Читать книгу Be Your Own Best Friend - Chessie King - Страница 12
ОглавлениеMY DEFINITION: when you feel like it’s time to be totally truthful with yourself AND with others.
This is your time to come clean; you’re ready to open up and say it how it is. I’m writing this bit with my bits out … I’m completely naked. I ran out of the shower to do this little section – it came to me just as I was washing my armpits.
TRUTH-FACED OR TWO-FACED?
As I’ve grown up, I’ve learnt that the more open and honest I am with my friends, the stronger and more understanding our relationship is. Especially for women, there is still a stigma around us all being ‘two-faced’ and not telling each other how we really feel about things … well, that’s not how I roll. There is absolutely no benefit to speaking behind someone’s back. I believe it’s better to address a situation before it becomes a mess – this is what I like to call being ‘truth-faced’.
Honesty doesn’t have to a brutal – ‘Wow, you’re totally shit at singing, please stop, I’m sending you the invoice for my broken ear drum surgery’ – it can be nurturing and ‘character-building’. If anyone has upset me or made me feel uncomfortable, I meet up with them face to face and tell them with kindness and empathy. I know they might not even be aware of it, or they didn’t intentionally do it, or they could be going through something.
I have a good friend who I’ve known for years. We have a very complex friendship, but we respect and understand each other. She’s admitted that, before me, none of her other friends had ever been honest with her. Out of courtesy, I’m going to call her by another name: Gladys.
Gladys has been through things no human should have to deal with. I cannot even imagine the pain and hurt she’s been through and how it has affected her. There was a stage in our friendship where she was spending most of our time together talking about other people negatively. It left me feeling really deflated, questioning whether she spoke about me like that to others … so I addressed it head-on. I said exactly how I felt, and asked if she was aware she was even doing it. She was initially a little defensive, saying that she didn’t mean it maliciously; she was processing stuff and her way of doing that was talking about others, to me.
A few months later, Gladys thanked me for being honest with her. It had made her think and she was more aware of spending time talking about other people while she was with friends. I was genuinely quite surprised by the effect our conversation had had on her, but we are now even closer because of it.
I used to be sensitive to honesty; I was a confrontaphobic. I would immediately go into self-protection mode and make an excuse for myself before apologising. It can be hard to take, but flip it round and be honest with yourself: if you didn’t know you had upset a friend, would you prefer them to communicate with you directly or would you want them to go to someone else and talk about you?
I find that if you both have a mutual understanding and level of respect for each other, you will have one conversation about whatever it was and then (hopefully, and I talk about this later in the book) it won’t happen again. I believe honesty is a really important part of building a friendship.
CONFRONTING TRUTHS ABOUT YOURSELF
Being honest isn’t just an emotion you can use with others; it’s just as powerful if you use it on yourself.
It can be painful, but these moments leave me feeling empowered – like I’m taking back control of my life and deciding to make a change. It took me a good chunk of time to be honest with myself about a previous relationship that had left me feeling weak and trapped. I felt like someone had smothered me in superglue and stuck me to this relationship for just over a year – I had convinced myself I wasn’t strong enough to get out of it. So you don’t all go after him, I’m going to call him Hamish – because Mat had a goldfish called Hamish when he was seven, and things with this guy felt fishy from the start …
Writing this now and opening locked-up memories actually helps me understand why I’m more apprehensive about self-celebration … every time I came back from work with exciting news, I would always get shot down by his pessimism. This was at a stage of my life when I was shifting jobs, from working at a start-up app in London to getting somewhere with my presenting. I’d come back home late after events, super-excited to share them with Hamish, but he would ask, ‘Why would you want to interview these fake people on red carpets?’ ‘What satisfaction do you get out of this fake industry, with your fake hair, fake nails and fake friends?’ Hamish was the king of eye rolls. He was the guy who told me I couldn’t do something when everyone around me was trying to show me I could. He was the guy who left me broke at 23, financially (I couldn’t afford a £10 dinner out with friends, let alone my rent in London) and mentally. He was the guy who told me I was overreacting when I’d driven back from leaving my nana in hospital after watching her go through a biopsy. He said she was absolutely fine and I was making it sound worse than it was … she died a few days later.
No one really knew what was going on, but people made comments online and in real life about his negativity, especially towards my job. It started becoming more transparent to others how unenthusiastic and disapproving he was of my life. He put me down constantly and had stolen so much of my happiness I didn’t feel like myself at all. Friends were noticing it, family could see a slither of it, and I knew I had to get out. Waking up one day and feeling truly honest with myself gave me the extra fuel I needed to end it.
HARNESS IT
So, you’re ready to channel your inner honest-truth-faced-Chessie? If you’re in a difficult situation with a friend, partner, work colleague or family member, don’t let it get worse – let’s work through it and hopefully settle things between you.
HERE’S MY STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE ON HOW TO APPROACH IT HONESTLY WITHOUT:
1 hurting them
2 hurting you
3 blowing things up to be bigger than they already are/should be, and
4 protecting the friendship, if, at the end of it all, you want to remain close.
I’ve been through all of the above, but I promise, there’s peace in knowing you’ve listened to yourself. Be proud you trusted your emotions.
PAYOFF:
Honesty can be scary, it can be difficult, but it can also be transformative. It can bring you closer to your friends and to yourself or it can help you distance yourself from people who are making you feel like shit. Always choose talking about it to the person over speaking behind their back.
