Losing a friendship

 Jan 14, 2021

 

I feel like I am mourning the loss of a friendship. But immediately I wonder if I can mourn when I don’t yet know if it has ended – permanently or temporarily. What I do know is that I have been preoccupied with wondering what state it is in and why it is in that state.

 

To put it simply my friend seems to have dumped me. Suddenly and slowly both at once. Suddenly because one day, in June, she stopped talking to me saying she needed space and slowly because when I asked to talk about it, she said, ‘yes, but not now,’ and she continued to reply to and send me WhatsApp messages until one day that too stopped — from both sides. Me because it became sort of meaningless for me to continue those, ‘how are you’, ‘I am fine’ typey things when my requests to meet and talk about things were not reciprocated. 

 

I did several things to make sense for myself this happening. I created characters who would represent her and me and had conversations between them. I journaled about my cycle of feelings — pain, anger, confusion and back. This person has done this twice before to me and I looked up old journals to understand what had happened then. I also had conversations with another friend she had ghosted around the same time in 2020. She was important to both of us and we wanted to make sense of what we were feeling, and why she did it, and think of ways we could be there for her if she was in some crisis. 

 

Later I began thinking of friendship in more general terms, reading articles, thinking of great friendships in books and my own friendships, particularly the ones I had botched. I took four of these botched relationships, which I had ended or done something that lead to them ending and searched my memories about them. Three of them had hurt me emotionally at a time I was particularly fragile because of the chaos in my life. Two had tried to apologize but I was so stuck in pain that I pushed them further away even after. The thought of them hurting me again was unbearable. I felt by ending the relationships I was in control and I was taking care of myself. One didn’t ever apologize, and I find he faded out from me as I must have from him. 

 

After this lapse of time, I can clearly see my own part in it. The immaturity of my reactions and how I continued to blame them despite their attempt at explanation. A few years ago, I reached out to two. I was terrified they would be too angry to respond but they both did, and now with one I feel even closer.

 

The fourth is more complex and needs more thought. There were unspoken judgments from that person about me that I could not unpack at that time as they were mixed up in the judgments I had about myself. But she was also a person I wasn’t ready for, and I rejected her, and her way of life, in a way that must have hurt her. She was a ‘secondary process’ I couldn’t yet welcome in. I regret that  but don’t yet know how to repair the gap. 

 

Meanwhile so much else is happening in the world. The US capitol was stormed, the president impeached. In India the farmer's protest has reached day 49 (I think) and the Supreme Court passed a controversial order about it. Hindutva groups, in the name of Rama, damaged mosques and homes of Muslims and when Muslims retaliated the cops arrested them while leaving the ones who had started the violence to roam free. A vaccine without phase 3 efficacy data was rolled out for ‘emergency’ use making people wonder if they were being used as guinea pigs without any consent or monitoring. People debated the new WhatsApp privacy policy endlessly and many stayed on WhatsApp because when things are free one pays a price in one way or the other. Each of these, and more happenings, I thought of endlessly too. 

 

I miss being able to talk to my friend about some of it, or all of it. I don’t have a ton of friends but the ones I do are really important to me. She is not dead just unreachable and that makes it even harder in some ways to find closure. But this going back and reflecting on the other botched friendships has been good. Friendships have no rules and no contracts but developing an internal ethical compass to negotiate them does develop. I just don’t want to sit at a desk ten years from now and regret more loss because of something I did or didn’t do.