the feminine urge to ache

i feel happier, lighter, but my friend has stayed the same

mixed feelings’ multi-voiced advice column features a mental health expert or writer who responds to your most pressing existential conundrums. Use our anonymous form to be considered for a future newsletter. This week, writer

Bel Hawkins

answers: "What do I do when my friend's mental health is becoming a burden on mine?”

Content warning: The below write-in and response briefly discuss details of disordered eating, and related behaviors and experiences.

art by Logan Tsugita

DEAR MIXED FEELINGS,

I've reached a crossroads with a long time friend. When we first met 7 years ago, we were both stressed college students. I was dealing with bouts of depression and a string of toxic and emotionally abusive relationships, while she dealt with severe self-esteem issues and anorexia. We both started going to therapy and dedicating time to work on ourselves.

These days I feel lighter, happier, and more at ease knowing that I have the right tools to deal with anything that comes my way. My friend, on the other hand, remained the same. She has been unable to work past any of her issues, and is in the same state of mental health she was in when we first met. I'm extremely sympathetic — I understand how difficult it can be to heal, especially with how inaccessible mental resources can be.

Time after time, I offered her my ear and shoulder to cry on…but these days, I've been having a difficult time doing what I usually do for her, because every time I offer sympathy or advice (I do my best to avoid engaging in toxic positivity), she always has a "but" and can't accept any compliments or the possibility that things can get better. I'm so sad for her that she feels this way, and can understand the depths of hopelessness, but her outlook is beginning to dampen my own, and sometimes I am so frustrated because it feels like she's not doing any work at all when I know that's not true.

I've reached a point now where I surround myself with friends and people that make my life better…but when it comes to this friendship, I feel like I am the only one doing the supporting because she is unable to support me in any way due to her mental health. I can understand that, but I'm also not sure if this friendship is doing any good to me anymore, and I feel like a bad friend thinking that. Is it bad of me to want to distance myself from her because I'm in a better place in my life and she isn't, and that I am beginning to feel burdened by her mental health? — ExhaustedFriend, she/they

Image: Midsommar

Bel Hawkins is a freelance writer and creative based in Lisbon. She’s a regular contributor to

shit you should care about

, and their collaborative book, Make It Make Sense, is published this September. 

Dear Exhausted Friend,

When someone close to me was diagnosed with a mental illness as a teenager, the doctor said, “The more you try and understand it, the less you will.” This was the early 2000s but almost two decades later, it’s something I’ve never forgotten. 

After their diagnosis, I wanted to really be there for this person, but it was like calling out to someone underwater and losing my breath from trying. I’d sit on their bed looking out at a red maple tree in their parents’ garden where a plastic bag had gotten caught in the branches and rustled uncomfortably, relentlessly. We’d watch old seasons of Skins on repeat, the seasons slowly shift, ourselves get older and change but not enough to get better. In the worst moments, we’d draw the curtains closed in the middle of the day when all they felt like they could do was sleep.

It’s the most powerless feeling, watching someone else’s ache. And if we’re not careful, it sneaks up, swallows us, and becomes our own. 

Watching someone suffer from mental illness is one of the most fraught, inexplicable things I’ve ever experienced. It pushes you up against the reality that some people’s journey through life is harder than others, and despite this, somehow, you still deserve your own happiness. You’re holding two opposing feelings in your hands and realizing they have to co-exist.

when you can no longer hold someone else’s ache

“We have limited emotional capacity as humans,” says Therapy in the City’s Dr. Nikki Zamkoff. “I like to say that we can't pour from an empty cup. When we have stress in our lives, struggle with mental health, or people are ‘draining our cup,’ we have to start paying attention. We have to make sure there's always enough tea left to care for ourselves.”

Conceptually, this resonates, but in reality, she acknowledges it’s not an easy boundary to put in place. “If it feels like supporting a friend is not leaving you with enough emotional capacity to support yourself, you need to reconsider the relationship,” Dr. Nikki adds. “I say if you’re not losing friends, it’s possible you’re not growing.” 

the feminine urge to ache

In her book Fight Like A Girl, Australian writer Clementine Ford connects the pressure on women to be thinner with subconsciously wanting to take up less space in the room so they can be blamed for fewer things. Cue: Ugh, argh, fml. It makes sense, then, that it’s easy to starve ourselves of joy when our friends are literally starving themselves.

It seems to be such an inherently feminine urge: to bend or mould ourselves to fit the needs of others, and lose what we need along the way. Recently, a friend told me that during her university years, her all-girl apartment vowed to never keep carbs in the house because one of them struggled with an eating disorder. At dinner time (after an hour at the gym), they’d sit around the kitchen bench sharing a couple of lettuce leaves and a sundried tomato before going to bed. “I’ve never been so gaunt in my life,” my friend tells me over a plate of risotto one night. She is not the only female friend who has told me a story like this. 

So much is mythologized about female friendships — and rightly so, because they contain a kind of healing quality unlike anything I’ve ever experienced elsewhere. They’ve picked me up off my bedroom floor, when I’ve been unable to move. They’ve come away with me over Christmas because they know I find the holiday difficult. They’ve stood over me with cups of coffee or chardonnay until I type the last painstaking word into a project the night it’s due. Female friendships are how I know about devotion.

But they can have a destructive effect, too. And we don’t like to talk about that so much because to admit this feels like it’s confirming some kind of Men’s Rights Activist group or incel propaganda. It’s not. Human relationships are complicated. Being a woman in a world that wants you to be small and compliant? Even more so.  

Of course, these dynamics exist in all types of relationships, regardless of gender. Close friendships, especially in the formative times in our life, can be as wild and reckless as falling in love. The connection is so new and intoxicating that we become codependent. We’re consumed with having someone alongside us, forming their life and themself at the exact same time as we are and going through the exact same things, which draws us into an orbit that’s hard to leave willingly.

So how do we love our friends when they’re unable to fully love themselves?

the ache goes when we let it

I had this breakthrough moment recently with my own therapist (hate to center myself in your turmoil, but it’s relevant, I promise). I was telling her how devastated I was by some things my mentally unwell friend had recently said about me, in disbelief that I could have devoted so much time to them, and yet be treated like that. To which my therapist said, “But someone who loves themselves enough wouldn’t be so hurt by this. That’s where your energy needs to go. Loving them, but loving you more.”

It cracked something open inside of me.

I had to make peace with my own luck, my life and my own self. Dr. Nikki calls this a kind of “survivor’s guilt,” but encourages letting yourself feel these complex emotions while also practicing a lot of self-love. It’s taken me all thirty-two years of my life to start to truly understand what that means: to give yourself the kind of care, romance, nourishment and attention that you yearn for, and not take on the responsibility for someone else’s in the process. 

You sound like you love yourself enough to know your limits, but you’re afraid the time has finally come to express them. But what happens when you do is that your world grows bigger. It becomes clearer what you’re not responsible for. 

if the ache’s not yours, it’s not yours to keep

Occasionally, an image of this person I love will come up on my feed, the way the algo loves to serve you memories it knows you’re not ready for. My mind drifts back to that red tree outside their window, and all the hours we spent watching it wane and come into bloom. The plastic bag is probably still there, too, tangled in its branches and still making that annoying rustling sound, reminding anyone nearby of all the things they wish would disappear and all the things they can’t control. 

And so back to you. Even though I think you know what you need to do, it doesn’t mean it’s easy. 

The time will come (as soon as you can handle) when you put your phone face down on the table between you both, touch their hands or look them in the eyes and tell them that you need to take some time for yourself. You can use lines like ‘I’m worried about you and I want you to get a support system that can really help you,’ and ‘I love you, which is why I’m telling you this,’ and ‘I need a bit of space to look after myself.’ 

You’ll avoid getting into the depths of how they’ve hurt you, or spending hours rehashing everything that’s happened over the years, or how sorry you are about everything they’ve been through. The conversation will feel like a necessary shutter of the old — and the opening of the new — you. You’ll close the door, feel empty for a little while, and then a whole lot lighter.

“It's important to be honest — to a degree.” says Dr. Nikki. “Hopefully, a friend will understand when you tell them that you wish you could be there for them, but you don't have enough tea left in your cup.”

And so it goes like this: Love someone until it touches the walls. Love yourself until your body’s all filled up. And then go out to the world and get to work trying to love it back, in all its messy uncertainty. Because that’s where joy lies. That’s the kind of life you shouldn’t rob yourself of just because others are still trying to feel it.