I sometimes feel like I'm trying to create a Short Story Life.
Instead of a somewhat linear, start-to-finish kind of thing, I'm creating a compilation of essays. Family I. Company II. True Love I. Settling Down I. Drunken Decade II: Return of the Blackouts. True Love II. Adventures in Misguided Friendships. Etc.
I divide my life into separate phases, and once one a phase is over, I don't reconnect with it too much. With rare exception, I don't talk to any childhood friends. I don't talk to my "college buddies." I'm not in touch with my old bandmates. You see the pattern, here. The only exception seems to be ex-employees. There's two that I consider friends, and they'll get in touch with me if I don't get in touch with them.
Living a life as a coherent novel feels scary and overwhelming. It might be because I don't want to be able to trace my life back to childhood that I've created these phases. Or, I could be just like everyone else and just have a fucked up brain. I don't know.
There are a few people in my life, outside of my family, who I have come to love. I'm going to try, this time, not to cut them loose. I might not be ready to live my life as a novel, but maybe I can extend this phase to a novella.
How's that for beating a metaphor until it's dead?
Love to all. Even you, the dude in corduroy who's should really wipe his nose.
6 comments:
I'm kind of the same... I've lost touch with most of my friends from back home. Friends I've met at Uni just remained there once I left. Friends at work also.
I don't think it's healthy because then you end up with not that many friends when you need to have people around you.
Like me right now! I wish I had more real friends to call and see. I don't want to be alone right now and I am because I didn't "take care" of my friends throughout the years.
So it's great that you realize that and are keeping in contact with some people, like your ex-employees, I'm sure they are awesome people! :)
-Anonymous-
I have this feeling this "anonymous" is, uhm... an ex-employee. Perhaps someone who now lives in Canada? ;-)
I am just like that. I totally cut all ties to people. I don't talk to any friends from high school or college. We have moved 5 times and I only have kept in contact with one friend.
I know why I do it - it's a total protection of myself issue (abandoned by father issues).
Maybe it is a trait of being an aquarius??
I'm not sure it's an aquarian thing. I'm a libra and this could be my story too. Have lost touch with friends from in High School in a state where most people who move here find it difficult to break into a social circle because everyone stays in close enough to the place they grew up to stay insular. I still live here but don't have the insularity.
Same thing happened with college friends, and I think the same thing is happening with most of the people who were friends from my marriage.
It's not that I don't reach out, it just seems like somehow it's not an equalized reaching toward and my life moves on and those that don't try as hard to stay connected to me as I do to them drop by the way.
I never thought of it as a short story life before. It' an interesting metaphor that I have been rolling over in my mind since I read it.
I think it is interesting to note those few common people who have stayed or re-emerged as characters in my story. It does seem like some are reprising their roles sometimes...
Anyway, thanks for the image and the thought provoking post.
peace.
I've found that friends I've had throughout my life are really just charaacters in the book that is my life. Once their chapter is finished they move into the background to make room for the next chapter's characters. How often do you go back and reread those chapters in your book? Friends typically don't move with you from chapter to chapter unless they have a compelling place in the story of your life.
I actually miss my childhood friends and the ones from college (the real friends, that is).
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