At My Best Friend's House

Witnessing the tenderness absent in my own life.

I would like to tell you some things about my best friend. Her crockery is all vintage or handmade, and nothing is saved for best. She spreads a sunny yellow tablecloth on an outside table and there is always a jug of water for the table. She has a spare hour in the evening and makes bread. There are always flowers on the coffee table, wild weeds and garden cuttings, always in fresh water. Two kinds of juices are delivered in the morning. There are photos of friends and notes from nephews tucked inside the frames of oil paintings. 

She is someone who will pop into a nice shop for a look around and get herself a good handwash. She is someone who will throw herself together a small side salad with dinner, chopping radishes and using good olive oil and salt. She is someone who makes the bed with cushions every morning. She is someone who will go for an evening run to give herself the exercise she’d promised herself. She is someone who lights the candles, even before it’s fully dark, because she can’t wait.

Her house is one of my happy places. When I am there it feels like an embrace, all the beautiful things carefully placed on their shelves, the shafts of sunlight in the kitchen as the kettle steams on the hob, sitting on the tiny patio that is always warm and aromatic with lavender. When I am not there it stays with me; I enjoy sinking back into the memories of being there and I look forward to the next time I will be. It is a place where I always feel wholly contented, and it is a place I always leave feeling inspired.

I thought this was because it’s always nice to have a relaxing weekend with your friend and it’s nice to have a change of scene; I thought it was because my friend is a good host, and that also we’ve reached the level of intimacy where one of us can go for a nap while the other reads a book so there is a refreshment you don’t usually get from a long weekend of socialising. But actually, I don’t think this is a measure of what happens to me on these visits, but what happens around me.

What happens on these visits is that I become a witness to tenderness. I watch like a novice as the high priestess arranges the altars and rituals of care, of beauty, of treating oneself like you’re worth something. I hadn’t expected to use the term “self-care” in this post. I didn’t think this was about self-care, didn’t equate what I was observing as self-care - but of course that’s what it is. It is self-care that I can actually fully understand, that I can get underneath. It is not self-care as capitalist performance, nor self-care as a self-conscious attempt; it was self-care as a way of being. A natural, engrained way of living that transcended “self-care” - it was just caring for herself in small, specific, beautiful ways, all the time.

I am a person who often feels that cutting a slice of bread in half to make myself a sandwich is a waste of time. I am a person who uses supermarket hand cream only as a treat, a person who only bothers with proper make up remover when I’m sleeping on someone else’s pillow cases. I am a person who bought plain white sensible crockery I didn’t like. I am a person who forgets to change the flower water. I am a person who operates around a heaped duvet. I am a person who will always walk away from an opportunity to treat myself. I am a person who does not treat herself with tenderness.

When I say I leave feeling inspired, it is not that I necessarily feel filled up, but that I see possibility. I feel inspired to live better, to treat myself better. I feel inspired because all those things I think will take so much effort I have now watched be so easy. I feel inspired because suddenly it is in reach. This is not to say that my friend is the wellness guru that no one knows about; she has her own uncertainties, of course, her own unknowings. But she knows how to do tenderness and care so well that I doubt she knows she knows.

Really, this is how I’ve always known I wanted to live, but I’ve never known how to get there. I always wanted to be a person with a stache of table linens, a person with art on the walls, a person who chose flowers to go in the pot I’d picked up at the vintage market. I have always wanted to be a person who took care, took the tiny sliver of extra time to make things lovely. 

In my mid-twenties I started a blog about such a life, in the hopes that having to write about it would make me actually do it; but instead that blog turned into something I could talk about with more ease (work). I bought a house because I thought that was what it would take to have that life, but instead I overthought myself to paralysis on everything from paint colour to bedding plants to wall art. And I suppose in the end, slowly slowly, I gave up trying. I gave up caring. 

As they say, if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. It wasn’t until I saw this kind of caring tenderness towards herself, that I realised quite how much I had stopped caring. But I also realised that I could start. I could start chopping some vegetables for my lunch because I care enough about what I put in my body. I could start making a posey from garden flowers. I could stop waiting for a special occasion. I could stop walking away from myself. I could let myself have, do, be something that I love. I could be tender. Tender, tender, tender.