I am who I am, because of…

                                                                                          11 March 2013

I recently had to say goodbye to a very dear friend, when he and his family relocated to another city. In a message I sent him, I wished him well in his new job and thanked him for his transformative role in my life. Part of his response was, “I am who I am, because of the people in my life.”

Today that phrase is particularly real to me, as I try to get my head around things happening to people in my close circle. It’s hard for me to feel happy and cheerful when people I love are in pain. It’s hard for me to switch off from their reality and to brush things off because they’re not happening to me directly. We feel this particularly when, as parents, we know our children are unhappy or in pain.  But it doesn’t stop there. If a friend is going through some kind of trauma, we feel it too. Maybe some people are capable of staying aloof in these circumstances, but I’m not one of them.

Someone I love is in pain, a pain I have experienced, and a pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I have no doubt whatsoever that she is strong enough to survive this and to move on to a bright, happy future, but there’s a long road ahead, a road fraught with all kinds of issues. That she is loved and valued, I hope she has no doubt – in fact, that is going to be one of her anchors, now more than ever before.

This is in line with my belief that we are all connected by our common humanity. We feel what others feel, even when they’re strangers to us. We read about something that happened on another continent, and we feel the sadness, the pain, the despair. We want to reach out - sometimes we’re even moved to make some kind of gesture, to assist people far away.

But there’s another kind of empathy that I’m struggling with, because the issues that make this a dilemma are exactly the same issues that usually cause most of my dilemmas: when someone I love is doing something that I think is, at the very least, inadvisable, or, at most, dangerous and destructive, I have a dilemma. Usually the person is doing something by his or her own choice, and knows, intellectually, what the risks are. You could say that the person has made an ‘informed choice’. My dilemma is: do I say something, and come across as judgemental, or do I give the person the space to exercise his or her right to choose, regardless of consequences? The point is, given the fact that each of us is on a unique journey, do I even have a right to voice my opinion on how someone’s living their life? Pointing something out to a friend doesn’t mean you think you’re perfect and that you haven’t made stupid choices, yourself. It just means, in this case, that you can see what the behaviour is likely to lead to, and the person involved can’t – or won’t.

I agree with my friend who now lives so many hundreds of kilometres way: I am who I am, because of the people in my life. I feel their pain. I sense the danger of their high-risk behaviour. It’s hard for me to  watch silently from the sidelines.

I try to operate on the basis of treating others like I want to be treated; if I were making a huge error in judgement (let’s face it, when we’re so caught up in our addictions, we don’t have objectivity), I’d like you to tell me, as diplomatically as you can, that I’m making a fool of myself. Had someone done that to me, I would have been spared a lot of pain.

So, what does a good friend do: say something, or give your friend enough space to learn the hard way? Ouch!