Lack of Compassion or Connection

September 3, 2024

Today I am thinking about a change in my ability to relate with a friend I have always been able to connect easily with. It happened yesterday while we were chatting that I found I couldn’t connect. It upset me enough for it to stay with me and I reflected on its genesis as I felt it had been coming on for a while. 

When I read back through my journal — we chat very regularly — I found that I had felt this for the first time in July. I had wondered then if it was simply our paths diverging after they had been running parallel for a while. 

It’s not the first time this has happened in a friendship. It does disturb me. It makes me wonder if there is indeed something within me that is broken when it comes to relating long term. I have sudden occurrences of a need to withdraw, and I have noticed this more in Singapore than before.

As a child growing up in a joint family I didn’t fit into, I spent a lot of time alone. I had so many cousins that our socializing was mostly with family. And since I didn’t fit in, I was on the edge always. As I grew, around grade 10, I began expanding my circle of socialising, but I think I remained on the edges always then, and even through University, and the early years after — until perhaps the 1990’s when I began to know myself and the things that drew me and began to seek those things and find more people who I felt were part of my 'tribe'. It was a time of picky expansion. Picky because slowly, besides knowing the activities I wanted to be involved with,  I began to understand the kind of relating I wanted and waited to find friends who could be authentic in relationship, willing to deepen it with vulnerability, especially in times of conflict. I was/am lucky to have several such friendships now in Bombay and in other parts of the world. 

In Singapore I have fewer such friends. But I felt my relating with this friend was one such in that there was search for authenticity and for understanding our core essence — if there is such a thing. But since July I found an inability to be present authentically when we talked. A, always was a good listener, someone who I turned to when I had a dilemma as I could rely on him to help me think it through. There were some issues that A had fixed views on and could not listen openly to, but those were few. But in July I found the quality of listening shifted. A listened with the intent of finding something similar in his life and relating it back to me, I guess thinking that the way he dealt with it would help me or something — not really sure what but I began to see in it a certain need to talk about his own self and life journey that stopped him from listening. 

He was going through some heavy issues so I decided then to spend the time we talked listening more to him, and trying to understand what might be behind this shift in his quality of listening. I felt it would move as his energies moved within him, but the months rolled by, and it just stayed the way it was.

            And yesterday I switched off. I had arrived to the conversation with a ton of anxiety about my mom who has been ill for a month. Something I realised I hadn't told him about, despite talking at least twice since she fell ill.  I never seemed to find the right moment to talk about it or anything. I found his lack of interest in my life, and my hopes and fears, turned me off so much yesterday that after a making a few attempts to bring those into the conversation I withdrew from the authentic connection and listened politely. Of course A noticed and felt sad. And I felt sad too because I just could not connect. 

            But I also go through periods of compassion fatigue. I feel unable to muster it up for individual person, or for a situation in the world that I have previously felt it for. I notice, withdraw, and replenish during those times and I wondered if this was one of those, or if something was wrong in the friendship, or it was just me operating from my childhood dynamics that fostered an inability to relate. 

            No answers — just sharing my process and questions. Bit sad.