Sharing – Kafka on Friendship and the Art of Reconnection

The post below is about Franz Kafka and his writing about friendship and reconnecting with friends after one of his many long withdrawals. There was a paragraph that I wanted to share with you:

It takes just one unwavering friend — a friend to the soul beneath the self that does the doubting — to quietly and consistently revise these punishing stories we tell ourselves. All along, through all the years of all this punishing self-talk, Kafka’s childhood friend Max Brod had been the greatest champion of his talent, never losing faith in his friend or in the friendship. Though Kafka frequently withdrew into his self-elected isolation, Max never withdrew his love.

There is also no mention of Max finding a solution for Kafka. Were his periods of severe withdrawal from depression? Was his tuberculosis part of it? Was it his creativity? To Max, it doesn’t appear that it mattered.

Max was just there. Max stayed when many others may have given up or walked away from someone who was such an eccentric. He stayed, and in the end, it might have made all the difference in helping Kafka see himself differently than the messages he was getting from his own mind.

Instead of trying to fix our friends and loved ones struggling with anxiety and depression because of what they believe about themselves, maybe we should understand that by staying in their lives, we are already providing the argument against those beliefs through our actions.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/11/17/kafka-on-friendship/