Pandemic friend drama
Dear Readers,
I like to think of myself as a person who doesn’t have drama with friends (Amber here today). This may make me seem like a placid, calm person - I am not. But what placidity won’t get you, having had a chaotic childhood will. Raised in an apocalyptic religion and with an alcoholic dad and volatile mother, I want peace.
As a result, it’s been years since my last friend drama. Maybe a decade. That’s not to say there haven’t been disagreements, or conflicts. I’m definitely not a people-pleaser. But as adults, my friends and I have always managed to work things out. It’s been the same in my workplaces. Sure, I’ve had annoying bosses and frustrating colleagues, but never drama.
That is, until the pandemic hit.
I suspect I am not alone in experiencing a statistical rise in friend drama since lockdown. I am also certain that part of why friend drama is on the increase, despite not seeing our friends, is because we need other people to keep us sane.
The first of the dramas blindsided me. I am finishing up my degree under the supervision of a mentor-professor I particularly admire. I love my professor’s sharp wit, her flippant way, and her generous and outgoing spirit. She is also, coincidentally, exactly the same age as my mother. After the drama happened, during the neurotic, self-flagellating phase of the incident, I realized these personality traits I was drawn to in my professor in some ways mirrored aspects of the personality of my mother (who, as a side note, did cause a lot of drama in my life, until she stormed out of my apartment one day four years ago and never spoke to me again).
Of course, this professor did nothing of that sort. Rather, she seemed like a version of my mother that was capable of liking me, while also possessing these traits.
In the Before Times, the professor invited me to her office hours; we’d talk about a range of personal subjects. I learned more wisdom from her than I have from anyone in my life. She wrote me a recommendation letter to Harvard, all her idea.
She invited me to her off-the-radar honors seminar, held at her home - an old 70s penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side with polished burgundy brick floors and photos of her playwright late-husband sitting with Paul Simon on their wrap-around balcony. After class, she’d invite us all to stay and order-in Chinese food. She always had excellent French wine, even though she doesn’t drink. I have basically just described what I would call “Amber porn.”
Then, the pandemic hit. We were halfway into the semester and this dream experience - one of those rare dreams that you know is a good dream even as it is happening - disintegrated. One week my classmates and I were sitting on giant cracked leather sofas in a room wallpapered by books that had occupied their shelves for 40 years. The next, we were home in our respective bedrooms, staring at a screen trying to have the same discussions, accidentally talking over each other, frozen at critical moments, connected only through invisible processes in the air.
Conversations between my professor and I, of which in the Before Times there were many, were now of course all but gone. There was no office to go to, for one thing, but who had the time, either. The pressures and strains of life were getting more intense by the day. I had taken on a lot before the pandemic hit - a heavy course load, in addition to three freelance contracts. It was doable. But then I lost childcare.
By the time the end of semester came around, I wrote my professor an email, explaining my predicament, and expressing my feelings of failure about the paper I had written in the class. I had thought we were close! I don’t have a mother to tell these things to! I’m very expressive by nature.
The response I got was like a slap on the hand. I was told that my situation was no different than anyone else’s in the class, that we all had responsibilities (except that no one else in the class had kids, or jobs, and most lived with their parents). No one else had been unable to fulfill the requirements, she said. There was also a reference to “my unmitigated need for external confirmation” and advice to talk to a therapist, rather than her.
I was dumbfounded. I felt sick for a week, confused and hurt. But also, surprised. Drama with an elderly professor I revered? Me, the hyper-vigilant student, ever wary of wasting someone’s time and generally acutely considerate? Never! Yet, here it was.
I finally did get over it, did talk to a therapist I could not afford while chasing after my daughter on her scooter, and made some sense of the whole thing.
A month went by. More pandemic.
Then, more drama.
This time it was a couple who worked for me, on one of my freelance contracts. We had been remote colleagues for four years - our children had played together, we had been to each other’s homes - and never a conflict between us.
Out of the blue, the husband wrote me and said he couldn’t meet the deadlines. This had happened three times before and I gave him extensions. But this time, there was no more room, I had a boss of my own breathing down my neck.
I expressed sympathy, but told him we were all in the same boat together, and I needed him to fulfill his commitment. He ghosted me. Stunned, given our long friendship, I tried emailing him again. No response. I knew it was serious when I checked Facebook: I had been defriended. Not only by him, by his wife - even his wife’s brother! I knew it was nuclear when I opened Twitter and found I was unfollowed there, too.
These mysterious rifts had seemed to come out of nowhere. How could relationships end when we hadn’t even been around each other? The only thing that had changed was that we had all stopped seeing each other. Can friendships survive without human contact?
In the beginning, with my friends, there were zoom drinks, flurries of texts commentating on Cuomo’s press conferences. But as the months wore on, I found myself split between all I needed to do and frantic childcare shifts, an hour here and an hour there in between my partner’s work schedule. Once my child was in bed, there were still hours of work on a screen stretching out before me. The last thing I was capable of was another zoom meeting.
As contact with the outside world ceased with no end in sight, everything became more and more untethered from reality. All that was real were the responsibilities I was spending every minute of the day trying to meet, punctuated by moments of distraction, during which despair and uncertainty crept in. I tried to be a good friend, but I couldn’t.
Maybe it was the same for my friends. Who knows what was going on on the other side of those screens? My professor was juggling who knows what kind of pressure. She has pre-existing health issues, and is a department head at a college that was thrown into online learning with zero warning. She mentors not only me, but tens of other students, because she is that giving. Maybe she just couldn’t give anymore. We ceased being breathing bodies in a chair, and instead became another ping on a computer.
The ghosting by the couple I worked with happened right around the time the Black Lives Matters protests started. The wife, who is Black, had told me many times over the years how traumatized she had been since the beginning of Trump’s presidency. Maybe, contemporaneous with George Floyd’s murder, a deadline was an impossible demand to meet. It was easier to erase me from the face of their lives than deal with one more thing. Maybe they were just exhausted.
The actual size of our brain is related to the number of friendships we can maintain. One massive study on adult development found that people who answered “yes” to the question of whether they had a friend they could call at 4:00am when they needed to talk were more likely to live to age 80. One of the researchers summed up the study’s findings as: “The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” Being around our friends literally does keeps us sane.
I know this from experience. After I left my fundamentalist religious community, I was shunned. I had no friends for a time. I really mean zero friends. I remember clearly how untethered that made me feel. I am not prone to instability, but there were times where I knew if I didn’t at least go outside to see people, I would possibly begin to go mad.
It occurs to me, too, that the eruption and death of my pandemic relationships echoes something from the Before Times: dramas I have seen unfold on Twitter, even pre-pandemic. We seem more easily agitated, quick to judge someone, and willing to view them as disposable when they are not in front of us. Lack of human contact emboldens us, makes us less empathetic, prone to misunderstanding and a lack of nuance. Everything round, like a person, is flattened, like the screen. It’s easier to hurt someone we can’t see.
Friendships, like family, make us feel bonded to the world. If anything, for me, friendships make me feel this bond more deeply than even family does, because in a sea of people, we found each other, liked each other, and chose to link our lives. Plus, friends are the people we can talk to about how crazy our families are.
One single friend of mine, who lives alone in a 350 square foot studio and hasn’t left the house in four months, sometimes feels she is getting to the point of having a breakdown. I feel that way too some days, for entirely different reasons. The lessons of the pandemic drama have taught me that in the pandemic, as in life, we all face problems - just different problems. Maybe we all just need a friend right now.
Amber Scorah
What we’re reading this week…
A journalist writes an unflattering piece about a CEO. Another journalist adds to the conversation. A wealthy tech investor takes exception and mocks her. She counters with accusations of harassment. Twitter, of course, takes over. This story may already be making your head spin, but it’s one of many recent public conflicts of managers versus employees, hinting at a labor movement that is simmering, ready to explode. Workers are justifiably infuriated at how they are being treated in this country, and bosses aren’t doing much more than shooting the messenger. As the writer points out, “What else will they fail to understand before it’s too late?”
Michaela Coel is a TV writer like no other - she is show runner, director, star and writer of her HBO-BBC series I May Destroy You, which fictionalizes the story of her own sexual assault. In her narratives, situations and ideas are turned around, looked at from other angles, and expectations are turned on their head. Coel says this trait in her work comes from the fact that she spent most of her life asking, pleading, and hoping for empathy - leading her to practice empathy like other people practice yoga. This ability to see everything from another perspective is starting to seem radical, and perhaps art is showing us the way back.
That’s our newsletter for this week! If you have any reader responses, friend drama of your own, news tips, or unsung stories of your own to share - reply to this email.
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~ The team at Lioness