Heart-swelling love and positive reality checks from friendship.
She tags me in a video on her story of a beautiful black child speaking some simple wisdom and truth. She tells me that she couldn’t help but think of my future son. She loves to hear my opinions, she thinks I’m full of them.
She sends me a message, linking to a post saying ‘I have no ugly friends’. (She is the jewel in the crown of our dazzling friend group, in fact.)
She loves my poetry so much, she reads it to all the girls at dinner. She thinks it’s great. I think she’s great. She recommends me to someone curating a zine.
A certain piece beats with her ‘resonating heart’ and she tells everyone to read it, to read me.
She screenshots our messages and saves them.
Many messages of ‘sweet dreams’, ‘love you’, and ‘God bless’ and ‘thought of you’ with appropriate red and yellow emojis to accompany them. I cannot help but feel loved.
She decides to teach me her native language and she praises my pronunciation.
Hours of silly texts back and forth and long, detailed letters typed out mean the world to me.
I have been growing resentful of the amount of time I had been spending on my phone since lockdown, and craving regular analogue connection. Loneliness was sneaky and calculating, playing on my insecurities in spite of my resolution to gratitude.
And foolishly, like the millions of other victims, I allowed social media portrayals of happy amity to infiltrate my view of myself and my relationships with friends. I do not usually receive grand gestures or go on picnics and sea walks or to fancy cafes. When I am with friends it is not usually perfectly cinematographic, and I am not a big selfie person.
My friends live far away from me, and when we meet we sit in coffee shops joblessly, or empty cinema car park lawns, or kitchens and spaces on campus. We laugh loudly and enjoy each other’s company and ridiculous arguments. We make jokes and have the general behaviour of old men. And when we can’t, we translate this into sporadic three-hour phone calls once in a blue moon, and sharing memes and stickers, and tagging eachother in giveaways.
Even before connections went digital, I always held the idea that I could never be fully understood by anyone or share a profound connection with them. A small voice in my head also insisted that as a friend, I was everyone’s second or third choice. I believed that I liked all of my friends more than they liked me. This was very dumb thinking for two reasons.
Firstly, I disrespected my self by making the fullness of my person dependent on another person understanding me wholly. It was a bizarre expectation to expect someone to know me as deeply as I know myself, and I deprived myself of the enjoyment of my own company, secretly waiting for another person to fulfill me instead.
Secondly, I disrespected my friends by undervaluing their efforts. Expecting someone to express love and affection in my way rather than theirs created an impossible unspoken standard to which they would always, inevitably fall short. I was dismissing the time they took to spend time with me, share food with me, text me, and think of me because I believed they were acting out of a sense of liability or politeness.
(Note: insecurity wastes our time and scams us of all of our enjoyment. Overcome and ignore her, not only for happiness and growth, but also out of spite and as revenge.)
I have come to realise that in this day and age, no one has time to craft and sustain a whole sham friendship out of politeness or pity. And even if they did, they can only fake their laughter to a certain extent, meaning that had they intended to, my company would have made the connection genuine anyway. I have also come to realise that I am a person worthy of time and friendship, and deserve to receive and reciprocate thoughtfulness and affection. And even if I weren’t to receive it, I am enough for myself. I have concluded that my doubts and insecurities are usually big fat lies.
Many of my friends are cool and detached from their devices. They aren’t scroll-addicts or the type to respond at the drop of a hat, they are all busy people. Since lockdown, everyone has become sick of screens and never-ending notifications and have expressed so. When I think of all of this, the gesture of picking up the phone and typing a text to me when I come to mind takes a lot more meaning, as does the time that went into physical meetings back in the day. It took all of this for the kind, sweet words and actions I receive to finally rest in my mind without any doubting of myself or my friends.
How silly.
To all of my friends reading this: thank you for showing me love and friendship. Love y’all for the sake of Allah.
The Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said:
‘Allah, the Blessed, the Exalted, will say on the Day of Rising, “Where are those who loved each other for My Majesty? Today I will shade them in My Shade on the day when there is no shade except My Shade.”
❤
