Who are your lifelines?

I don’t know about you but post-Covid, I find myself losing friends. People in their fifties and sixties, and sometimes even in their forties, are suddenly gone. The causes are sudden and linked to the heart: aneurysms and clots are the words that get repeated. Unknown and unseen stresses are alluded to. It is like the character in the film “Dil Dhadakne Do” who takes anxiety medication without even telling his wife. 

My realisation and this is echoed by the brilliant Roger Rosenblatt in a New York Times article on ageing is that everyone is in pain. We often underestimate how much a loved one is struggling because they smile and stay busy – and to see an example of this, just look in the mirror. 

Talking about feelings is hard and for some reason, has become taboo in today’s world, so we hide behind jokes, work and silence. When life hurts us, we distract, disassociate, self-medicate, and intoxicate ourselves, when what we really need is connection. 

Who are the people you call in a crisis? Not the “car broke down on the highway” type of crisis although that’s bad enough. If something truly awful happened — like your marriage falling apart, or your loved one contracting a life-threatening illness — who would you dial first? Not your kids, because you’ll want to protect them from this news. Not your parents either. They are the crisis. Most of us call our spouses or siblings, but this, I’ve discovered, is not enough. Some of us turn to friends—or do we? The question is whether you let others into your messy life or whether you close the door and keep up a façade. Is being “strong” helping us or isolating us?

Recently, a childhood friend had a heart attack. This was a guy who once climbed a guava tree to retrieve a cricket ball and then threw it into the thorns to spite the bowler. We grew up laughing together — and now we were looking at him on Zoom, post-surgery, with three stents and a newfound appreciation for psyllium husk. The eight of us neighbourhood brats in that Zoom call were shaken. If it happened to Naren, could this happen to us? We were still young, weren’t we? We still played imaginary guitar to loud rock music. 

That fateful Zoom call led to something beautiful — a WhatsApp group called Lifelines. Eight of us across time zones, trying to be each other’s safety net. We had four rules: no judgment, no filters, total honesty, and absolute confidentiality. It was basically the opposite of our lives on LinkedIn or Instagram. It worked. For a while. We shared our vulnerabilities. We cried. We reminisced about gully cricket and our kids growing up. But geography, it turns out, cannot be breached. Emotional support works better if you live in the same time zone. We couldn’t send soup when someone had the flu. We couldn’t show up with wine (or chai) when someone had a bad day. Slowly, our monthly Zooms turned into the digital equivalent of “let’s catch up soon” — i.e., never.

These days, many of us pay therapists just to hear someone say “That does sound hard.” And while it may be helpful, it is not the same thing as feeling connected (notice I am not saying ‘loved’ because connection is enough) in the deep and wacky way that we experience from family and close friends. 

After trying out a virtual web of community with my global friends, I have come to believe that you need to have local lifelines – within your city and if possible, within your neighbourhood. People you can drop in and have chai with, even if you need to schedule it first via text.  People you trust and cultivate, that you would like to grow old with. People who will help you when the chips are down, people you can call in a crisis and don’t have to have your game face on. These are not Insta followers or LinkedIn connections, but actual humans who can hold your hand.

The weird thing is that humankind evolved this way. We all used to be this way when we lived in the same village over generations. It is only in the last few decades that all of us have left the land that we were born in and moved across cities, countries, and continents. While this global migration has enriched us enormously, it has also exacted a cost and that is loneliness, something that the US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy has been talking about. We had tons of phone contacts but very few people we can actually call.

The good news is that you can still build a gang of friends. It takes time and effort but the reward, in my opinion, is a community that can bail you out when life throws a monkey-wrench. 

How to build it? Well, stay tuned for my next column. (Spoiler alert: samosas are involved.)