On the importance of friendship

There’s not a lot of art made about friendships. There’s some, but a drop in the ocean compared to stories about romantic relationships, or parents and children, or siblings. Whenever I see a book, play or film advertised as being, at its heart, about friendship, I’ll lap it up (hence why no one can sway me from my love of the musical Wicked). Friends have played such a significant role in my life, and, during my time as a leader, they have never been more important. 

A number of my friends work in the arts sector itself. One of life’s great joys is the slow metamorphosis of a colleague into a friend, which sometimes, particularly when you’re in a leadership position, can only fully happen once you no longer work together. Friends that work in the same sector as you are brilliant. You can have a cathartic moan about the state of the arts together, you can really understand the detail of each others’ problems and you can support each other in practical ways - I’ve read friends’ job applications, got their opinions on positions I’ve thought about applying for and watched many productions which they’ve played a part in creating. Going on a theatre / concert / gallery date with one of these friends is also great - they’re invariably excellent critics and often your post-show conversation can be as interesting as the show itself. 

About half of my close friends work in the arts sector in some way, but the other half do not. They are a mixture of people that I’ve known from school, university, previous and current hobbies and, most recently, parents I’ve connected with whilst on maternity leave or doing the nursery pick up. They work in a whole variety of different places doing a whole variety of different things - for some of them, their work is their life, for others it’s a pretty small part of it. These people have been invaluable to me throughout my leadership career - not because they’ve given me practical advice and help, but because, in reality, they’re not that interested in my job. 

What they are interested in is how I feel about my job, and how it makes me feel. They care about the latest funding rejection not because they’re bothered about the implications for the organisation, but because they can see that, on some level, I’m taking that rejection personally. If I’m in a moment where work is expanding beyond its banks, seeping into evenings, weekends, sleep, they’ll ask me direct questions about when this period of overwork will end, or tell me straight that it’s really not that important, that nobody will die if I put up some boundaries. They’re also the first to defend me when they feel work has treated me badly - if I relate to them a story about an incident that made feel a little bit cross but I’ve convinced myself was probably nothing, they’re the ones who’ll be angry, outraged on my behalf, and sometimes, their reaction lights a fire in my belly and nudges me into action. 

But mostly, when I see them, I find myself not talking about my job at all. Sometimes I’ll be meeting a friend straight after work, my mind full of what’s happened that day, thinking that perhaps I’ll offload a bit to them, hear their perspective. And then I get to wherever we’re meeting and suddenly we’re talking about something else entirely and I realise that hours have gone by and I’ve not thought about work once, and I can’t quite remember why that thing that I was worrying about was as important as I thought it was. 

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

For many of us, friends can be everything as we start to arrive in adulthood, but as we age, they can be the first thing to drift. Romantic relationships, changes in where we choose to live, work taking up more of our time as we move deeper into our careers and the arrival of kids can all eat into the hours that we used to spend with our friends. And that can lead us, inadvertently, to a place where work can creep further and further into every corner of our lives - the thing we talk about with our partner as we seek to destress every night, the thing we do late in the evening because the laptop is right there and we should probably just try and deal with our inbox rather than go to bed early to get some much needed sleep. 

I came across this article recently by Jo Verrent, Director of arts organisation Unlimited. There are many brilliant and resonant things within it, including when she describes herself as being in an abusive relationship with her job. She writes: 

“I’ve put your needs above my own for a long time. I’m not sure who I am without you. When I have time off – some of it’s still spent thinking about you. Feeling guilty that I’m not with you. Wanting to be with you. I’m still obsessed with you.”

This, I’m sure, will sound extremely relatable to many people. And what can, in part, exacerbate or sustain this kind of abusive relationship with your job, is finding yourself cut off from people who love you, kept isolated, stuck in the same world day after day until you lose perspective on what’s normal and what’s right. 

Since I started working in the arts over fifteen years ago, I have made it my ongoing resolution to catch up with two of my friends every week, and, the vast majority of the time, I manage it. I’ve managed it through numerous production periods involving multiple late nights in tech rehearsals, through three different leadership jobs, through the pandemic and through the creation of two children. I believe that my friends are one of the main factors in having kept (broadly) grounded and sane throughout my working life and I truly, literally, do not know who I would be without them. They make me laugh, they accept me precisely as I am, and they remind me what really matters. So the next time you’re sitting at work, feeling like the world is going to end, go call a friend and remind yourself how little they care about your job and I promise you, everything will start to look a tiny bit brighter.