Somewhere along the way I turned my life into a performance, and everyone around me into an audience. All except one.
Last night one of my friends sent me a photo of a slice of cake. Just one slice. From the good bakery. And she wanted it on record that she’d queued half an hour to get it. I’d had one of those weeks, the kind that weighs you down and you can’t seem to shake, but none of it came up between us. We talked about the cake. We talked about whether her cat is getting fatter. A while later I put the phone down, and as I put the kettle on I noticed something in me had loosened but that it had nothing to do with a word either one of us said.
It didn’t come from being heard. I never mentioned the hard thing at all. She just sat there in my evening, pleased as could be about a slice of cake. And my world went back to being an ordinary place, where people eat cake for dinner and worry about their cats. It was her company, and I hadn’t realised just how much I’d been missing it.
She has no idea she does this. I think if I told her she keeps me upright some weeks, she’d laugh and ask if I’d been drinking.
At some point, I turned my life into a performance. I don’t remember deciding to. Bit by bit the people around me stopped being company and started being an audience, and once you have an audience you start playing to it. You bring the good bits forward. I photographed the perfect coffee in the lovely cup, and made sure to keep the sink of dishes out of frame.
An audience only wants the highlight reel. That’s the deal, struck in silence. So the good bits stay and the rest sits quietly out of the frame: the dull week, the unpaid bill, the pile of washing, the three-in-the-morning fear. Everywhere I look, other people’s best bits are on show, and next to that shine my ordinary week starts to look like proof I’m doing life wrong. I come away feeling not enough.
The gap between performance and life is where the shame lives. The wider it grows the more I hide, and the more I hide the wider it grows, and from the outside all that hiding looks a great deal like a person sitting alone in a quiet house. That is the loneliness. I used to think it had happened to me. It hadn’t. I’d built it, one edited-out Tuesday at a time, scared of being the one with the problems, the one whose less-than-perfect bits wouldn’t stay out of frame the way everyone else’s did.
But it’s in our connection with other people that we find out what normal looks like. Take them away, leave only the reel, and the mind decides everyone else is fine and we’re the ones falling short. My friend’s cake corrects that. It shows me a real person, delighted by a slice of cake, and the whole invented standard falls apart. It was never real. There’s a quieter thing underneath it too. Sitting near someone steady can settle something in you that hours of solo breathing or tapping will never reach. We’re sold self-soothing as if we came into the world able to manage alone. We didn’t.
My friend never tries to fix me. And I think that’s it, really. When someone leaps in to fix, a small part of you hears that you couldn’t have managed it yourself, and something quietly erodes each time it happens. My friend doesn’t reach for solutions. She stays. Staying tells me nothing needs fixing, which tells me I’m not broken, and it does all that without a single sentence saying so.
With her, everything is the same size. The scary thing and the small thing get the same tone of voice. She’ll move from a hospital letter to a slice of cake and back without changing gear. In her hands they weigh the same, because both are just what a life looks like from the inside. A beautiful catastrophe, held gently. She normalises the whole of being human, and never once knows she’s doing it.
I’ve thought about telling her, about saying it plainly: that most weeks these ordinary chats are what keep me going. But I won’t. The moment I name it, she’ll spot the audience she’s playing to, and start to perform, and the one true room I’ve got will fill with footlights like all the others. So I keep quiet. I let her think we just talk about bakery queues and her possibly-fatter cat. And every time, my world goes back to being a wonderfully ordinary place.