Great Friends Are Burdens

Day by day, I’m increasingly convinced that being a great friend might be one of the most important roles a person can choose to play, and really, that it might be some of the most important work one does in their lifetime. It bleeds into everything; all your relationships. The way you move in the world. The way you get to truly experience the fullness of life. It impacts how much of your own self you get to experience. It is the purest form of love. And, in thinking about the practice of being a great friend, and what that means, what it looks like, or how to become it, I don’t have the most clear answers, but the feeling of being a “burden” comes to mind.

For someone to be willing to be a burden on you is possibly one of the greatest acts of trust. To burden puts you at risk. There isn’t necessarily a guarantee someone will provide you acceptance, support, and safety. Very few people want to hold another’s pain. Very few people can. And so, there’s a deep surrender in allowing yourself to burden another person. This is a gift. It deepens the bond. But, more than that, I think it also allows people to expand themselves through that deepened bond. It is a radical thing to be provided a space for your pain, and for your pain to be held by another human who has no obligation to you. A friend is not bound to you by blood or contract; friendship exists through repeated actions. It is an ongoing choice. It is an act of pure devotion. I think we’re all meant to be a refuge for each other through such acts.

And so, for someone to willingly and actively want you to be a burden on them is not just to invite intimacy into a friendship that cultivates depth, I think it’s to recognize the profundity of that kind of relationship. That there is no room for ego. That resentment cannot dwell there. That honoring another person’s humanity is essential. That you have the ability to dissolve walls. That you have the power to free people. That pain is not meant to be experienced in isolation. To invite and welcome a friend’s burden then is to recognize that friendship is entirely sacred.

I think friendship is transformative work. To show up fully in friendship means you’ll expose your fragility and experience another person’s fragility. To hold someone at their most fragile, in their heaviest suffering, is to experience true rawness, and a great capacity for love. To experience yourself as someone who has the capacity to carry such heaviness that isn’t yours, is to meet the depths of your strength. And in doing so, you help yourself become strong enough to maybe allow another person to carry your burden, too. And through that, they can meet the depths of their own strength. Through shared vulnerability we amplify each other. We help each other expand. And so, the sacredness of great friendship is a cycle of radical reciprocity. But, to experience such sublime reciprocity, you must have the courage to be a burden, and be burdened.

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Leave me feedback, thoughts, questions, whatever, etc.

These daily posts aren’t polished essays, but an experiment in taking one thing that’s lingering with me and publicly executing on trying to develop and articulate my thinking about it, especially when my thoughts are incomplete.

I think of everything on my entire Substack as something I can come back to and iterate & expand on later, including these posts! So, if anyone leaves a comment that sparks anything for me, I’ll consider exploring it further sometime. Here’s a link to a Google doc. of the above post:

→Right Here!!←

If you have any specific thoughts that came up for you while reading, feel free to just jump in the doc. and leave comments on those moments, or all over throughout; leave thoughts on whatever you want, and ask questions, or share reactions to specific things. What stands out? What are you curious to know more about?

— Sandra