The grief of change

An introduction to a new series! And some thoughts on long-distance friendship...

There are some moments that you can just place yourself back in. As if it’s possible to just take up residence, for a short-time, inside your old body, your old existence.

It’s always odd revisiting a memory like that, as the details surrounding it are blurry. Things you would have known at the time, small details like how you arrived there exist unknown alongside the bigger ones, the political situation at the time, what the headlines were, (sometimes) even what year it was. The moment itself is sharp, as it is significant. Everything else is cloudy and confusing… as those things don’t really matter. Not in the grand scheme of things.

One of my own ‘jump-in, jump-out’ memories is sitting on Clapham Common, a grey sky descending, alongside a weariness that had begun to settle in my friend and I: it wasn’t warm enough to sit outside much longer so soon we would have to depart… but the thought of leaving each other, again, and entering into the unknown, again, was a prospect neither of us could face. I wanted to, as I often do with her, stretch the minutes out, live as long as I could, frozen within her warm company.

It was 2020 (I think) and we hadn’t been allowed to hug. Enough time has passed for me to confess that we did, and thinking of that cuddle, that grey sky, seeing her finally after months of being forced apart, causes tears to jag me, sharply in the throat. The hurricane of the pandemic, of lockdown, had already began to morph me into someone entirely different. I could feel the world spinning and changing and I wanted to beg it to stop. Why couldn’t my friend and I just go back to who we once were? World-chasing 20-somethings, roaming London in the height of Indie Sleaze, ticking our ambitions off with the help of a Post-It note filled A-Z map, negative balance Oyster cards and, most importantly, the love we held for each other.

But we couldn’t. Because those lives we had been chasing… they were here. We were 30-somethings now. It all happened so fast! People said the pandemic put ‘life on hold’ but it still hurtled towards us, at full speed, throwing experiences at us that we had not been warned or equipped for. Some, of course, we had been expecting - they just had to be navigated differently. My friend told me she was pregnant that day, that she was moving back to Scotland. We naively promised each other that nothing would change. As I say, I wanted to put us on ice. Preserve us exactly as we were.

(friendship snaps)

I was so afraid that she would be lost, that we would be lost. I’ve felt this fear so many times with friends, as we grow older and life gets more complicated and priorities change.

Over time though, I’ve learned something: distance and circumstance do change things. But the worst friendships are actually the ones where you cling, bloody knuckled, onto who you once were… and so your meet-ups become simply reminiscing over old times and never moving onto the new. The longer, more treasured relationships are the ones you don’t need to make effigy’s of. You move and change together.

(more on that here)

My friend and I, like many of my beloved friends who have moved onto new cities and new lives, are still as close as we once were. But I didn’t know that back then, as I stood, feeling almost fractured, as I watched her walk away.

It was grieving period when she first moved - I once wrote in a poem “my ribs are breaking without her” and I felt absurd for being so melodramatic. I felt flippant and trivial to equate it to grieving, but looking back I can see that’s what I was going through. We don’t talk about this sort of grief as it can feel silly. But it’s not. It’s real. It’s OK to feel terrified by change. Even if we know we will come out the other side of it.

And these are the sort of stories I want to tell more of.

(memories of 2020 when everything moved so fast and so slow all at once)

So, if you have a story you’d like to tell me - about the grief of a lost friendship, an old career, an unrequited love, even a lost possession! Anything you lost that caused your life to change, please reach out to me. You can comment below, or reply to this email, or message me on IG. I’m slow to reply and I’m disorganised but I WILL get back to you some day!

Tomorrow, to kick things of, writer Emily Ash Powell, who I greatly admire, reflect on her experiences of long-distance friendship. It was this a piece which caused me to reflect on all of the above (which was actually meant to just be an intro for her! But it’s quite long so I thought I’d break it into two). Emily is the brains behind Career Suicide Notes, a newsletter and community that unveils the truth behind the shiny highlights reel of other people’s careers. It’s a tonic for anyone who has a tendency to beat themselves up by the yardstick of other’s achievements (so, erm, me) You can find it above, and look out for her guest post later this week.

Pssst that rib breaking poem on long-distance friendship can be found, here.