FRIENDSHIP - I LIKE YOU JUST THE WAY YOU ARE

Friendship and Love are based on Understanding and Acceptance...on someone telling you I LIKE YOU JUST THE WAY YOU ARE.

Sometimes you find exactly what you need, just when you need it most. For me as a young girl it was a book I found. I have no idea why I picked it up. I do know why I kept it for many years after. 

The book which affected me so profoundly had the odd title, "My Friend says it's Bulletproof". It was by a novelist named Penelope Mortimer. It was about a tough subject which wasn't talked about much then, Breast Cancer.

The books main character is a 27 year old woman who discovers she has Breast Cancer. The book written in 1967, is apparently an overlooked early Feminist book. I didn't know that till just a minute ago. If I remember correctly, the title comes from a couple of young boys ogling a beautiful, expensive car.

What is going on the book, in those early days and treatments of what later became a Breast Cancer epidemic, is the trauma and convolution you feel when someone tells you that you have Cancer.*

While, many people have operation scars of some sort, the loss of a Breast is one that causes cataclysmic emotional distress. Thinking about dying from this kind of Cancer might actually be secondary to being convinced no one will ever look at you in a normal way again, or care for you. 

The most important and uplifting lifesaver is her new boyfriend's acceptance shown by his telling her that, "I like you just the way you are". This declaration saves her.

I kept the book around for years, because I knew instinctively that this simple wonderful statement of understanding and acceptance was one of the most important things anyone could ever say to another person. In 1977,  Billy Joel sang a wonderful song with the same title.

Someone once said, Your friends you can count on one hand and usually on one finger. How right he was.

How happy we are, when we know that someone out there understands us. Even more wonderful is that they understanding us, and miraculously, accept us as we are. Wonderful to hear, even better to recognize we have a real friend, at last.





*See also my essay entitled: BC (BEFORE CANCER) and AC (AFTER CANCER).
AND
the June 15th, 2013 essay: ACCEPTANCE: I LIKE YOU JUST THE WAY YOU ARE