On Loyalty
From Blind Spots: A Riches to Rags Story — Chapter X
“You get some truly unique perspective as the condemned heretic, the flame-broiled main course at the auto-da-fé, because you get a direct view into everyone's soul. As they say, the best thing about the worst time in your life is that you get to see the true colors of everyone around you.
The first thing I learned is that loyalty is rare.
I had this completely wrong. I assumed that most people are loyal and you just have to keep an eye out for the disloyal ones and avoid them. In reality, it's the opposite. The reason why is that it requires tremendous courage to run towards a man in his hour of need, especially when he is being sautéed in public, and to take a stand and support him. Loyal friends are worth more than money, and anyone who says otherwise doesn't have either of the two.
When your life is proceeding splendiferously and everything is up-and-to-the-right, trust me, everyone wants to be your friend. You gotta stumble. There is no other way of knowing who in your life is loyal. Shifts in fortune, wrote Cicero, are what test the reliability of friends. This is why those first few weeks after getting arrested, defenestrated, and guillotined were in many ways worth the price of admission. I learned that love conquers all, and that humans will break any and all rules when it comes to someone they care deeply about. People who love you aren't worried about the legal, the societal, or the moral, because they're busy riding in on war elephants. It's beautiful to watch.
Samuel Johnson wrote that the true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. At that moment, I wasn't worth a damn thing to anyone, just a radioactive piece of toxic waste. That's when you see both what true loyalty looks like and how rare it is, because the majority of people will scoot away and distance themselves; ew, I don't want to get any of this on me.
The issue is that once the skies clear up, and they always do, these same people will scoot back towards you. A wise man already invented a term for these people. They are called "fair-weather friends," and they are about as useful as tits on a boar.
All I can say is that life is fair in this arena. If you never stand by friends in hard times, guess who is going to be there for you when you need it? Nobody. People who go through a shitstorm always remember who was there at the bottom, and just as vividly, they remember who wasn't there. "In the end," wrote MLK Jr., "we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." Disloyalty is a stinky cologne, dear reader, the stench of a skunked beer that has gone permanently flat. It was another painful positive as I realized I'd been watering a lot of dead plants, non-reciprocal relationships that were draining time and energy.
A lot of the pain I had been feeling came from a familiar foe: miscalibrated expectations. Once the fog of war lifted, emotion was removed and the rose-tinted Persols lay smashed on the floor, people did exactly what I should've expected them to. I was the one who was wrong, not them. I had been wildly irrational with my expectations. Stop me if you've heard this one before:
(Happiness = Reality / Expectations)
This is why it could never happen to me is so idiotic. People are going to treat people the way that they treat people. They have track records, they leave breadcrumbs, and if you want to know if they will stand by you in tough times, take a hard look at whether they stood by other friends during tough times. You will quickly realize you are not special. They did nothing wrong. I was wrong because my expectations were wrong. When I look back at these stupefyingly puerile notions I had of how friendship is supposed to work, I can’t even figure out which Disney cartoon I got them from. But this heart-rending process was how I learned to stop taking shit so personally, and it was how I finally removed the phrase it could never happen to me from my vocabulary. I replaced it with if it has happened to anyone in the history of humanity, then it could happen to you. So far, so good.
Putting all of this together changed the way I think about time. You have a finite amount of hours in each day. Call it eight for sleep, ten for work and two for yourself. That leaves four hours each day to be split between your partner, your family, and your friends. This in itself should be a wakeup call that you are spreading yourself too thin and not dedicating time to those friends who deserve it most.”
Always dance with the one who brung ya,
GB
