Sharing

Rebecca can't share.

A few years ago I had a mega fall-out with my best friend. A proper break-up. We didn’t speak for the better part of a year and the only things I knew about her were discovered when I’d occasionally allow myself a stalk of her social media. I’d comb over details of her life, trying to work out what she was doing, whether she was actually happy or just pretending to be, and whether she missed me.

Eventually she got back in touch with me and we went for a long, strange, intermittently sorrowful summit at a horrible pub near my then house (The Rose and Crown in Kentish Town. It says that it has a garden, but it’s only a garden in a apocalyptic sense, and the vent from the deep fat fryer pipes all its air out directly into the tables. Don’t go there.')

Anyway. We sat outside in this non-garden and poured our hearts out to each other. I rather self-righteously explained all the ways that she’d screwed up. She listened, and then gave me my list. Lots of the things on said list were banal, if fair, criticisms. But towards the end she hit me with one I’d never heard before - that I was bad at sharing.

I had always thought I was good at sharing. I went to boarding school where the two currencies were things you can literally share, like Juicy Tubes and Diet Coke, and things you can metaphorically share like gossip and stories about times your mother implied that you were fat. So I had vast amounts of practice. But at some point in my life I got worse at it, and then eventually pretty bad at it.

We talk a lot about fair-weather friends, the ones who are only around in good times. But I’ve never encountered one of them. I think it’s much more tempting and much more toxic to be a bad weather friend. I like being there to support other people and honestly, I thrive on a bit of drama. From the outside this probably looked like I was a very decent friend. But in a lot of cases I wasn’t, because while I’d happily be Best Supporting Actress in someone else’s life traumas, I wouldn’t ever allow them to return the favour. In my twenties I’d hold your hair back when you vommed, make you a bed on the sofa, cook you a roast when you had a broken heart. I’d listen to you talk about your bad boyfriend, your horrible boss or your mean sister, and I’d strategise and sympathise and support. But at the end of all that you’d go home and I’d have told you absolutely nothing about me. I thrived on other people’s bad times but when it came to my own, they were hermetically sealed away.

My daughter is almost two and a half, and also not into sharing. I follow her around soft plays performatively telling her to share with other children so that parents think I’m decent, but in my soul, I get it.

It’s trendy in Instagram and TikTok parenting circle to say that children shouldn’t have to learn to share. The logic they offer is that adults don’t ever ‘have’ to share, so it’s not reasonable to expect children to. I don’t buy this. No, adults don’t have to share in the traditional sense, but as a bad sharer I know how important it is as a skill, and anyway, childhood is a different state from adulthood. Teaching children to share is about flexibility and compromise and knowing when to say yes and when to say no. It’s an early way to explore boundaries and nuance. Yes, you do have to share at soft play or at the child minders, no you don’t have to share the sandwich you’re eating for your lunch.

The other day I had a spate of commissions, and was on a couple of podcasts. I put them on Instagram and the majority of the responses were from other writers, asking how they could pitch the same publication or get on the show I’d been on. And while I respected and understood the request, I looked at the nine messages in my inbox asking for the email address of the person who commissioned me and I had the same reaction my daughter has when someone else wants to put the cups in the sink of the play kitchen. ‘No. Mine.’

Not sharing comes from a nasty place. In a work sense it comes from a place of panic within me, that there isn’t enough work to be had and that if I ‘give away’ a contact I’ll somehow be thrown over. It’s the same mentality they use to frighten people about immigration, that if you let other people ‘in’ there won’t be any jobs or resources left. In political and economic senses it’s the most deprived areas where people have least which are most resistant to the idea of immigration, and I think emotionally it’s much the same. The less you have, the more jealously you guard it, which creates this miserable tension between wanting to help people because it’s the decent thing to do, and fearing that if you do help them you might personally lose out. Earlier today a friend and fellow writer called and asked me if I was around to write, because I might be right for something she wasn’t taking on. That’s the kind of person I want to be, not the kind of psycho who shoehorns herself into every single opportunity because she’s so paranoid about losing out. Sharing is confident, assured and classy. Not sharing is petulant and childlike and panicked.

I wonder if this might also be true about the other kind of sharing, too. When life is overall good, I’m better at admitting to the sticky bits. The moment I steer the ship into choppy waters and it feels like my life is in a bad way, I don’t want to share. I don’t have the kind of vulnerability it takes to be honest about a row with a partner or a script I wrote which got turned down, or the crushing belief that I’m never quite going to be as talented as I want to be. And when work is good, I’m happy to share resources, to boost other people, to be the member of the sisterhood I actually want to be. But when it’s bad, I’m a two year old again, I want to grab it all to my chest or (as my daughter is wont to do) pick up all the plastic play fruit and hurl them against the walls so that no-one else can get them.

Since the friendship schism and reunification, and the split with my ex-husband, and a number of other things, I’ve got a bit better. I have a policy that if something bad or major happens in my life I have to tell at least two people, plus my therapist. A sort of internal whistleblower policy to protect against the culture of bonkers secrecy I managed to instill last time. I spend a lot of my time telling a two year old that sharing can actually make playing more fun, and I’m optimistic that at some point the message might actually sink in.