Food for Thought

[deathpixie]

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.

Comments

[dumbphilomel.livejournal.com]

I think the truth is somewher in the middle--if someone doesn't know much about you, about the experiences that shaped you or were important to you, they likely won't understand you well beyond the superficial. At the same time, while you can sympathize with your friends, and you should--it should be give and take, I think. Not about one person telling and the other person listening (there's a weird control dynamic there, from both ends). It should be about being interested in each other's lives, not just one person telling and the other person listening. Not every exchange, but througout the friendship, you know? Which is all just to say I'm really agreeing ith alestar, above :-)