decisions they make when being kind is inconvenient.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we measure the value of a life.

Because nobody is going to stand at the end of our lives and list the influencer events we attended. Nobody is going to remember whether we were invited to the right parties, whether our clothes were expensive enough, or whether we looked sufficiently beautiful in the photographs.

They will remember whether we were good to them.

I mean good.

Good luck.