When I read your work, I sometimes find a lot that’s helpful to me, whether it’s psychological support, a way out of a difficult situation, or an explanation for other people’s actions. I’m curious: do you also provide psychological support to your friends in real life? Or is it just the “easier on paper than in real life” effect?
I'm glad you find the writing helpful sometimes! That's awesome.
As for me personally, I would say with my friends, I generally try to be supportive to them and they are to me. I wouldn't want to be their psychologist and vice versa (though I do have quite a lot of friends who are psychologists/therapists/social workers, I think that just happens when you end up as someone who likes to listen + needs a friend who likes to redirect in return lmao, otherwise you end up in a lot of very one-sided friendships where you're just The Listener and sometimes The Pep-Talker lmao, which was a lot of my younger years).
So I wouldn't say I provide like, "psychological support" to my friends so much as just general support - I'm just a friend to them. And of course that's harder, because in real life that means hearing about the suffering my friends are going through, and being willing to sit with them through some really tragic or heartbreaking events, whether that's domestic violence, or miscarriages, newly acquired chronic illnesses, or a cancer diagnosis, losing their family members, or whatever it might be.
Helping out a character is never going to hurt or feel the same way as being there for a real person who you care for, who is going through something really hard. They're just - imho - not comparable.
But it's not that the helping in and of itself is like 'geez it's tough to know what to do.' The reality is there's very rarely a right thing to say in hard situations and it's often a lot easier to just say 'what would help you right now in this moment?' or even just...sit there and listen and be willing to try not to fix their issues (which many people are unable to do, which sucks, because many people Going Through It are not actually looking for solutions some of the time).
The 'what to do part' - knowing what to do is easy, actually doing it is harder. That's why so many people - when their friends are going through a tough time - have the urge to minimise, to redirect, to change the subject, to be positive in a toxic way, to avoid, to fix, and to not just sit there and be willing to witness and contain someone else's pain. That takes practice, I think, with holding your own powerlessness in the face of someone else's struggle. The challenge with friendships is learning how to centre a friend's needs above your own desire to avoid discomfort, and sometimes it's also learning how to open up in turn.
But that is what it means to be friends with someone, for me. Someone else might say that's psychological support but for me that's just what being emotionally supportive to a friend is. If I'm willing to have good times with them, then I have to be willing to see through the hard as well. You can't have one without the other.
But as a result of that, I'm also fairly careful of who I let myself get close to, especially if I sense that the person is starting to use me as an emotional dumping ground (in that sense, I relate a lot to Kadek's wariness/guardedness with new people!), because folks who have never had a friend like that before can very quickly just need you for a function, instead of who you are as a person, and that's a fast-track to burnout. It needs to go both ways.
Anyway TL;DR being supportive to friends is different and harder than writing characters who need support, but I also really enjoy doing it, because that's what friendship is to me. I have never been the "small talk" fair-weather friend, I am the person who sits with someone for 3 hours making them tea and bringing snacks, while they talk about difficult stuff, or I talk about difficult stuff, and then we both nerd out about something, before going back into more stuff. And I like that.
