Your Strong Friends are Getting the Short End of the Stick

How to support emotionally strong people

I am still best friends with all of my girls from high school. Maybe this is because I’m too introverted to make new friends. Or perhaps it's because of the specific trials and tribulations that have occurred over the last 34 years I’ve become extremely averse to opening up to new people. Maybe those are the same things.

The point is, although I’ve made new acquaintances, my true friends have stayed the same. My best friend's name is Janelle. Now, I know that being a 34-year-old woman and using the term “best friend” seems infantile. Do we really have best friends anymore? We don’t stay up late in our PJ’s talking about the boys we have crushes on and eating popcorn. Although the last time Janelle and I hung out, we did get drunk and fell asleep holding hands and spooning, so there’s that.

We are closer than I am to anyone else aside from my husband. This is likely because we’ve been through everything together. From puberty to marriages to break-ups to grieving— we are in it for the long haul. And throughout it all, Janelle has always been the strong one.

Although I’ve grown and gotten better at helping people through emotional trauma, I still avoid it like the plague. I bake cookies as mourning gifts to bestow on anyone in pain, rather than allowing myself to become a shoulder to cry on. I employ a long poking stick with a plastic hand attached to it so as not to have to get too close when giving physical comfort to someone who has been crying.

I can’t tell you the number of times that Janelle has been that shoulder to me. She has driven to my house in the middle of the night to comfort me during teenage breakups. She sat in a hospital waiting room for hours on end while I was holding up in the ICU after my c-section went sideways, and I nearly died from blood loss. Janelle has always been the rock that held me to reality when I was ready to float away.

These are not isolated incidences, but more of matters of fact. This is simply how our personalities have buffed out over the years…

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