Week 5: Old Friends
When you leave the insular environment you grew up in, you lose your chance to have “old friends”. They are a luxury you simply cannot afford. Occasionally, someone else leaves and you can reconnect with them, but that is not guaranteed. The group I grew up with - the ones I don’t really remember life without because they all showed up before I turned six - are not really part of my current existence. I tried to maintain a connection with some of them for a bit, but it’s exhausting to have to go back to holding your breath once you’ve begun to exhale - even if it’s only for a moment.
I remember the last time I tried to preserve one of these connections. To see if I could bring any of my “old friends” along with me on this journey into a new world. We decided to meet up in our small town Burger King. We started talking about the church we grew up in, the people we grew up with, all the things. She had a few criticisms that were harsher than anyone else had ever vocalized - I took my chance and leaned in. I shifted the discussion to theology and said the following: “I don’t think the Bible is inerrant.” She leaned back, her eyes grew big, and the spell was broken. She didn’t fight me, but she didn’t agree. Her guard went back up. I watched the vulnerability she had been offering me come to an end. The message was clear: I was too dangerous and I could not be trusted. No one would be coming with me - I was on my own.
In all honesty, the truth is that I always felt like I was a bit “on my own”. While I technically had a group until I was about 11, I always felt one wrong move away from being ostracized. The group had always been semi-unstable, and my fears ultimately proved to be correct as, when I made the difficult decision to place my safety and needs ahead of keeping peace in the group, I was shut off from the intimacies of the group and promptly replaced. I tried to go back numerous times, and some days it seemed like nothing had ever happened. As long as I was willing to play my part, they were willing to tolerate me. The problem is that playing a part is absolutely exhausting, especially when you start to plan your escape and it increasingly looks like you’re going to make it out alive.
If my childhood and adolescence are beginning to sound a bit like a YA novel, it’s because that’s part of how I coped and continue to cope with them. Substantial portions of those years play out on a screen in my mind as though I’m watching them happen to me rather than experiencing them as myself. In fact, since growing up in a place that was actively traumatizing me was not ideal, I sought an escape - an escape I found in books. In books, the main character always makes it out alive, often bringing everything and everyone they cared for with them. Unsurprisingly, this idea brought me an immense amount of comfort, allowing my consciousness to get lost in worlds so different than my own that I could escape the walls that I felt were suffocating me, while also providing hope to calm my fears about being trapped in this very real existence for the remainder of my life. I tried to extend the comfort these stories brought to my inner world by creating spaces for them in my outer world. How did I do this? By suggesting books to my friends.
This had varying degrees of success - some of them didn’t like to read, some had different tastes than me, and sometimes parents and adults in our world labeled certain books as having “demonic spirits” attached to them and so I was unable to share them broadly. But other times it worked, one of those times being with the series I’m currently rereading - Percy Jackson and the Olympians. With this series, I did not achieve universal success, but I did succeed at pulling two of my friends into the mythological world created by Rick Riordan. Recently, I’ve been rereading the series and I have longed to have someone to talk about it with - I have longed to talk to them about it again. To anticipate what might happen next, to argue over who should be “together”, to discuss theories and lore and little connections - these are the conversations I have begun to miss as of late. In missing these conversations, I have begun to reflect on the nature of my friendships - past and present - in general, and have come to the following conclusion: I have, largely, been deprived of sustained meaningful connection in all forms of human relationships.
Now, there are a variety of reasons for this:
I spent the majority of my life trying to play a variety of parts I felt unqualified and unfit for in order to please others, as opposed to just being myself.
Most of the friendships I had prior to the last 5 years were highly conditional or circumstantial.
Almost none of the relationships I experienced prior to 17 modeled good boundaries, communication, or conflict resolution.
I have always had the underlying belief that I am difficult to like, let alone be friends with or date, and that my needs are too great to share with others.
Those who I opened myself up to in a more full way as an adolescent chose to abuse the access that I gave them.
While there’s a lot to unpack here, I’m going to focus on what this I think this means for me generally over the next year. The big thing that I think it means is that I am going to choose to be much more intentional about the relationships I cultivate and, within those relationships, I’m going to try and be more conscious about being continually vulnerable. This is not to say that I have not been intentional in regard to the people I surround myself with or to say that I have not been vulnerable in some of the meaningful relationships I do currently have. However, it is to say that I will often withdraw when I feel as though people are getting too close to me or that I am being repeatedly vulnerable in the relationships. This obviously creates a barrier in regard to forming deeper connections with people, essentially creating a threshold that I want them to cross, but am afraid to let them across.
I recognize that this is hard and sometimes confusing work, but I’d like to think it will be worth it. No human is an island - we are built for community. We are worthy of community. We are worthy of a community that loves us and whom we love. A community that respects our boundaries and invites us to be vulnerable. A community that invests in platonic relationships as meaningful relationships. A community that sees as whole and who maybe, if we find a community that will grow with us, we can one day say are our “old friends”.