Skip to main content

The intimacy of being understood

They say that you don’t know the value of what you have until you lose it. You don’t agree, you know the value of what you have when you’re sitting in a café with your best friend and a good friend and you laugh at a joke and she looks over at the friend and says, “I know it looks like she’s being fake but trust me, that was genuine.”

She’s known you for three years and she already knows when you’re happy, when you’re trying to be happy, when you’re sad, when you’re annoyed, when you’re restraining yourself from having an all-out argument with someone, when you’re complaining about not having something you don’t even want, when you’re talking about something simply because you want to talk and when you’re nonchalantly talking about something that you would trade a kidney for. It’s what being understood feels like and it’s enough to make a grown woman with a heart cry.

Everyone wants to be loved, it’s natural, but being loved can hurt. It can cause immeasurable pain and conflict between the part of you that’s hurt and the part of you that knows this is the only way they know how to love. Being understood is different, it can make you feel a kind of comfort that’s hard to describe. The friend who covers for you when she sees that the conversation is hitting uncomfortably close to home, the sibling who distracts your parents from having realisations that are going to get you into trouble, the cousin who knows exactly what to say to get your mind off that person because she practically has a master’s degree in the study of you and the friend who nods along as you rant and rage over a situation she knows you don’t want to fix.

It's about not having to articulate the feeling, being able to convey it with just a look, a sigh, a laugh, a tear and the other person just getting it. When you understand someone, you know why they like that song, why they relate to that character, why that movie made them cry, why it made them laugh, whether those were happy tears or unhappy tears, you know it all because you know them. It’s not easy, knowing someone, but it is something that happens when you care enough about someone to learn what makes them tick, or cry for that matter. Loving someone is easy but taking the time to understand them is a lot harder. Which is why the next time you’re in the passenger seat of a grey car, stumbling over words and adjectives, you turn to her and simply end with, it’s just ugh, you know? And she takes her eyes off the road for a brief second as she smiles at you, “I know”.      

 

 

 

For Alessia, who is quite literally the Bethany to my Sydney and the only reason I make less than ten bad decisions a year.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Friends We Make Along The Way

Cleaning out your cupboard has always been one of your favorite activities. Not because you particularly like cleaning, but because you’re always bound to find some old dusty diary that you’d used and discarded years ago. For you, discarding something means shoving it onto one of three shelves and rediscovering it a year or two later. This particular diary falls into your hands five years after you’d put it away, and out of idle curiosity, you flip through the pages. There are at least six different types of handwriting in the diary, but none of them are yours. That’s when you realise this isn’t just an ordinary diary, it’s a culmination of ten years’ worth of friendships.    You barely remember the day you bought the colorful diary to school, but you do have a distinct memory of peering over your friend’s shoulder, trying to read what she’s scribbling inside. She glares at you, and you take a step back, giving her her privacy. Another friend takes out her packet of colored ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pretty Is Pretty Enough

You’ve never considered yourself beautiful. Pretty maybe, if the lighting is just right and the angles are good, and your hair is being cooperative, and your clothes are falling on your body in a way that doesn’t make it obvious that you have never stepped foot inside a gym. It’s hard to consider yourself beautiful when your Instagram feed is filled with women who wake up looking like they’ve stepped off the page of a fashion magazine, and sometimes you wonder what you’d look like if you had the time, patience, money, and energy to present yourself so perfectly to the world. However, over the last year, you’ve noticed something unsettling. With more and more women speaking up about how much editing goes into a 30-second Instagram reel, your envy has changed into a distinct kind of sadness. Everyone’s not editing their flaws anymore; they’re editing themselves. They’re taking their perfectly normal human bodies and making them thinner, fairer, and spotless to fit a standard that was n...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Life You Build

Having a strong internal locus of control means believing events in your life are primarily the result of your own actions. It’s funny to think about how you didn’t even know what a locus of control was two months ago, and now it’s possibly one of the most important things in your life. You’ve had this image in your head for the longest time. You’re standing on the sidewalk on a crowded street with the wind blowing through your hair and the sound of traffic horns wreaking havoc on your eardrums, and you’re happy. Now, it’s a reality, and you’re not quite sure how you got here. You remember sending in the application and prepping for the exam. You don’t think you could ever forget that. The planners, the notes, the *cough* legally downloaded textbooks, the study techniques, the time blocks. You’d never studied this hard before and a part of you wondered whether this would even be worth it. After all, you were smart but you weren’t that smart, were you? Your fears were realised twent...
5 comments
Read more