Trauma causes much more than tachycardia and compulsive behavior. An anxious child has a hard time making or keeping friends. Add to this palatable mix the father’s government job that takes the child to a new school every 3 years. Let me first shatter your belief that children are innocent and all the good in the world. There is no one crueler than children (with the exception of Trump and Modi maybe) who can cause the harm they can.
I was bullied whenever possible. The bullying usually hit very close home, for once in 1st grade a girl made me eat the whole of my tiffin (overstuffed by Mumma to help me make friends) till I puked and then decided to not play with me for I stunk.
So I never had friends, till puberty gifted us hormones and boys started being interested in me in whatever Kabir Singh way we taught them. In short, I never understood how the whole friendship game worked, and when I looked for a rule book, there wasn’t one. So when I did make friends, I thought of them functionally. You study with them to save time and labor, they split rent with you, came to rescue you when you are stuck on a bad date, and it is safer to hang in a pack; an understanding very fitting for my then Anthropology syllabus.
It was when H picked up fights with me for not caring to have meals WITH her at night, when she made me go with her to pick pillow covers for OUR living room and got pet fish were to name and talk to, that I started feeling the anxiety of being in an unknown city in the middle of the night with people speaking a language I do not understand. I was basically incapable of caring for a person in that way and magnitude if they were not bound to me by blood. So abandonment-related panic and mental distancing were common elements in my initial friendships.
Later, I would grow into a friendship with calmer and untainted by indifference. In such spaces, it becomes easy to be focused solely on your romantic partner, which I hope I don’t have to spell out is unwieldy for an already delicate relationship. I was never taught that trust was as important for your well-being as is for the relationship. It was only last year that I realized what a bad friend I had been, not by intention but by design. I had to course-correct, I was a person who never answered calls, never met, dropped a friendship at the border of the city I exited, and waited for them to make mistakes so I could say AHaa! knew it! I am outta here!
When I decided to course-correct, I found out that I had been lucky, for, through my indifference, unavailability, and sometimes even anger, some people had stuck through. For the first time, I finally told them about PTSD, about the issues at home at the cost of feeling buck naked in front of people with a pail of acid in their hands. And they surprised me, held my hand to support me instead of weighing me down. P kept my sanity when I was lost, H became the person I called when I panicked publicly, D would pull me out of triggered imagery while I cried under a blanket, and S would keep having my back, over and over. The fights became easier to live through. Now my heart does not directly panic at a fight, heating up the tears for the upcoming abandonment. Now I am able to reach out, apologies, communicate and stand my ground if I am wronged. I now rely on them as much as I am relied on. And now I am able to do normal friendship things more from my desire to do it than from an obligation for a herd. I take friend trips, didn’t lie to be nice, answer phone calls, plan bi-monthly conference video calls and watch bad movies on Netflix party.
Becoming a better friend is still WIP, but I have moved from scouting locations and materials that fit the budget to picking a carpet and pillows for OUR hall that go with our mood.