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strinasacchi
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« on: 17:24:37, 30-10-2008 » |
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This isn't a challenge/upset, it's certainly not devastation, but it's not unalloyed happiness either. I'm not sure what I'm feeling, so I thought I'd create a new place to go when one is a bit confused, in a turmoil, trying to figure things out.
I moved a lot growing up. My most vivid and formative childhood memories are from age 5-9, when I lived if I'm not mistaken in Turfan Fragment's current hometown. I had a tight band of good, fun-loving friends - it's also where I first started violin lessons.
Then I moved and lost track of everyone. I never thought I'd see any of them again.
I didn't reckon on Facebook.
A couple of friends emerged, people I knew and recognised but weren't my closest friends from that time. That was amazing and bewildering enough. But today I found the girl I thought of at the time as my best friend. I'm so excited to hear what she's been doing, to fill her in on what I've been doing, to catch up after all this time... but it's bittersweet. We were children when our lives diverged - what do we still have in common? I see the chat she has with our mutual friends from then, and of course they all got to grow up together and know each other through their teen years and young adulthood. I just disappeared and missed all that. I also ended up forgetting a lot that they haven't, because they've had each other to keep those memories alive.
I don't know, maybe my later unhappy school experiences tainted my trust of people more than I think. Maybe they'll all be thrilled to be back in touch with me, and are genuinely curious to see how I turned out. Maybe also I don't trust myself - maybe I'm afraid I've become much less likeable than I was when I was nine - and I'm afraid of falling for the nostalgia trap, living in the past. But I find myself questioning my feelings and presumptions, and I feel a bit lost. Moving a lot - and being an expat - has trained me always to turn my back on the past, always to look ahead and welcome what's new.
I also look at the photos people have posted of all those beaming young faces in silly 1970's clothing and wonder what happened, how did life get to be so complicated, how did I get to be so convoluted, why are things so difficult now?
Not that things are bad now, and not that things were universally rosy then. But that really was the last time I had my "crowd" of which I felt a real integral part - ever since then I've always been a bit on the outside of things. And I wonder whether I'd be genuinely welcomed back, and if I would genuinely want to be back.
I'm sorry to babble. I hope it makes some sense. I'm a bit overwrought.
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Morticia
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« Reply #1 on: 17:35:27, 30-10-2008 » |
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Strina, you're not babbling at all. What you say makes sense and I suspect that more than a few people here (including moi) will empathise with and recognise what you're saying. I'm a tad brain dead at the mo but I'll PM you when I have my thoughts in more coherent order.
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thompson1780
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« Reply #2 on: 17:41:35, 30-10-2008 » |
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Strina - live with the intrepidation, but treat the old friend as a new person you haven't met yet.
An old schoolfriend found me on Friends Reunited, and (as at the time) Friends Reunited cost money but Facebook didn't, he persuaded me to join Facebook to find more old schoolfriends.
Approaching "that time of life", I was keen to re-connect with my younger self, so spent a furious few weeks linking up with old friends, exchanging pleasantries, and....
..and what? Building shallow relationships with people who a) I don't have a lot in common with now, and b) are very different from when I knew them.
Whenever I log on to Facebook now (rarely), I am amazed at the notifications I get about old school associates making meaningless comments about old rubbish / drivel someone else has posted. It's like the Coffee Bar here, but with no fun.
I cannot actually see any personal benefit in Facebook, apart from being able to post Events (like concerts). And even then, that's not much use if the people I can inform of the events aren't the sort of people who would go......
Could be very different if I manage to find old musician colleagues, but I haven't tracked them down yet.
Tommo
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Made by Thompson & son, at the Violin & c. the West end of St. Paul's Churchyard, LONDON
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time_is_now
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« Reply #3 on: 17:51:16, 30-10-2008 » |
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It probably won't help to know this, strina - it certainly won't solve anything - but a lot of the feelings you've described are very similar to ones I have a lot of the time. The way it's possible to carve out an identity for oneself as an outsider, and then spend incredible amounts of emotional energy wondering what it feels like to be an insider, is certainly something I'm very familiar with. Of course, what we never know for certain (but we could probably make a sensible educated guess if we weren't so emotionally het up about the whole business) is whether anyone really feels like an insider. As the years go by (  ) I'm no more certain of the answers, although I have moments (which feel almost like 'normality', dare I say it?!) in which I manage more or less to convince myself that I'm not special, and the questions are no more pressing for me than they are for anyone else in the world. You don't need to be 'normal' by anyone else's standards, anyway. All you need is to feel normal for yourself. And what that consists in can vary from day to day. Just as you can choose on a day-to-day basis who to make your friends, and who to stay in touch with. |
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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Lord Byron
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« Reply #4 on: 18:00:51, 30-10-2008 » |
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I have made new friends from facebook and keep in touch with some people I have met from going out via facebook, I also met an old school friend off friends reunited and we always meet up for a drink when I visit Huddersfield. I have 'just online' friends and 'just off line' and those that are a mix, go to a few meetup.com events, going to a pub meet from the idle foundation on the 8th in a london pub. http://idlefoundation.net/It is all a mix, have met old school friends from friends reunited and we don't keep in touch much and same with old work mates etc., people come and go from your life, old friends,new friends etc. etc. |
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richard barrett
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« Reply #6 on: 18:26:22, 30-10-2008 » |
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If you have hobbies and meet new people lots, you soon realise that people come and go, can always make new friends, but you do need to go out, things like this can help
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Lord Byron
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« Reply #7 on: 18:27:05, 30-10-2008 » |
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richard barrett
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« Reply #8 on: 18:35:57, 30-10-2008 » |
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I've never indulged in Facebook or FR, but I quite like the idea of remaking contacts with people I haven't seen for decades. The trouble is (given the number of people and the amount of time) some of them will be dead. That's the thing which engenders confusing feelings as far as I'm concerned.
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martle
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« Reply #9 on: 18:38:54, 30-10-2008 » |
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Strina Two stories from my own recent life, thanks to FR, not Facebook: 1) My first ever proper girlfriend contacted me. Last time I'd had contact = 28 years ago (two years after we split up). We exchanged two emails apiece, all jolly catch-up stuff, barely a passing reference to our former relationaship. We sent each other a current photo and did e-laughing about them. Then, it was somehow mutually agreed to stop. Not 'look forward to your next!', but 'well, it's been lovely to talk, bye'. Sad, but we both knew there was no point in taking it further - different lives etc. 2) When my father died, I found in his effects a photo of my primary school class, when I was 6. I'm in it. I could name almost all of them (!), but a few I couldn't. I then got a FR email from someone in that photo, not someone I knew well (I was a bit of a loner at that age anyway), and wrote back to her asking if I could send it to her to help identify the 'missing' names. I did, and she produced an excel sheet  with the names, occupations and marital status/ kids/ major traumas in the lives of virtually every single person! Seemingly, I was the only person in my class who'd moved more than 10 miles from my home town. It was hugely cathartic, very funny, and that was that. Back in touch with someone, but as a means of understanding something about me, not as a way of kickstarting a life long gone. |
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Green. Always green.
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strinasacchi
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« Reply #10 on: 18:43:03, 30-10-2008 » |
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This isn't about making new friends. That's something I've had to do over and over. Never before have I been confronted with old friends long drifted, though.
Facebook has been a good way to keep loose contact among my colleagues. As a freelancer it's possible to go months and years without seeing certain people, so it's proven useful for that. It also has been a way to keep informal contact with friends and family in the US. If something important is going on, nothing takes the place of a phone call or direct personal email - but for day-to-day ticking along it's all too easy for months to pass with no contact. Facebook has provided a way to keep an eye open, send the odd note, send out the odd announcement or statement. I've enjoyed it for that.
Also, unlike Tommo, I've been able to reconnect with some old musician friends. Because of my time out from music to do law, I lost track of some colleagues I'm only too happy to be back in touch with again. Some people are doing really interesting things, and have ended up in places where I could very well see them some day. That's useful to know about.
But this is the first time I've been confronted with, well, to look at it selfishly, an entire alternate universe for myself. What would my life have been had I stayed? How would I be different? It's not impossible I'd be doing exactly what I'm doing now - one of those elementary school friends stuck with the violin and is freelancing in New York (she was the first to find me, through a muso both of us knew much later in our lives). But would I have avoided all those years of avoiding people, mistrusting people, keeping all but a few at arm's length? Would I have been happier? Would those friends have remained friends? Would we have fallen out as we grew up and our interests diverged?
Maybe it'll be easier to be friendly now, as adults, than had we suffered adolescent squabbles and betrayals. It's not so much "being normal," as tinners puts it, that haunts me - I'm not sure I was normal aged nine, but I am sure it didn't bother me very much and I simply expected people to accept it. It's the idea that I probably would have had a rich emotional life with my peers had I stayed - something I didn't have when I moved and felt completely alienated. And suddenly it feels like a tremendous loss, something to be mourned.
I'm a little calmer now. Thank you, everyone, for giving me a place to vent and rallying around with good and sympathetic advice.
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Just saw Richard's post. That problem isn't unknown to those slightly younger - four people from my university college have died, two of them were very close friends indeed. But it's better to know, I think - and the longer you wait the more likely things like that will happen have happened...
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Just saw martle's post - yes I'm beginning to realise my emotional reaction is more about me than about her, or all of them. I love your two stories - I think they're both very poignant in different ways, and even if one doesn't continue contact it is still somehow precious to have had a later catch-up.
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time_is_now
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« Reply #11 on: 18:48:52, 30-10-2008 » |
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I've never indulged in Facebook or FR, but I quite like the idea of remaking contacts with people I haven't seen for decades. The trouble is (given the number of people and the amount of time) some of them will be dead. That's the thing which engenders confusing feelings as far as I'm concerned.
Yes - that's part of the way things go, isn't it? But it's only the larger 'sample size', as it were, that means that's more likely to be the case from that wider circle of acquaintances. Getting to know anyone on a long-term basis (especially marriage or equivalent) is partly defined by the awareness that one of you is going to be around longer than the other, and you've no way of knowing which. As it happens I quite enjoy Facebook as a means of keeping 'medium-level' contacts - signalling to people that you don't mean to lose touch, even though you may never actually have anything particular to say to them. But about a month ago, within the space of a week, I found out through Facebook about two people who'd died - both around my age, neither of them a close friend, but one of them was a friend of my ex-boyfriend who we used to socialise with quite regularly and the other was a guy I'd chatted to a few times in clubs. That wasn't very nice, and in the second case, since we didn't have any common friends, I have no way of finding out what happened (although I can guess). Edit: Just seen strina's new post. Sorry if I seemed to be addressing a different issue to what you'd wanted to bring up. I guess we all have our own preoccupations in this kind of discussion. But what I was trying to get at was partly the fact that emotional reactions probably have more to do with us than with the long-lost friends whose reappearance occasions them. |
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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Lord Byron
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« Reply #12 on: 18:54:28, 30-10-2008 » |
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strinasacchi, your fate was not to stay, things change, the wind blows us about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unbearable_Lightness_of_BeingThe book centers on the idea that existence is full of unbearable lightness, because each of us has only one life to live: Einmal ist keinmal (once is nonce: "what happened once might never have happened at all"). Therefore, each life is, ultimately, insignificant; every decision, ultimately, does not matter. Since decisions do not matter, they are light, they don't make us suffer: they do not bind, yet simultaneously, the insignificance of our decisions — our lives, our being — is unbearably light, hence, the unbearable lightness of being. Because of the subject, some critics labeled this novel modernist, while others see it as a celebratory post-modern explosion of narrative craft.[citation needed] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effectI do know what you mean though, some friends from FR live down the road from their parents and have families but others have spread out far, like living in new zealand, scotland or becoming an air hostess and flying and living all over the planet. things 'just happen', chill it |
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Antheil
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« Reply #13 on: 18:59:34, 30-10-2008 » |
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I joined FR oout of curiosity, to see if I recognized the names of the girls in my class. To my shame a lot of them I couldn't even visualise. (Except for Rosalind Glyn-Jones upon whom I had the most enormous crush) I did not part with money to contact any of them (and none of them parted with their money to contact me, which is rather telling!) To be honest I did not have a lot of friends at school and always thought of myself as an outsider.
My best friend, from the age of 13 to 18 (she moved away and then I moved) I had kept in very sporadic contact with. We then got together (she lived in Swindon) for a weekend (I knocked at her door and she said "You haven't changed a bit" and I thought "If I passed you in the street I wouldn't have recognized you!" and it was quite fun swapping school memories but after so many years we really had nothing in common and there were no more meetings and after about 2 years of very occasional phone calls it petered out.
However, strina, cliche that it is, nothing ventured - nothing gained. It could well be a disaster because you were very young when you were friends with these people but at the very least you could exchange some schoolgirl memories which could be a pleasant experience even if it goes no further than that. Shared memories.
Was just about to post this and seen 4 new posts ahead of mine, never mind I'll push the button
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Reality, sa molesworth 2, is so sordid it makes me shudder
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Lord Byron
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« Reply #14 on: 19:06:36, 30-10-2008 » |
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I do not keep in touch with the majority but it was worth it to get in touch with a great friend i did lose touch with.
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