Recently, a woman I know was telling me how horrid she was to other girls in high school.

“I had to let them know who was boss,” she said as she nostalgically recounted all the times she made people cry or bleed, “because, otherwise, they would have fucked with me.”

“What made you think that?”

“I don’t know. I was scared of someone being mean to me first, so I wanted to look tough.” What a lovely outlook! This affixes onto friendship, an ostensibly fun, affectionate, and pleasant conceit, the idea imposed upon politics and professionalism that SURVIVAL IS AGGRESSION, THEY’RE ALL GONNA GET ME, and that’s already destruct-o-max enough right where it is.

When it’s demonstrated to you that the way to “get ahead” in your social groups is by policing, mocking, and gossiping about your cohorts, it is fucking IMPERATIVE that you do not internalize it, or you end up perpetuating that same hardness of heart yourself. As my acquaintance illustrated, it’s a sham of illegitimate, wussy origins—why would you want to work in the service of that? When everyone’s shuffling through that dishonest foxtrot, rather than just being kind, then everyone’s sorta-right to be making the sad and sick assumption that we’re gonna dismantle or disregard or WOUND them, despite their good hearts and intentions. When people explain that others can be brusque, reticent to speak honestly, and/or plain-long unkind because they’re insecure, it sounds like a moldy self-help trash trope. Unfortunately for our collective cynicism about all things that are sincere, banal, and moralistic all at once, it’s such a moldy self-help trash trope because it’s incontrovertibly real.

This is true in less overt ways than just as applied to the inner workings of the Girl Who Would Be Boss. A friend whom I’ll call Eddie, my platonic life partner, is my de facto date to every party (the rule goes that we are allowed to bring people we’re interested in romantically, too—we’re just each other’s main friend-squeezes first and foremost). We met when I was 19. I was writing my first novel in the front wooden booth of where he tended bar, so we got to know each other pretty well. As it turned out, we also ran in concordant social packs, so we orbited each other affectionately over the course of the next few years. Eddie, the star of the show no matter where or with whom it was being staged, delighted me and whomever else in any particular cast in which he appeared—he was a font of interesting positions on literature and music, physically riveting in aspects beyond just his handsomeness (ask me about all the times I’ve seen him swing-dance acrobatically with whatever mark is lucky enough to be spun over his head in a given moment), rife with endearing, haywire anecdotes about his life, and committed to sharing authorship in the serialization of those excellent stories with each venture into the company of others.

We hung out a ton as pals and party dates throughout this first iteration of our long pairship, but we only acknowledged each other as best friends/forever-squad recently. Eddie was running late to meet me at a restaurant one night, so I posted up at a table thinking about him. Throughout all the years that I had found him to be an ace human being and been stoked on his friendship in all sorts of avenues, we had never really talked about our treu-bleu feelings as co-members of our species. I wondered if raffish, charismatic Eddie had ever felt as alone as I did. So, when he got there, I asked him.

“I have often felt like a beautiful statue,” he said. That wording is a little lunkheaded, but also kinda ideal (cf. “You’re always posing”). I knew exactly what he meant, which intensified as he went on: “I locked myself out of my apartment the other day and I just stood outside my door because I didn’t think I had anyone to call.”

“I live around the corner!” I said, dumbfounded, trotting out information he has known for years. “You could have just buzzed up!”

“Right? But I panicked—I was convinced I didn’t have any friends and that no one would want to help me,” said one of the most roundly well-liked and popular people I’ve ever met.

I told him about my longstanding eschewal of being seen as a person who needs things from others: the idea that, if I wasn’t totally self-sufficient in all moments, about EVERYTHING, then I was a blight on the happiness and good opinion of whatever person might witness me that way. If people weren’t 100 percent dazzled by my capacity for constant, harmonious social and professional capability, then of what use could I be to them, or to anyone? The worst thing in the world, I thought, was to be a burden, so I didn’t want to share any of my problems with others, no matter how small. The size of a key, I understood, was gargantuan in that sense. We laughed: Did we really think the other would say, “No, person who is my friend—stand in the rain; you’re clearly not the bastion of radness I’ve thought you were for years, good job fucking up your whole worth to me by forgetting that you left something you needed in your other pants?” and then dispose of us, preferring marble that, upon close and constant inspection, didn’t reveal a single hairline crack?

We made a pact that day to get a hold of each other when we needed anything—to let each other come crash if the situation calls for it, to pick each other up before we go out together if we feel nervous about who or what we’ll find there, to let the only fixed and immutable thing about our friendships be, instead of the immobility of our statue-selves, the commitment to being weirdo, ungraceful people living in front of each other honestly, and to love whatever that looks like. And we do! We talk on the phone, check on each other near to every day, and hook each other up when one of us is in need of something. Even when I’m at my most viciously lonesome, head-wise, it helps to just understand that, if I want, I can text or email him and he’ll reassure me that I’m not, just by telling me how he’s doing, too. Shared, our private wreckage transforms into a victorious and sweet point of emotional communion, even when our goings-on seem, on the surface, to be wholly inconsonant. Seeing him exactly as he is, with all of his context, only contributes to my affection for him. As expressed in reality, the exact situation I was afraid of—shunting my NEEDS onto someone; being typified as vulnerable—has been a mitzvah. DOYE!

A fellow Rookie staff member explained the mechanics of this brand of closeness to me on the phone last week. I was calling about work, but she knew my grandfather had died a few days prior and so offered her condolences at the end of our business. We ended up having a remarkable dialogue about grief and how to be there for your people when they’re hurting, as I was trying to be for my family, and then caught ourselves in the act of opening up to each other. “I hope this is OK,” I told her, slightly mortified that our professional conversation had mutated into a painfest of my moaning, “I! Will just miss him! So much!”

“Yes!” she said. “I have such a hard time with it, but I’m coming to terms with the fact that sharing with other people frees them up to do the same. You have to lead by example. It’s still tough, though—even now, I feel like, Did I say too much? Am I too much? Is this a bad idea?”

It wasn’t. In telling me about her own life, she made me feel really understood and cared for, although we don’t know each other all that well, and guess what? We still got our fucking work done, and done perhaps even better and with more understanding, even though we had been QUELLE EMOTIONELLE. That reassurance came at a time when I couldn’t have needed it more. I want to do that for the people I love—or even just the people I like and want to support in the world in any sense—whenever I can, and my colleague is right: Weirdly, a lot of the time, that means showing people they can trust you by treating them, first, as trustworthy. Part of being kind to other people is accepting kindness from them. Because how hollow might it seem if some person said, “You can confide in me!!” without giving you any real sense of why that could be true? It would be like me introducing myself to someone as a VERY good MLB pinch-hitter and expecting them to just believe it, without ever having seen me play. Man, talk about clumsy oversimplifications…but I’m pleased to report that these days, I’ve truly started seeing my “home team” as the “all-stars” they are because they really “know how to “home run” when they “show up at bat!!” (Punch me in the face. Punch me in the face right now.)

Vulnerability isn’t just about hairy shit like the death of a grandparent or the fear of being eminently friendless. Zealously liking things is just as scary, if not more so! A phenomenal man I’m seeing whom we’ll call Rad-xotic Fantasir occasionally points out to me that, when I’m really into playing someone a Sibylle Baier song that I love, or going off on the writer Patricia Highsmith’s well-documented love of snails, or stoked on a writing assignment, I froth over like a dishwasher that someone accidentally put bubble bath inside of, then catch myself, study the other person for approval, and unconvincingly sussurate, “It’s whatever. I don’t care. It’s not a big deal.” He laughs: “Yeah! Pretend to think this thing you love isn’t cool!”

Rad-xotic Fantasir makes me feel more soundly cared for than many other people do, and it’s not, as you’ve read, because he’s the only one who’s there for me. I just like the casual way in which he’s always showing up at the ol’ baseball’s plate for me, so to speak. Once, we were sitting on my couch and I hesitated mid-conversation as I was telling him something that seemed personal to the point of goriness. Familiar with my pride and apprehension, he leaned back and smiled. “It’s chill—I’m just going to use it to hurt you later on.”

Save for the deployment of “chill” as a qualifier, I thought that was just about the best thing I’d ever heard. (And look how, as in that sentence as when I was talking about Eddie’s statue simile, I had to distance myself from a special and heartfelt thing that meant a lot to me by blandly mocking it. Please know that is symptomatic of what we’re talking about here, and that I wish I didn’t have to do it, but I’m afraid of you.) First, it demonstrated that Rad-xotic Fantasir saw and understood that I was scared, and then it pointed out the implausibility of seeing those fears expressed—but didn’t pressure me to keep going if I didn’t feel ready or think I could. The joke wasn’t on me—he was instead showing me that he got it. I told R.F. what I was thinking about, and he listened, and now we do that all the time. What a great precedent to set for someone.