deathpixie | Food for Thought

Back when I was fifteen going on sixteen, I spent a year in Japan as an exchange student. It was, to use the cliche, a life-changing experience.

One of the things that stuck with me most was a conversation I had with one of the American students, who had done her year and was about to go home just as I arrived. We'd met up for lunch and she was giving me various tips on how to survive the year and in the course of things, I started blurting out, as I had a tendency to do back then, the whole sorry story of being ostracised and picked on at high school.

She looked at me and asked, without any kind of ill-feeling: "Why did you tell me all that?"

I was a bit non-plussed. "So that you'd know what awful things had happened, I suppose," I replied. "So you'd sympathise."

"But," she said. "Which would you prefer? Someone to be your friend, or someone to feel sorry for you?"

I didn't have an answer straight away, and we went on to other topics. But that conversation has stuck with me, all this time. And it's slowly shaped how I relate to people and react to them. Sympathy and someone feeling sorry for you is good - it validates your suffering, means that you'll always have someone there when you feel bad. But it's not a basis for a friendship. There's an inequality built in right from the start, one person perceived as being weaker than the other.

What would you prefer? A friend, or someone who felt sorry for you? I know which one I prefer, as hard as it can be sometimes.