Christopher Phin

Most people want to help when friends are struggling, but sometimes you just can’t.

Sometimes the problems your friends experience can’t be solved or even alleviated by you.

So what do you do to show up?

This is only my experience, and others may have different contexts and approaches that mean this advice doesn’t apply; I am not a mental health professional. Content warnings: Trauma, mental health crisis, suicide

Make your peace with inconsistency and uncertainty

One day your friend might be black with despair, and the next day they might show up at a social gathering apparently fine. They’re likely not fine, but this is how they’re showing up right now, for one of a dozen reasons which don’t concern anyone but them. You might want certainty and consistency from your friend so you can be there for them in the best way,  but they’re probably not gonna be able to give you that.

Their feelings and experience are always valid at every moment, even if they shift and appear inconsistent to you.

Don’t ask if they’re okay

You know the answer to that: no they’re not. It’s dumb to ask, and makes them do your emotional labour for you. If you want to know something specific (for example: “Are you considering taking your own life right now?”) then ask that if you must, but remember they don’t owe you coherence or certainty never mind answers. They might not know the answers.

(At worst, ask: “How are you right now?”)

Sit with your impotence

You want to help, and if you can’t — because they can’t tell you how or because there’s nothing practical you can do — you’re probably gonna feel pretty shitty; anxious, frustrated and impotent.

Tough. That’s your problem, don’t make it theirs.

They’re the one who is in crisis right now, and you not being able to feel good about yourself for helping them doesn’t matter.

Push, carefully

If you truly think a way you can help your friend is to ease the burden of making food, for example, then don’t ask; drop off food and text them: “There’s a couple of tubs of chilli outside your door. Ingredients are {list them}, chuck it in three days or sooner. Love you x”

If you think your friend needs to talk, say “I’ll be in the park 7–9pm if you wanna stop by and talk, but otherwise I’ll just enjoy my book!”

Don’t make them work out what they need. Assume a yes, but be happy with a thousand no’s.

Yes, it’s hard and unsettling work, and you might get it wrong a few times. Do it anyway.

“That sucks”

You wanna fix it? You might not have the skills and experience to do so. But you know what everyone can do? They can say “That sucks.”

Validate the feelings without feeling like you have to deal with them — which protects
your peace too.

They might be a dick — right now

When someone’s hurting, confused, disenfranchised or hopeless, they might lash out, pushing you away tacitly or deliberately. They might not realise they’re doing it, or they might have fucked-up or valid reasons for doing so.

You’re gonna have to absorb some of this.

How much you do depends on a few factors — how many spoons you have yourself, how close a friend they are, and whether they have a proven track record of ‘not being a dick’ before this crisis, and thus deserving of your porosity.

You’re not obligated to absorb infinite emotional punches, but good friends deserve you not tapping out when the first one lands. Get up. Fight for them, not with them.

Figure out what kind of help they want and need — with mutuals’ help

Talk to mutual friends about what kind of help everyone is offering and providing, and try to work out, to synthesise between you, what is helping the most. Treat it like a work project. You might create support group chats, you might have shared notes, discuss them when you meet up.

There’s just one rule here: don’t you dare turn this into a competition. If one of you finds a way to support your friend well, you all learn and their care gets stronger, and that’s all that matters now. Nobody is ‘a better friend’; you’re getting your friend better.

To conclude…

Being around someone who’s having a bad time is often not a good time for you. If your friend is worth it, and you’re worthy of being their friend, you have to be okay with that.

And if you’ve been showing up well for your friends, yours will show up for you right now too.

This post also appears, in a shareable format, on Instagram.

It took me until my early thirties properly to be exposed to a really simple idea: everyone around you, indeed, everyone all over the world, has a story that brought them to today, to this minute, this second, that is as rich and internally consistent as yours.

It’s so easy to think “Oh, Derek is an asshole,” or “Jill is going to kick up such a shitstorm about this” or even just to think that the part of someone you see every day in the office or down the pub or on the pitch is the whole and total of who they are. But inside their head, there is a whole multi-faceted narrative that lead them to now, and everything they do makes sense to them – just like how everything you do makes sense to you, or at least, can be rationalised or explained or at worst excused away. See also Hannah Gadsby’s wonderful recent polemic on how good men continue to redraw the line to put the bad men on the other side, or the much more academic, though still highly readable Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me).

This is an important lesson to internalise (and god knows I forget it so often) because it engenders empathy. Derek is not an asshole, he’s living and dealing with, oh, any number of things that are making him do assholish things. Things he might not even realise are things. Emotional literacy and self-reflection are hard.

But it took me to my late thirties to realise something else. As well as it being incumbent on me to afford others some leeway and empathy as I interact with them, recognising that their stories are more lavish and nuanced inside their heads than is apparent outside, I think we should also allow that richness to spill out of ourselves! Despite Brexit, despite Trump, despite the repugnant attacks that accompany historically marginalised groups reasserting their control over their identities and their destinies, I’m currently – today – feeling hopeful. Because around me, in the friends I have in cyber- and meatspace, and the media I chose to be exposed to, I see people much more willing to be emotionally vulnerable and honest. To allow people, in other words, to read that story inside each of us, and not to be afraid to show the world that we’re not the 2D cardboard cut-out people we usually feel we have to present as.

Much is made of social media’s tendency to let us – to tacitly encourage us – to present the best version of ourselves, and this is increasingly being called out for being unhealthy. And for sure, it basically is, although even there there is nuance; selfies, derided as vain and vacuous, can be a way of empowering people whose image was traditionally mediated through prescriptive gatekeepers, for example, and I’ve certainly shared posts on Instagram which look like the worst kind of Instagramminess, but which record and mark little personal triumphs of happiness for me.

But in my world, I’m seeing people using social media to articulate and own their issues, their problems and their insecurities – their stories. They’re prepared to show the workings-out of how you become a good and kind and whole person, rather than persisting in the fiction that they’re already complete, autonomous adults. And that’s marvellous, I think; I have become closer to friends who have embraced their chaos and their fuckups, and I believe people have been drawn closer to me when I’ve purposefully dismantled the façade I so carefully built from my teens on.

We are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimp, and telling the story of ourselves to those around us will help them understand and love us more completely. And if we listen carefully to that story as we tell it, we might just love ourselves more completely too.