The Battle Buddy

Editor’s note: Ladies, we need friends! We need people who have our back, hear us, know us, support us, and let us do and be the same for them. Does that feel impossible? It’s not! Laura Tremaine has a great new book about making, keeping, letting go of friends, and how to find the people we need — our Life Council. It’s not as hard as we make it. Enjoy this excerpt.

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The word battle might be a little dramatic, but I’m not taking the sentiment lightly. The Battle Buddy is some- one who has a shared difficult experience, one you soldiered through together. It might be a personal journey — going through cancer treatments at the same time, for example — or it might be an adventure you were on together, such as being a part of the same rigorous degree program.

Having a buddy while you go through something hard is what makes the battle bearable. Like the Business Bestie, they understand something that likely no one else in your life does. The downside to having a Battle Buddy is, of course, that you had to go through the difficult thing at all.

The duration of the experience you share may vary. You may consider a coworker in a toxic work environment to be a form of a Battle Buddy, and that friendship may go on daily for years. Or, your version of a Battle Buddy might be someone who shares a special bond with you, even though the difficult event only lasted a single afternoon.

No matter your version of the “battle,” the bond with a Battle Buddy is impossible to overstate. You might not share much in common beyond the hard thing that brought you together in the first place. Nor can you easily put into words what it feels like to have a witness to a traumatic period. Having a Battle Buddy brings relief and gratitude, anger, and sadness.

The Battle Buddy fulfills a very specific role on your Life Council. While many of your friends or mentors will be able to give solid advice or be a listening ear, only the Battle Buddy can relate to the specific struggle you share. You might turn to your Battle Buddy for a long time after the metaphorical war has ended as someone who understands the residual effects that you’re living through or who can see how far you’ve come.

• Growth is even better with a witness.

As we grow and evolve into better versions of ourselves, it is satisfying to have others notice, especially those who were by our side on those rocky roads. My Battle Buddy Amber has been my witness.

The first time I saw her, Amber was standing behind a podium in a Nashville ballroom, addressing several hundred women at a blog conference. She had a stylish pixie cut and a deep Southern drawl. I thought she was so pretty. And though I can see how Amber’s friendliness might be described as approachable, I was immediately intimidated. Amber has command of herself; she has a presence. It was a time in my life when I felt lonely and small, so her confidence made me feel unworthy.

I didn’t end up meeting Amber at the conference where I saw her speak, but that first impression stayed with me. We weren’t formally introduced until the next year, when we wandered the halls of the same Nashville hotel at the same conference, and that time, both of us were pushing strollers with new babies.

Amber had been blogging longer than I had, and we approached the task of sharing ourselves on the internet from very different angles. She’s a natural writer — her words seem to flow out of her as easily as her long arms and legs move with grace. She treated her work like the poetry it is, deciding to write and write and trusting that those who were meant to read it would find their way onto her path. I treated blogging more like a video game. I thought if you knew the right tricks and codes and tunnels, you’d eventually stumble upon a huge audience behind some secret wall. I was trying to game the algorithm before I even knew what that word meant. Amber had four little boys at home in Arkansas and a wild past. I had two babies in California where I was making up for lost time as a Goody Two-shoes. But there was a friendship spark right away.

Amber and I had dozens of friends in common when we met. Blogging friends, of course, but our worlds overlapped in other ways, too. We had mutual friends from college and summer camp and old churches. It felt as though, if we hadn’t met at that blogging conference, we would have met some other way eventually.

After a few years of our friendship growing deeper and deeper online and offline, Amber and I were both invited on two different trips that cemented our relationship into the friendship hall of fame. The first was to Israel with a large group of esteemed and established writers among whom, frankly, I’m not sure I belonged. During our eight days in the Middle East, we toured historic biblical sites and various areas of war-torn Palestine. Our group was never in any direct danger on the trip, but it was an eye-opening experience both spiritually and politically.

I wanted to go to the Holy Land because I believe that God can speak to us through place. In my world, God had been silent for a while, so meeting him near Jerusalem felt like my best bet. I desperately wanted to hear answers to my long-standing prayers. I wanted something magical to happen that would make everything about my faith crisis make sense. While this trip was meant to be an educational one centered on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I was hoping for a personal spiritual nudge on the side.

Amber, too, was in a time of spiritual desperation, and together we were angsty, confused, and conflicted throughout our stay, often locking eyes across the room communicating our questions and disquiet. On one particularly long day, during the bus ride from one site to another, I started to have a full-blown panic attack. I’ve struggled with a lifetime of anxiety, and panic attacks are not uncommon for me, but this was an inopportune moment. We were on a full, enclosed bus, bumping along a road with the ceaseless drone of an educator coming over the speakers. I couldn’t find quiet. I couldn’t slow my breathing. My heart raced, and I stopped taking in air. If you’ve ever experienced or witnessed someone legitimately panicking, you know the crazed (or sometimes dazed) look that comes into their eyes.

As Israel’s landscape raced by, the fatigue, overwhelm, and constant stimulation of the trip hit me all at once, and I thought I was going to come out of my skin there on the faux- velvet bus bench. Someone near me realized I was struggling and reached into her bag for the only helpful thing she could find, which turned out to be an orange essential oil. She passed it to Amber, who rubbed the oil generously on my wrist and instructed me to inhale deeply. When the attack eventually subsided, I looked across the aisle at Amber, who was staring back with a worried expression. She started to break into a loving, knowing smile, and something about her face meeting mine broke the spell. I went from panic to hysterical laughter, which she joined in a moment later. We cackled maniacally on that bus until we finally grew quiet together.

The year after we traveled to Israel, Amber and I were both invited on a trip to Haiti as guests of an organization we respected. This was a shorter trip, lasting less than a week, and I said yes because I thought it was important to use the platform I was building online to highlight good work being done around the world. My intentions were good, but looking back, there are a number of things about both trips that I wish I had done differently.

Haiti is breathtakingly beautiful, but the poverty is soul-shattering. It was jarring to go from my own country of abundance to one that needs so much. There were only five of us traveling this time, and Amber and I shared a room during our few days on the island. We would whisper long into the night about all we were taking in.

To share these perspective-changing travels with the same person puts Amber in the Battle Buddy category for me. In the last decade, Amber and I have shared rooms a number of times during getaway weekends and social gatherings, but those long nights abroad make our relationship unlike any other. The original group of blogging friends that brought Amber and me together is still intact, albeit with some changes over the years, and there’s never a shortage of things to catch up on or personal events to analyze. However, I can’t help but feel that Amber and I have some secret knowledge of the other because of the travel we’ve shared and the trajectory of change we’ve both been through spiritually.

Amber holds my heart without judgment, she’ll speak truth to me when necessary, and she’ll hold my hand through a panic attack. She has been a witness to my growth as I have been to hers. And we have the battle scars to prove it.

Excerpted with permission from The Life Council: 10 Friends Every Woman Needs by Laura Tremaine, copyright Laura Tremaine. 

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Your Turn

Who is your Battle Buddy? Do you have a friend with whom you’ve gone through troubles and tough situations? Maybe you need one! Come share with us. We want to hear from you! ~ Laurie McClure, Faith.Full