The Cost of Being Good Company

There is a moment at some social gatherings when I realize I am no longer participating in the evening.

I am managing it.

I am watching my face. Making sure I appear interested. Softening whatever I say so that nobody hears more sadness than they were prepared to receive. Looking for the moment when a joke might relieve the tension.

Someone has invited me because they care.

They have offered a meal, a trip, a different view or a room full of people who want me there. I know what the invitation means. They do not want me to be alone. They hope that company might interrupt whatever has been happening inside my head.

Often, they are right.

So I smile.

I ask questions. I participate. I make people laugh. I reassure everyone, without saying so directly, that inviting me was a good idea.

Then I go home exhausted.

Not because the people were unkind.

Because pretending to be alright is expensive.

Recently, I told somebody I did not feel social.

They heard something more serious. Perhaps I was withdrawing. Perhaps my mental health was getting worse. Perhaps I was surrendering to sadness when what I really needed was to get out and enjoy myself.

That was not what I meant.

I meant that I did not have enough energy to become the version of myself I know how to be around other people.

There is a difference.

I have spent most of my life learning how to be good company.

I can read a room quickly. I know when somebody feels awkward, when a conversation is beginning to die and when humour might give everyone permission to breathe.

I learned early that being funny could change the temperature of a room.

If people were laughing, they were less likely to be angry.

If I kept them interested, they were less likely to leave.

If everybody was enjoying themselves, perhaps nobody would notice what I needed.

Eventually, that stopped feeling like a strategy.

It became a personality.

Priesthood made the skill useful.

A priest enters rooms at strange and difficult moments: hospital rooms, funeral homes, family gatherings after somebody has died, church halls where two people are furious with one another but still expect the minister to say grace.

People look at the priest to discover what sort of moment they are having.

Is this terrible?

Is it survivable?

Are we allowed to laugh?

Is God still here?

You learn to read the room because the room is reading you.

Crisis work required many of the same instincts. People did not need my anxiety added to theirs. They needed someone who could remain steady, listen carefully and help them find the next thing that had to happen.

Sometimes being good company was not pretending.

It was service.

Sometimes it still is.

I genuinely like people. I enjoy hearing their stories. I love making somebody laugh, especially when the laughter arrives somewhere it probably should not.

Some of the most honest moments of my life have involved people laughing in hospitals, funeral homes and treatment centres because respectable behaviour had stopped being useful.

The laughter was real.

So was the care.

The funny person is me. The storyteller is me. The person who notices when somebody is standing alone is me.

That is simply not all of me.

The problem began when being good company stopped being something I could offer and became something I believed I owed.

If I remained interested in everyone else, nobody would ask questions I could not answer.

If I kept the conversation moving, there would be no silence in which the truth might enter.

If everybody enjoyed having me around, perhaps nobody would decide that I had become too difficult to love.

That is the fear beneath much of my sociability.

Not that I dislike people.

That they may stop liking me once I am no longer able to make the room easier for them.

The more unwell I became, the more energy it took to appear well. I could arrive exhausted, make everybody laugh and leave them believing I was doing much better.

Then I would have nothing left.

No conversation. No patience. No ability to answer another message or explain why an enjoyable evening had cost so much.

And it may have been enjoyable.

That is the difficult part to explain.

Something can be good and still cost more than I have.

I can be grateful for an invitation and relieved when I am allowed to decline it.

I can love the people at the table and still not have the capacity to sit with them.

I can be lonely and still need to be alone.

These are not contradictions.

They are limits.

But limits can be difficult for loving people to accept.

When I say I do not feel social, the first invitation sometimes becomes a second request.

Are you sure?

It will be good for you.

You may feel better once you get there.

Often this is said with love. The person remembers times when I resisted an invitation, eventually went and was grateful that somebody had persisted.

Those times are real.

There have also been evenings when I went because saying no required more energy than attending.

I smiled. I participated. I thanked everyone.

Then I paid for it privately.

That does not make the invitation cruel.

It means love and capacity do not always agree.

I have been on the other side of this too.

I have encouraged people to get out, come along and stop isolating. I have believed my invitation was obviously good for them because I knew how much I cared.

Sometimes I was right.

Sometimes I made their no about my need to feel helpful.

Care can become pressure without anyone intending harm.

That is why I am trying to hear the first answer more carefully, including my own.

The Gospels repeatedly show Jesus leaving crowds.

People still wanted him. Some genuinely needed him. There were more bodies to heal, more questions to answer and more expectations waiting when he returned.

He left anyway.

He went somewhere quiet and prayed.

Even Jesus did not treat constant availability as faithfulness.

I am trying to learn the same lesson before exhaustion makes the decision for me.

The cost of pretending is not only exhaustion.

It is that people form a relationship with the performance.

They come to expect the stories, the jokes, the energy and the reassurance. When those things disappear, they may believe the person has disappeared too.

I have not.

I may simply have stopped working so hard to make my presence comfortable for everyone else.

I do not want to stop being funny.

God knows solemnity has done enough damage in my life.

I still want the pub, the football, the family table and the unexpected conversation with a stranger. I want to laugh and be good company.

I just do not want love to depend upon it.

Sometimes I will come.

I will tell the story, make the joke and mean every moment of the laughter.

Sometimes I will say that I do not feel social.

I may not need another invitation or a reminder that company could be good for me. I may simply need the people who love me to believe that I understand what the evening will cost.

The table will continue without me.

The conversation will find its way through the silence.

Someone else may even have to make the joke.

I am trying to trust that the people who love me will still recognize me when I return without a performance prepared.

And that if I do not come tonight, I have not disappeared.

I am just tired.

Giff on the Way Home.