Seattle ✨️ Danielle

If you’re lucky enough to be friends with a swer, and you’re not a swer yourself, there are a few things I think you should understand about maintaining that friendship. First and foremost, friendship does not entitle you to unlimited access to someone’s time, energy or attention. No matter how close you are, how long you’ve known each other or how much you care about one another. Something people outside of sw don’t always fully understand is the extraordinary amount of emotional labor our profession can require. Much of our work involves anticipating other people’s needs, managing expectations, providing companionship, making people feel appreciated and being consistently attentive and emotionally present. Even when we genuinely love what we do, that level of engagement can be mentally and physically exhausting. Sometimes after spending so much of our time taking care of other people, we simply don’t have anything left to give socially. So we withdraw. We get quiet. We stop responding as frequently. We retreat into our own little worlds for a while. Not because we’re angry. Not because we’ve stopped caring about you. Not because you’ve necessarily done anything wrong. But because sometimes we need to exist without being responsible for another person’s emotional needs. Our silence isn’t necessarily rejection. Sometimes it’s simply recovery. And this is where I think understanding the distinction between emotional intimacy and emotional entitlement becomes incredibly important. Being close to someone doesn’t mean having unrestricted access to them. Loving someone doesn’t mean they’re obligated to be perpetually available to reassure you of that love. When friends begin demanding attention, questioning our absence, keeping score of unanswered messages or making us feel guilty for needing solitude, they inadvertently create the very emotional pressure we’re trying to recover from. Suddenly a friendship that should feel like a safe place becomes another relationship we’re responsible for emotionally managing. And there’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from feeling as though you have to perform emotional availability in your personal life after spending so much of your professional life doing exactly that. The irony is that the more someone pressures us to be available, the more likely we are to withdraw. Not because we care about them any less, but because interacting with them has started to feel like another obligation rather than something we can simply enjoy. And before someone inevitably misinterprets this, I’m not suggesting that swers are uniquely exhausted, that our friendships should be one sided or that we’re exempt from being considerate friends. Healthy relationships require reciprocity, communication and mutual respect. I’m simply pointing out that someone can genuinely value your friendship while temporarily lacking the emotional bandwidth to actively participate in it. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You can miss someone without making them feel guilty for being unavailable. You can care about someone without requiring constant reassurance that they care about you, too. And you can love someone deeply while respecting their need to be left alone. Ultimately, being a good friend isn’t measured by how much access you have to another person. Sometimes it’s measured by how safe you make them feel when they need to step away. If you genuinely want to be someone a swer can turn to for comfort, make sure your friendship doesn’t become another source of emotional pressure they need to recover from. Because sometimes the most meaningful thing you can offer someone whose professional life revolves around meeting other people’s needs is a friendship in which they don’t constantly have to meet yours.