The Scars We Bear
Because Not All Wounds Fade
Prompt: In a New Yorker interview about her short story “Marseille,” Ayşegül Savaş comments on a realization she made when putting together her story collection Long Distance, forthcoming from Bloomsbury in July: “Even though friendships are very important to my own life, I would still place marriage, or parents, or children at the center of my preoccupations. Then why do I write so much about friends?” Take a look through some of your past writing and try to locate any patterns of concerns that recur throughout different pieces, thus revealing your thematic priorities. Write an essay that muses on why these are primary concerns for you to explore creatively.
Going through some of the writings in this newsletter, I think friendship has been mentioned more times than I might have intended. Why? Because I believe it’s the one subject in life that provokes a lot of emotional response in me. You see, friends, as they say, are the family you choose for yourself. So, as much as you might feel hopeless when it comes to your family because you had no say in the hand you have been dealt, your friends are your choice. When something goes wrong in this important, central choice you've made for your life, the pain it causes is much harder to bear.
I know it’s a dark thought, but you kind of expect your family to mess you up from time to time. That’s the thing about families: you didn’t choose them, you still love them regardless, you give each other hell and you move on. You’ll stay in their lives, albeit from a safe distance, and they will stay in yours because that’s what you do with family. Friends are a different story. You do not have the same level of tolerance when it comes to them, because frankly, why should you? You already have people using up all your tolerance in life. Why should you have to allocate more to people you have chosen to let into your life? This doesn’t mean you will be unforgiving or unnecessarily hard on your friends; it means you do not expect them to harm you the way your family might. Because they are the ones who are supposed to know you better. They are the ones who are supposed to be in your corner, no matter what. It’s you and them against the rest of the world.
As you can see, the stakes are high when it comes to how I see friendship. It’s a sacred bond. It’s one thing I value above all when it comes to human relationships, and naturally, it’s the area where I have been the most hurt and heartbroken, because that’s just the sick way life works.
Shit happens, right? Right. People make mistakes, and it’s not the end of the world. We should move on and not get stuck in a moment in life, right? Right.
Well, I have never been able to do that when it comes to failed friendships. I keep thinking about what went wrong, how it went wrong, what could I have done differently. How could I be that naive? Why do I keep trusting people? Is it all worth it?
And this non-stop wheel keeps going round and round. What makes this even more depressing is that the older you get, the harder it becomes to find a friend you can truly share yourself with, because who has the time and energy to share all the baggage? This makes the hits even harder to bear because despite the hardship, you have decided to invest time, hope, and energy into letting someone new into your life, only for you to watch it go to waste.
I know there is nothing you can do about this unless you lock yourself up and say, nah, I don’t want this. I am better off dealing with my family and having a couple of surface friendships here and there. I don’t want to put myself through this, and that’s fair. You do you.
But I have never been like that. As far as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to have friends, the more the merrier, and I have tried and failed in this so much more than I care to admit. I have found some gems along the way, which makes the risk worthwhile, but the heartbreaks weigh heavy on me whenever the subject of friendships comes along.
Will I do this all over again should the opportunity present itself? Sadly, I am not as invested as I used to be. I am too old for this. But the hopeless romantic in me will still keep the dream alive of having friends you can trust your life with. Not that I don’t have any; I have a handful of them. But you know what I mean, let’s say not having to go through the hardship of cutting someone you once loved out of your life and having to live with a nasty scar for the rest of your life.