I'm Not That Person Anymore

So many people from your past know a version of you that doesn’t exist anymore.

— Unknown

You know how people say they can meet up with someone they’ve not seen in years and it’s as though no time has passed at all? I’ve never been good at that. It’s lauded as the sign of a healthy friendship, but it doesn’t work that way for me. I’m too aware of how much my life, my interests, my understanding, and my very self change over time. There’s a social media meme that expresses this perfectly.

You’ve changed.

I hope so!

If we’ve not been in touch through those changes — mine and yours — then we no longer know each other. The person you think of when you think of me no longer exists. We might reconnect, but unless it’s to re-establish an ongoing, more-or-less frequent connection, there’s little point. I’m not interested in sporadic news updates of what’s happened to you since we last met. I want to know who you are, not who you were. I want to share with you who I am, not who I was. It’s the difference between sharing life’s journey and sending each other occasional postcards from distant lands.

I’ll qualify that a little, because it might sound as though I need to be in constant touch with someone for the friendship to be worthwhile. Frequency is part of it but it’s the sense of being present in each other’s lives that matters most. Each friendship has its natural rhythm. When circumstances permit, Fran and I connect several times a day. I’m in near daily touch with several other close friends. One long-time friend and I exchange letters every week or so. Circumstances might necessitate a temporary pause or change in how often we’re in touch, but in each case the friendship returns to its natural beat afterwards. There are a few exceptions. One friend and I work brilliantly despite going weeks or even months without hearing from each other. I’m not sure how it works so well, but it does! (Hi, Louise!)

I saw a social media meme the other day that read MAKE A HABIT OF REACHING OUT TO PEOPLE JUST BECAUSE THEY CROSSED YOUR MIND. I get the idea, but I don’t necessarily agree. A few months ago I thought of someone I was friends with in the eighties when I lived in London. We kept in touch after I moved north, but it must be thirty years since I last heard from them. On a whim, I found them on social media. They looked happy in their present life. For a moment I considered reaching out to reconnect, but realised how little point there was in doing so. If they accepted my friend request we’d exchange catch-up messages, bullet pointing the intervening decades. Where we’d lived. Where we’d worked. Partners. Family. Mutual friends. Highlights. Lowlights, maybe. Health. Illnesses. But they’re not the person I knew all those years ago in London. I’m not the person they knew.

You may be thinking, but they might have been delighted to hear from you. You’ve both changed, but you could begin a new friendship from where you are now. That’s true, of course. But our past connection is no guarantee we’d get along now. Maybe there’s a reason our friendship lapsed. Maybe they’d rather not be taken back to those days by an out-of-the-blue request from someone whose name they associate only with the past. Reaching out to people because they crossed your mind might be good advice if it’s someone you’ve not heard from in a few weeks, but it can be intrusive — even toxic — in other contexts. I can think of several people I’m pretty sure wouldn’t want to hear from me, despite them often crossing my mind. They’ve moved on. I’ve moved on.

Disengagement happens in many ways for many different reasons. It can happen suddenly, or so gradually it’s hard to detect until some threshold of awareness is crossed. I’m reminded of a poem I wrote many years ago. It describes the creeping changes that confounded the deepest and most significant relationship of my life up to that point.

Without a word we set our backs to oneanother, walked the slopes alone,
our fields and hills pastoral: darker vales disdained, pretending
not to see the forests moving.
Till one night unseen some secrets in the guise of
willows crept into the stream we called our bed,
took root, and in the morning we awoke to find between us
woods impregnable.

— “What happened to the Lovetrees?”

Frequency of contact isn’t everything. A social media post I saw the other day declared that “Real friends keep sending you memes even if you don’t react to them.” There’s a certain truth to those words. Regular low-level contact can keep a friendship going through difficult times when we might be unable to engage more meaningfully. Memes, good morning texts, and such remind us that the other person’s there, that we’re thought of. They’re insufficient to sustain a meaningful connection on their own, however, especially if the frequency no longer aligns with the rhythm of the friendship itself. In that case, what began as a gentle ritual becomes a habit you’re loathe to break for fear there’s little else left. There might also be a reason the other person isn’t reacting. Maybe they’re tired of being bombarded by essentially empty messages. Maybe they’re busy. Maybe they need a break. For these reasons amongst others, I’m wary of formulaic contact. It’s content that matters.

It’s worth pointing out that gaps don’t have to mean a friendship is in danger or at an end. I’ve written about this previously in Supportive Disengagement: How to Be There for Your Friend When They Need Space.

Supportive disengagement is for situations when your friendship is taking a break rather than broken, when disengagement is less than total, and — crucially — where the lines of communication remain open.

I don’t write a friendship off just because there’s been a break or a pause. I’ve picked up again with friends, sometimes more than once, after break-ups lasting anything from a few weeks to many months. Where this has been successful, it’s because we were both committed to reestablishing an ongoing presence in each other’s lives. If there’s been a significant gap, I find it helps to approach reconnection like starting again from scratch, rather than assuming things will pick up again from where you left off.

I’m aware that not everyone views friendship the way I do. I’d venture to say I’m in a minority, based on conversations I’ve had on the subject. Most people seem able to pick up with friends after months, even years, of little or no contact. I envy them a little. I’m sure I’ve missed out by feeling a friendship has ended for me, where others would have kept things going, albeit on a less frequent basis. It helps to explain why I have few very long-term friendships. Of those I consider present in my life today, the longest friendship is some fifteen or sixteen years old. It amazes me that people my age still have friends from school or college! It’s not a case of others being right and me wrong, or vice versa. The point is that people have different ideas about what’s important to them in a friendship, what constitutes a pause or break-up, and how and when to reconnect. On a deeper level, we have different perspectives on who we are, how we change over time, and the significance of those changes to the connections we make with other people who are also changing. Acknowledging these differences can lead to a greater understanding and empathy for others, and indeed ourselves.

I’m grateful to all my friends, present and past, for inviting me into your lives and for being present in mine. Whether we were friends for a short time or many years, what we shared enriched my life. I hope it enriched yours. I’ll close with an exchange I had with someone years ago.

Do I add value to your life?

If you didn’t, you wouldn’t still be in it.

The response caught me off-guard at the time, but I understand now. It helped me become the person and the friend I am now. (Thank you.)

 

Photo by Vladyslav Tobolenko at Unsplash.