How to lose friends

There’s a saying that goes something like if you want to know who your real friends are you should wait until something goes terribly wrong in your life and see who’s still around. I don’t know if any one specific person said this or if it has always been around as a piece of general wisdom that was then assigned to various famous people - if you google the text in italics you’ll discover alleged quotes from Liz Taylor, Steve Jobs, Charles Bukowski, Marilyn Manson, and Jeffree Star to name a few. It’s the kind of platitude you’d find on Instagram accounts with usernames like the_real_hustler_2015 a few years ago, typically in a bold font over a picture of a wolf howling at the moon. So, you can imagine how embarrassing it is to admit that I can actually relate. 

What went wrong in my life is that 5 years ago or so I got diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis, a chronic illness as inconvenient as it is understudied. What we do know about it is that it’s an autoimmune disease by which my immune system perceives every bit of food I ingest as a threat, it begins attacking the body whenever I’m digesting anything. This often results in lesions to the intestinal wall and over time, even ulcers. 

For me, the major symptom is fatigue. Because my immune system perceives every bit of food I ingest as a threat, it begins attacking the body whenever I digest anything. This means that every time I eat my body starts working for no reason, thus expending energy that could be put to better use, and since the autoimmune response happens in the large intestine, I’m also unlikely to absorb all the necessary nutrients from the food I’ve eaten. I’m also perennially anemic, but I can’t take iron supplements at home because they exacerbate inflammation in the gut. Cool. 

Another super cool thing is that inflammation in the gut often means inflammation in other tissues in the body, the joints for instance, which adds a layer of reduced mobility to the whole fatigue thing. 

Despite all this, I have it easy. Since my diagnosis, I’ve read dozens of testimonies from people whose lives have been punctuated with invasive procedures, and surgeries, some even had parts of their intestines removed. Compared to them, I was the luckiest girl in the world. Once I figured out my treatment I only thought about my illness for about two months a year, when my annual flare-up was triggered. Still inconvenient, but aside from that I was free to enjoy my life. Until this year. 

Symptoms of what I thought was my fifth annual flare-up started to manifest around February. My temperature went up after every meal, my joints hurt, and a fog took over my brain halfway through the day and made it impossible to think about anything other than lying down in a quiet room, even just for 30 minutes. Then a couple of weeks later I started bleeding from my large intestine, the ultimate sign of an acute flare-up. As I write this, seven months into trying out gradually stronger treatment, I’ve finally gone longer than a week without bleeding. 

I realize I run the risk of sounding asinine writing this but I make a horrible sick person. It could be that I have a degree of internalized ableism that I must have picked up from simply existing in society or it could be my perfectionism or my hyper-independence. Or maybe the fact that I was lucky enough to have it easy during the first few years post-diagnosis made me cocky, who knows? 

The point is that I struggle to think of myself as ill. I resent that my body gets to tell me what I can or cannot do and I have at points pushed it past its limits because of this and to the despair of the people who care for me. 

I am not very good at being in bed. I am not very good at being cared for. I am not very good at not having my shit together (excuse the pun). 

Most of all, I’m not very good at watching the life I worked so hard to build for myself dissipate before my eyes. Who is? 

But illness doesn’t give a fuck about your life, so I didn’t really have a choice. 

The first thing to go was my life outside the house. In her brilliant collection of essays Poor Little Sick Girls, Ione Gamble writes about how her Crohn’s diagnosis forced her into a very close relationship with her bed. Chronic illness will do that. One day you’re out and about, doing hour-long commutes to work five days a week and going out to plays and brunches and gigs at the weekend like it’s nothing. And then one day most of that is impossible. Work becomes work from home, work from bed, work part-time, work freelance. Before you know it you don’t even remember what it felt to do a 45-minute train journey without feeling exhausted.  

The second thing to go was friends. I have to preface this by saying that so many of my friends did the exact opposite. When I couldn’t go out anymore they came to me. From across town, from other cities around the country, from Italy, from Romania, from France. They came over and sat on the sofa with me when they could have been anywhere else doing infinitely more fun things. 

But some disappeared and I would be lying to protect my ego if I said it didn’t hurt. I tried to do that for a while, actually. I told myself they’d always relied on me to suggest doing things and that was simply the dynamic of our friendship. When I saw Instagram stories of nights out I used to be invited to I put myself in their shoes: would I tell my disabled friend about a night out I know they won’t be able to come to? No. did that make me feel any better? Also no. 

About a month ago I was having one of the aforementioned wild nights on the sofa with one of my friends and venting about this. She was sorry that I was experiencing this feeling of loss but was quick to reassure me it was theirs and not mine. They were doing me a favour, she said, it was a classic case of the trash taking itself out. Words I appreciated and one of the few things a good friend can say in a situation like this. The only issue was, these people were not trash. They were fun and smart and kind, albeit not to me at this particular moment in my life. 

We do this a lot. Faced with rejection of any kind, a popular knee-jerk reaction is to dehumanize the source of that rejection. You ask a woman at the pub for her number and she says no, she’s a stuck-up bitch, although you were dying to get her attention just seconds ago. The guy you’ve been mentally planning the rest of your life with 2 months into casually dating starts to reply to your texts slower than usual and he’s a fuckboy. You know both those things are false but it’s too hard to swallow for right now. 

I was presented with a tough pill to swallow of my own when, during a self-indulgent moan about my disappearing friendships to my sister, she had the nerve to point out that while what I was going through was tough, maybe these people were going through things of their own. The thought had occurred to me, but it didn’t appease me. 

It’s also true that grief makes people selfish. Or at least self-involved. Just look at the length of this post. What follows, then, is that friends owe each other a little bit of extra consideration when difficult things happen. But I refuse to look at friendship in this quid pro quo way. “I’m here for you when you feel bad so that you’ll be there for me when I feel bad”, it seems to say.  Well, what if we’re both feeling bad at the same time? Who does the caring responsibility fall on? Do draw straws? Do we come up with a scale to measure pain against?

If so, how do we avoid falling into the social media-age trap of being assholes to our friends in the name of self-care. That “I’m at emotional capacity and can’t be a good friend to you right now” email comes to mind.

And what is emotional capacity, anyway?

Earlier this year one of my closest friends lost a parent. Another went through a very messy break-up. Somehow, among all of that grief, they both found time to ask me how I was. By that token though, maybe I could make an effort and reach out to some of the people who had stopped reaching out to me, just this once. 

So I did. I’m having coffee with one next week. The second I was about to message posted something that annoyed me to their Instagram story, though, so I decided maybe not. You win some, you lose some.