We've all got that friend who just doesn't have much EQ

We've all got that friend who just doesn't have much EQ.

Picture this scene. You arrange to meet your friend at a café. You've got stuff going on, and it was hard to reach out. You're feeling a bunch of things: maybe hurt, vulnerability, even anger.

And you really need to talk - but somehow, as you and your friend sit across from one another, you just can't get through.

You say life is pretty tough right now.

They immediately reply that theirs is worse.

Your boss is a dick.

Their boss is a bigger dick.

Your cat got run over.

Well, so did their goldfish.

Your grandma died.

Their grandma is more dead than yours.

And after an hour of being unable to get a word in edgewise, your friend tells you over empty coffee cups to cheer up. Things could be worse.

Maybe the friend means well. But you come away deflated, like you tried to entrust something important to them and they wouldn't take it: wouldn't even acknowledge it.

Right now, there's a post going round Facebook, not for the first time. It's about Irish slaves, and it's been debunked more often than I can count. It talks about Irish people sold to the new world where they were degraded like livestock, the women forced to 'mate' with black men. The claim is made that African slaves were treated better.

And to illustrate the point, the post comes with a picture of bedraggled human beings that appear to be ... turn of the century Italian coal miners in Belgium. Awkward.

Before hitting 'share', a person really should ask, why has this post resurfaced during BLM? Why is it a favourite of the alt-right?

But let's assume good intent: that at least some of the sharers are motivated by a passion for Ireland's history of injustice.

How each of us lives our whakapapa, it's a hell of a personal thing.

I will tell you a little about mine.

My father's side of the family is Scottish. He arrived here in the early 70s, not much more than a kid. From the other side of the world, Aotearoa must have seemed like paradise on a magazine page: a safe life, economic opportunity, a gentleness in people. (I can only speculate whether the wide streets and sideways rain of Invercargill lived up to the dream.)

I have not lived with dispossession, with loss of language or land, although my Scottish whānau do, vividly. My skin and my kōrero mark me as the majority. But in a corner of my soul, there are ancestors who pled as their homes were burned or dug graves for their starved children in the frozen earth. And in that corner of my soul, small though it is, resides defiance and grief, clenched teeth and fists, ferocity.

What to make of this, then? Is someone telling me that this thing handed down to me, even if only a fraction of its historical weight, is unimportant?

There have been so many wise things said recently, but the wisest I've seen was this. Saying all lives matter is like going to someone else's birthday party and blowing out the candles because you're special too.

My history is important. And that's why I will not dishonour it by using it to efface the pain of others' histories, of their here and now.

When you and I meet, I don't want to be the low EQ friend. When you talk, I will try to stay quiet; maybe, if it's OK with you, my hand will reach out to yours.

I like to think my whakapapa is not a thing that erases yours, but equips and teaches me to listen to you, in the thrum of the café, with wisdom and with grace.

Being a friend is knowing when it's time to listen.

This is the time to listen.

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Written for Elijah McClain.