Herrington: Friendship or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Criticism

Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer

     The whole point of having a friend is to have someone to talk to. Talking to someone needs to be a two-way street: Sometimes you talk, and sometimes you listen. What you are listening to may not make any difference at all, as long as you can relate with honesty and the freedom to speak your heart and mind. There may, though, be a thread of disagreement, entanglement, misunderstanding, cynicism, disregard, or criticism that is tough to put up with, and this can test a friendship to the breaking point.

     Some people seem to have a light hearted look at things, and we say they may be wearing “rose-colored glasses.” They may have a sort of naïve way of looking at things or be particularly optimistic about things. Some people will just simply brook no negativity at all. I had an aunt who was a wonderful soul, always positive, and when I was the least out of sorts, she would ask, “Honey, what’s wrong?” If things did not add up to happiness, there must be something out of kilter that needed to be righted.

     She had an uncanny way of adjusting the environment, tweaking the moment, recalibrating the knobs of life that would include some slight realignment, and we would be off and running. She was a fixer without her being someone who reprimanded or scolded. And she was a stickler for positive talk. One time my mother asked her about a movie we had seen, “Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang.” “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she noted, “but if you are going to talk like that you may need to leave.” Simple, but effective. She would clear out her kitchen at the least provocation, no squabbling for her.

     Some friends are the exact opposite of friendly. They can be mean spirited, have a dry sense of humor, be rather dark, make fun of others, just have some fun, or otherwise make you feel like you wish you did not know them. As the saying goes, “With friends like that, who needs enemies?”

     I write on-line, a lot. My daily word count is about 10,000 some days. That means that if I hit it for 200 days a year, I could easily knock out 2 million words. I don’t write every day, and some days I have to travel or sit with a friend or go to a movie or whatever, so I probably hit maybe 500,000 a year or close to it. That’s a lot of communicating, and I can’t say that every word is positive.

     I don’t like bullying, so I am likely to come to the aid of someone I see drowning on–line, even if I disagree with this person. I am a fair debater; I don’t always come out on top, but I am a flurry of activity waiting to happen, so when the occasion arises, I can muster an assault that is worthy of the moment. My deflection and decoding skills are pretty high, and when I see someone getting run over, I usually hover nearby like a dog waiting for table scraps. I don’t know what there is about my personality that even cares about that, but I feel like people ought to have a fighting chance.

     That being said, some people just can’t help stepping into it with both feet. People who can’t help it align themselves with the need to set everyone else straight. The town-crier of the set of children of an alcoholic fame is someone who needs the truth to be told because the parent would not admit to being an alcoholic. This person then has the life mission of being brutally honest about everyone else’s failings and faults. It’s the way they have interrupted the world, and this is their reality.

     If you hook up with one of these people, they will be revealing your every move to you for your own good. They will tell you what you know, outline the problems, go through the ain’t it awfuls, and circle the scratch on your Ferrari. Yes, without these people we might have lived in the delusion that we are perfect and that our lives are spotless examples of just how to be.

     But, into every life a little rain must fall. If you have not been given a hard time, you have not lived. You have to go through tough times so that you will appreciate the good times. You need to toughen up so that when you get out into the real world, it will not swallow you whole. You have to build some psychological muscles….Man, people have a lot of excuses for getting in your business and telling you what to do, don’t they?

     Studies have shown…really (http://www.amazon.com/Learned-Optimism-Change-Your-Mind/dp/0671019112), that if we are negative, pessimistic, when we are young, we will probably remain so for life. We can learn to be optimistic, but the cure is a maddening thing called being successful. Some people have the mindset that every time they open their mouths, try to do something, or attempt a change it only leads to disappointment and discouragement. They cannot get it through their thick skulls that everyone has one of those days. Everyone has a morning that starts out with everything turning sour and messed up and nothing will go right and it would be better to just go back to bed. The difference is that some people persevere and manage to get under it, over it, beyond it, or past it. Some people tend to just throw their hands in the air and give up, even though a successful moment was in the wings and only waiting for the clock to click 9 A.M.

     A hundred anythings in a row does not mean that there will be 101. You could make the case, but it would really just be circumstantial, and after a while the laws of probability would kick in. The chances that something else will mess up is so astronomically low that you are guaranteed to have a good day given your past activities, right?

     At any rate, the reality is that all of us need some straightening out. No one is wrong all the time, but a lot of us are wrong a lot it seems to a select few who go around with self-appointed pad to write us an Oops Ticket. It’s snowing down south, your slip is showing. Isn’t there always one person who notices this? She was in the 3rd grade when her mother shamed her about that, and she will never forget that no matter what else in the world is going on, if your slip is showing, the whole day will not go off as planned. Snow can ruin any party. We have got to fix that snow. Make momma proud. Or just stop wearing slips altogether and only use this skill on those you meet along the way.

     One of the things that really gets to me is when someone pulls what seems to be a problem out of my hands. If I am having a moment with my phone, I have a friend who deems it his God given right to yank my phone out of my hand to show me how to correctly correct the offending problem. I don’t usually stand too close to him, and if I am having a problem I will hide my phone until I give up and then hand it to him to fix. I have a problem with being man-handled.

     The point here is that between our relationships, our environment, our family backgrounds, and our own genetic predispositions, we need to align ourselves with people who are capable of dealing with our insecurities, misapprehensions, hyper-sensitivities and insensitivities. I mean, your friends can say things to you that no one else would even dare to say to you unless they had you at gun point. And that’s what makes you friends.

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