Terri White: How female friendship guided me through my lowest point (2024)

It was a Saturday morning when I woke up in tangled sheets, clutching two empty pill bottles. A single stray tablet was stuck to my spine, the rest had passed through my mouth into my throat and were now inside me. I hadn’t died, I noted. Presumably I still could, though, if the pills were doing their work where I couldn’t see. But I was paralysed with fear: what would happen to me if I went for help?

Last night I had blacked out from drinking, before even making it home to my East Village apartment in New York, and now my phone was MIA, along with most of the contents of my handbag. But my laptop was there, on the couch, Skype blinking. I didn’t know what to do. But I knew my best friend, Lindsey — 2,800 miles away in Los Angeles — would.

We met three days after I moved to New York, having been introduced on Twitter by a mutual friend who somehow knew it would be love. Lindsey was a successful women’s fiction author living in Brooklyn, and I’d headed to Manhattan after a decade in London for a job on a magazine. Like so many before me, I was convinced the cinematic city I worshipped from afar held the incredible life I longed for.

We arranged a blind mate date at a restaurant on the Lower East Side. My nerves jangled. What if it was awkward? What if she didn’t like me? I only knew one person in New York, and I told myself the best I could hope for was a new friend, who would make a city I already felt so lonely and insignificant in feel more like home. We came together that first night through our backgrounds — we both came from northern working-class areas just miles apart (me, a small village near Chesterfield; her, Doncaster). Our love of wrestling (yes, wrestling), the band the National and the writer Michael Cunningham. The fact that we were both called Nana by our close friends. Our equally chequered romantic history. I was 33 and sore from the end of a long-term relationship; she was 31 and immersed in the exhausting world of New York dating.

In the two years that followed our friendship swelled and soared. But, at the same time, I was losing myself, piece by piece, disappearing into the streets, the skies and the sewers of the city. The depression I’d experienced in waves since enduring sexual and physical violence as a child roared back into life in the heat and noise of the city. Everything was brighter, bolder, bigger and louder, including my trauma. I cut my body. I drank myself unconscious most nights. I took greater volumes of pills than had been prescribed. I tried to destroy my body and my mind as my mental health unravelled at breakneck speed.

But even as I came away from myself — and most other people in the process — I didn’t come away from her. I worked hard to keep the truth about the dark depths I’d descended to a secret from my colleagues, my friends and my family back in the UK. But with Lindsey, who was physically there for so much of it, it didn’t matter if I sneaked away to the bar for secret shots of whisky; once again drunkenly, incoherently wept; or simply disappeared, phone off, for days (all of which I did). She was patient, kind and devoid of judgment. She occasionally softly broached my drinking or volatile emotional state, only for me to shut her down with a wave of my hand. Her love was unconditional in the way that we’re told the great love of a man is, but in my experience had never actually proved to be.

Growing up I’d had very few friends — the painful events behind the closed doors at home made me chronically shy, anxious and isolated. In my twenties I met a tight circle of smart, funny, brilliant women in magazine offices, but I kept most of the details of my past from them. My shame kept me mute and closed off. With an ocean between us, my contact with them became even more sporadic, my secrets more tightly held.

That Saturday morning, though, when Lindsey saved me, the lid was blown clean off. When I called her over Skype, she was firm and to the point — I needed to go to the nearest hospital. Driven by cold fear, I flagged a cab. I went to ER and was treated, then admitted on a psych hold.

As I sat in the locked ward — surrounded by men and women of all ages and backgrounds, each dealing with their own private hell — I tried to quell the overwhelming panic and fear that comes from sitting in such a place. But Lindsey, one of the few people who knew where I was, worked away behind the scenes. She spoke to my doctor when I struggled to get answers on what was happening and when I might get out. She familiarised herself with the steps I would need to undertake when I was discharged. She called me every day on the psych ward pay phone, the yell from one of the other patients of “It’s Lindsey, for Terri!” becoming the sound that my days pivoted around.

Two weeks later I returned to my apartment. Lindsey returned from LA that same day. Outpatient rehab and AA meetings had been part of my discharge deal with the doctor, and she ensured I turned up to the former three times a week and found meetings for the latter. She organised no-booze brunches at our favourite restaurants on the Lower East Side and sober nights out at dance parties in Brooklyn. She asked others not to drink in front of me and filled her own glass with water. When other friends we knew in the city couldn’t support or understand, she remained steadfast and loyal.

As I tried to navigate the world without my skin made of booze and Xanax, I was sometimes quiet, other times skittish. I worried constantly that I had become a disappointing, dull version of myself. But she treated me like she always had, never betraying the strain and exhaustion that she must have felt shepherding this new, fragile version of me to safer ground.

After 3½ years of living in New York, I accepted that it was not the city to heal my fractures. And while I was considering returning home to London, Lindsey was contemplating moving to LA. Though we both ultimately decided we would be leaving New York, it never occurred to us for a single moment that we were leaving each other.

We now live the farthest away from each other we ever have — some 5,400 miles. Our lives couldn’t be further away from those two smitten single girls who sat across the table from one another: last year Lindsey got married, and I went to her wedding in Beverly Hills four months pregnant with my son, to whom she is now godmother. Yet we’re as close as we have ever been.

The night before I left New York, we had a final dinner, this time in the West Village. As usual we laughed until we cried, offending our fellow diners with the volume.

What I couldn’t have banked on, or even hoped for on that first blind mate date, now eight years ago, was that I would find a woman who so often feels like the other, unquestionably better half of me. And wherever our lives take us, whichever cities we live in, our friendship will always, always be home.

@terrilwhite

Coming Undone by Terri White is published on Thursday (Canongate £14.99)

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