When I first entered the kingdom of the sick, I wasn’t interested in befriending my fellow denizens. Only 22, with a limited understanding of grave illness—or loss—I found the idea of a cancer support group for young adults wholly depressing, and I didn’t want to get too comfortable with the identity of the cancer patient. Unsurprisingly, a year into treatment, I was as isolated and lonely as I’d ever been in my life.
When it came to friendship, I had always prioritized quantity over quality. Attending six schools on three continents before the age of 12 meant that I was skilled at quickly forming friendships but not necessarily at sustaining them. While moving around, I maintained pen-pal correspondences with my best friend Molly in upstate New York, and my best friend Ranya in Tunisia, and my best friend Eléonore in Switzerland. But without a clear idea of when (or even if) we’d see each other again, and with all the address changes, our letters would peter out. The message I took from it was that relationships have a shelf life.
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Become a SubscriberIn college, I was a social butterfly, flitting from group to group, making fast but not necessarily deep friendships. Many of those friends disappeared when I got sick, and I felt hurt, angry, and betrayed. With time, I came to realize it wasn’t some huge failing on their part—of course the people I played beer pong with were not at my bedside when my hair was falling out. To sustain a relationship through that kind of crisis requires stronger bonds.
