The Friction That Filed Me Into Shape

Image by @doeringphotograpy from Unsplash

There is something quietly ironic about sandpaper.

You use something rough to smooth something rough. The very thing that removes the unwanted edges is itself coarse, uneven, a little brutal. And yet, without that roughness, nothing gets refined. A soft cloth on unfinished wood does nothing. It takes friction to create smoothness.

I have been thinking about that a lot lately.

One of the disciplines I try to practise in my own life is asking for feedback. Not the polite kind that skips over the hard parts. The kind that costs something to give and costs something to receive. I brace myself each time, not because I expect cruelty, but because I know honest words have a way of landing on the exact spots that are still raw.
The places I have not fully faced. The parts that still need filing.

That is what feedback does, when it comes from the right people. It does not tear you down. It smooths out what is rough.

Years ago, I asked a small circle of close friends for something unusual: permission to be corrected. I told them they had standing to flag what they saw in me, even when I could not see it myself. Blind spots, patterns, the things I was doing without realising. I trusted them enough to open that door.

One of the things that came back surprised me. She said I kept things to myself. Not out of secrecy or distance, but because I did not always express what I was thinking or feeling. And because of that, she sometimes did not know where I actually was. She was not criticising me. She was telling me that she wanted more of me, and I was not giving it to her to work with.

That sat with me for a long time.

It was not comfortable feedback. But it was true. And what made it bearable, what made it useful, was knowing it came from someone who was not trying to diminish me. She was trying to help me grow. She was filing, not breaking.

Not all feedback lands that way, of course. Some comments come edged with something else: ego, frustration, or a desire to feel right rather than to help. Part of growing is learning to hold both kinds, to sift through what is useful and to release what is not. To ask: is this being said to help me grow, or to tear me down? Is there something real here, even if the delivery was rough?

Sometimes the answer is yes, even when it hurts.

What I have come to understand is that the people who love you enough to tell you the truth are rare. They are worth holding onto. And the willingness to hear them, really hear them, is one of the harder forms of courage. It is not dramatic. It does not look like much from the outside. But in quiet moments, when someone offers you a word that files away something you have been carrying, and you choose to stay open instead of closing off, something shifts.

You become a little smoother. A little more yourself.

The friction is the point. It is not the enemy of the process. It is the process.

And none of it has to be done alone. That matters more than anything. I am not alone in this journey. The people around me who are willing to file and to be filed in return, that is not a small thing.
That is everything.

This week, I am grateful for the people who tell me the truth. Even when it costs them something. Even when it costs me something.