Who is Your Best Friend?
The other day I was scrolling through photos on my phone, and I lingered on a selfie of me and my closest friend, wearing his medal after running the Glasgow Half Marathon. He always did have a way of keeping going all the way to the finish-line. This is a true story, so I won’t use his real name, let’s call him Dumpty. I guess that makes me Humpty.
But how can you be best friends with someone that you don’t trust or respect?
We’d known each other forever, but I guess things kicked off when he got sectioned. He thought that he had no choice except to run away but his Mum was distraught.
‘It’s OK, Mum. I’ll go into the hospital. Don’t cry.’
I was mortified that I was associated with Dumpty the loon-ball, but I couldn’t just ditch him. Could I? Besides, he’d previously patented an invention that he’d been too chaotic to follow through and market.
‘Why not invent another patent? I can help you and we can both get rich!’
‘Because a patent is just one good idea.’
And I know I sound shallow and two-faced but that’s how things were back then.
It was hard work being around him, chaos, and when we were in rough pubs, he freaked people out with his impeccable logic bereft of emotional intelligence.
I noticed a difference in him when he got a new anti-psychotic medicine. He was more focused. He could read again. He was interested in reading about writing, and he was always animated (easily construed as manic) when he spoke about it.
‘Writing is essentially structure and character, and both are rooted in human psychology. I am learning about life, and myself.’
I couldn’t believe it when he got 3rd place in a Britain-wide short story competition. He was amazed too. How, with his chaotic brain, did he choose 2,000 words – from out of infinity – and order them just so into a coherent story? Dumpty didn’t seem like so much of an embarrassment anymore, and Dumpty the eccentric writer sounded so much better than Dumpty the loon-ball.
He was unsure that he could accomplish this writing feat again, and he felt as though his quest for good mental health had plateaued. He collected fancy pens and ornate notepads but it didn’t help him to write, not a jot, and he toyed with buying a book on the Greatest Inventions of the 21st Century. He designed a tattoo, the ‘fictive dream’ he called it, of an old-fashioned pen nib flying along creating colourfully, because he knew that he was fundamentally lazy and prone to depression, and he figured that if he had a writing related tattoo on his body then would have to keep up his writing, otherwise he’d be a nincompoop for having marked himself with such a redundant irrelevance.
‘Will it hurt?’
‘Not as much as unfulfilled potential.’
Then covid struck.
Dumpty had always been anxious about travelling outside of Glasgow, and this made him feel like even more of an oddball outsider, but when travel restrictions were imposed, on everyone – he felt as though he was just like everyone else. And the weight of fate surrounding covid made him wonder that his becoming ill wasn’t really his fault in the first place. It was just luck, Karma, maybe. Some obscure plan, perhaps. He developed an admirable positive attitude, and I didn’t mind being stuck with him in our Dear Green Place. Sometimes I’d delicately broach the subject of self-harm.
‘Nah. It’s not for me. If ever I peer over the edge down into the abyss, I
think fuck that – it could be even worse down there. Whatever there is.’
The reminder of the preciousness of life, and time, that Covid brought with it prompted him to take a chance, financially, and with his sanity, on learning the mysterious meditation technique of Transcendental Meditation. It was a game-changer, even more so than when he got his new anti-psychotic medication. And he enjoyed the fruits of meditating so much (not least the wellspring of creativity) that he even attended some TM philosophy courses online.
‘The world is as you are’ is something that he’d heard in various guises before, but it is a concept only truly comprehensible to someone who is well in the head as a reference point, and because Dumpty was meditating regularly (not to mention taking his medicine, and meeting regularly with his medical professionals, particularly his superstar Community Psychiatric Nurse), he was well in the head, and his mind was ordered, and he absorbed the concept beautifully.
Another such concept was ‘The Self is all there is’ (not to be confused with selfishness), and it’s a concept readily realised when considered alongside the truism that one cannot walk in another person’s shoes. This led Dumpty onto the notion of ‘be kind to yourself’, something that he was forever being advised to do but something he had never quite put into practice. But now he recognised that not only should he be kind to himself, but he should be his own best friend, forever.
I am Humpty Dumpty.
And I am my own best friend.
But unlike Humpty Dumpty,
I got a little bit zen,
and I did put myself back together again.