I look back on the years 2012-2014 and realize that many of the people around me, myself included, did a lot of leaving of each other during these years.
In essence, we bailed out on each other, when I'm not sure that was the best route to take.
But wait, let me start at the semi-mid way beginning of the middle end.
For most of my life, in terms of friendships, I was the kind of person who put a lot of myself into a friendship. I gave all and expected the same else it didn't last or go very deep. Even my lighter-hearted friendships were still more authentic than some of my friendships today. I had had many long term friendships that went through the typical and sometimes not so typical ups and downs that most real solid friendships go through. But they were still solid. Some lasted 5, 10, 15 and 20 years but somehow they were healthy overall because of how we communicated with each other and generally, how we behaved. When there was a problem, we'd contact each other, meet or talk over the phone to work out the details of the scrap to right things again. Rarely did it cause us to bail out or break up with each other willy nilly unless it was something super messed up like cheating with the other's boyfriend…but that never happened, thank goodness because of differing tastes in men and mostly friends with ethics. But sticking around, working things out, was an automatic thing to do when something went awry. Nowadays, it's not so much anymore.
It seems now when something goes wrong, many people gossip about it to other friends, post something on some social media page to rack up sympathy points and then bail out…unfriend…and write that someone off as if the whole thing was fake to begin with EVEN though it may have seemed like a real friendship. Like some whirlwind of teenage stupidity, we work ourselves into a lather over nothing and poof, finito, mas rapido, fast, end it slick with no question or will to figure out what actually went wrong, whether or not something actually went wrong, instead of just a micro-miscommunication burp or an actual snfu in the friendship. Just move on to the= NEXT!…thing. (Think:
SQuiRREL!!)
In a about three years of my life, I made about 50+ friends…mostly through facebook but I met most of them in real life. Honest! On top of that I got back in touch with another 50+ and was already in touch with 60+. So in total I was working myself into exhaustion trying to juggle over 200 people at a point and for awhile I was holding my own, maintaining what I thought were authentic interactions. Obviously I was not doing a very good job at keeping those relationships real and authentic because well, you can't with that many people and especially, remotely online. Friendships require more contact, I believe.
So naturally it all came to an end in some ways but the way it came to an end…still makes me
smh, as the kids say, shake my head in confusion. In a few years over a series of truly banal stupid incidences, I lost about 6 or 7 friendships. The irony was, most of those friends had been my longer term friends I had known before Facebook and I'm still in touch with a few people from Fb afterall. Go figure!
Were we due for a break up or was it a by-product of the modern era taking it's toll? Or was I just such a bear to be around? I didn't know because for some of those 'friendships' nothing whatsoever bad happened and no one said anything, they just disappeared from my life. They just ended?
For quite awhile, I kept in touch & hung out with, talked on the phone, wrote letters to around 50 or more new and old rehashed new again people, mostly through facebook but most of it bled into real life. It was a flurry of activity where before fb my life was pretty small and had shrunk to a pea due to chronic illness that derailed most of my existence and spirit so I withdrew from the world feeling so out of whack and disinterested to be honest. So I figured going onto a social media page would help me break out of the isolation I had put myself in while going through literal and virtual hell. I thought, how bad could it be? Despite many years of avoiding it, I had no idea what I was getting into. :l
Before that, I had spent much of my life underground, so to speak. Part of the counter-cultural milieus of American sub-culture genres: world culture, punk, hippie, politics and even rap/hip hop before it blew up into all materialism and pimp & ho culture and destroyed young America including many young black people. Hey, sorry, but it's true. Fuck off if you can't handle the truth….(sorry it slips out here and there). Suffice it to say, I was plugged into the underground world of real culture and subversive living chock full of authentic interactions and a slew of various art forms driven by odd unique innovative and exciting people. Real people who could care less nor kept up with mainstream culture or trends. Then I walked away from my dream career, moved to suburbia, got sick and it all went down hill from there. When I finally looked up, plugged into the cultural milieu at the time, I found myself swimming in totally unfamiliar waters with many people I had known for decades who, previously to FB were NOT mainstream people likely to follow any trends, like social media.
For me to be participating in something SO mainstream as Fb and social media, 'liking' random idiocies that so many others 'liked' and responding to the endless fodder that streamed along the newsfeed was just not something I had done before in any form be it gossip groups, fashion circles (gag) or social media or even bars… I hate bars if one must be truthful. Cesspools of depressant indulgence masked by the fume of boozy interactions and sloppy sexual advances. Blehh!
I had managed to avoid this world for many years. So really I was out of my element for sure.
I like other stalwarts, had to learn the codespeak of the young and hip, the acronyms of the nincompoops of modern culture. There's nothing odder and more humbling than trying to figure out LMAO or STFU or SMH when you have NO reference but your own imagination and an actual education to go on. While pissing and bemoaning the woes of modern tech talk and hipster jargon, I slowly but surely and sadly, immersed myself in modern hip culture and become a facebook junkie and I slowly but surely and sadly, lost all touch with the real world. Ok that's a bit dramatic but it makes the point.
When I first got on to the page, my old school friends were like, 'Oh my god, it's about time you got on here'….to 'finally!'…'hey nice to see you cuz'….from family members who had no problem jumping in line to the latest fad trend yen blah…thing.
I however, felt childish…and silly. BUT I was trying to be open and needed to break out of the depressing stinky cave of my deep earth dwelling and wipe off the elitist solemn funk of a cape I had worn for so long to mix with the masses. So I walked into the shallow end, slowly, hoping that it was as cool as it looked on the surface and safe as water can look, on the surface.
Little did I know it would change the way I relate with people. But not being alone in this, I along with just about most others in this country were also affected by Fb in relating to each other and how we navigated friendship in the modern era. Little did I know those seemingly real friends I would make would become
frenemies that I no longer speak with simply because of those banal misunderstandings and silly banter that were misinterpreted online because we can't actually read emotions through b/w lettering and 2 second comments, and not in real life.
In most of my life I had very few frenemies or friends I had severely broken up with. I can name one who I ended up getting beat up by because she was half-psycho and had the reputation of beating up a LOT of her friends during those years. Those were crazy years, period. It was how she coped with her fucked up life. I just went through the rotation of her friends till it was my turn, painfully.
Other than that, if I lost a friend it was usually just a quiet growing apart or moving away and didn't keep as much in touch. Not an actual detached 'unfriending' in this newfandangled fashion of living and loving the modern world was telling me. The very idea that you can 'UNFRIEND' a person with the click of a button and be done with them in such a dry, disconnected clinical manner is stunningly low and cheap. It boils friendships, partners, lovers and even remote acquaintances to mere images of ideas on a page to stare at and feel pretend love in a pretend community.
It can seem real at times too. People said, 'I'd never bail out on you for some silly reason….oh your opinions don't bother me…I didn't even notice was you said, what'd you say?'…revealing that the blips on the screen really meant very little but a momentary stimulation that gave us a temporary high that enabled us to feel a part of something for a global second so we could stop thinking about the fact that maybe our lives were in chaos or tedium, or our jobs sucked, or we were lonely, or our body hurt or our country was falling apart from the inside. For one second we felt 'loved'…kind of. Cared about, maybe. Important, not really but sorta simulating it that we were. Like sort of just temporarily for a second noticed by random people in our lives seeking the same desperate connection we all were: real life.
So for awhile it felt great, some superficial high that we could get without inhaling or snorting anything; it didn't cost much or cause us to gain weight
much or destroy our livers but it gave us this buzz that we were part of something…that we mattered. That we had real friends.
Oh I know how it goes…yea we all 'knew' it wasn't that real. We all 'knew' that most of those people weren't our
real friends and that when push came to shove we'd be alone during the real crises in our lives….like the memes say: '
Real friends are the ones who come in when the others are walking out…' Kind of thing. Right?
Yea so who were we fooling?
So when things started to fall apart because I couldn't keep up with the 50+ new people that I had met new ON top of the 125+ people I already knew and the 50+ people who were family, friends of family and professional associates…this was when things started to become very apparent about how things were really working in this brave new world I have ventured into reluctantly but temporarily, happily for meeting new people and finding old friends.
Things became very clear that when it came down to even clean cut nitty gritty real life, many of those people could care less about the real me and the real us.
And I was the fool running myself ragged trying to authentically keep up with all of them so as to grow real relationships because, that's what you do in relationships, right?
Pant pant...
The next thing I knew over the course of a year+ between me pulling back and others pulling trips…I lost about 7 or 8 or 10 or whatever 'friends'. Some I had known for many years and gotten back in touch with. Some I had just met.
Either way, it was baffling. I even found myself participating in this new wave of teenage write-off's in terms of having an issue with a friend because I was tired of feeling taken for granted. I was tired of being one of those people who wanted to be friends with everyone so I put up with, overlooked, ignored and psychoanalyzed all the things that came to mind WHY I shouldn't be friends with them but was because I just didn't want to be judgmental. Goddamn trickle down affect of American New Age Buddhism and west coast hippie!@ Argh!
Sigh…was I acting just like these flakey flighty people, or did I have a legitimate reason for confronting the few I did and bailing out??? What the hell has happened to all of us, to me?
When I think of some of the reasons and behavior I witnessed, there was literally no legit reason but that et voila…it just didn't suit them at the moment to stay friends despite prophetic declarations previously made.
And this is what I am talking about with this newfandanagled bailing out behavior that social media has taught us all how to do, with the flick of a button.
My reasons were that I was tired of being called boring or selfish because I didn't respond to someone's demands fast enough when offering to do something nice for them for free, simply because I had a skill to be valued (photography). Or when I temporarily got off fb once because I was spending too much time on it and my eyes were going bad and I was getting daily migraines (as I sit here now with glasses) and yet I wrote a post on my wall for WEEKS telling everyone that I was getting off to save my eyes and prevent migraines and work on my new small business that was JUST being born and consuming all of me. She didn't bother to read it and instead, her and her husband simply unfriended and ignored me because she thought I blocked her. After 30 years of friendship instead of calling and asking me, she just unfriended me and didn't say anything, staying quiet on her end until I asked
her about it.…huh?
There were others that didn't make sense to me, there were others where I reacted fed up because I was. I was fed up at how I was being treated after many years of friendship, the language with which we now spoke was laden with a crass uncaring tone that had come out as a result of modern pop culture and nothing that existed before it did, in our friendships. I didn't relate to all the shit chat that so many people who kept up, were doing. I felt old, like a dinosaur come back to life. I referenced things that people in their 50's and older did: the 60's movement and all it's effects, the political situation and the reduction in values of today's generations, how fast things have gotten in today's technology. We kvetched together with a greater understanding of the overall detriment to society and when I was around younger people, even people in my 40's age group, the main focus was on, ok survival of course but shallow pursuits of sex, materialism, the latest fad on fb, superficial relationships but also, what kind of phones they had, the latest concert they'd seen, the size of a man's dick (wait what?) and who said what on which social media site. My head spun with confusion at the overall lack of depth that people around me were exhibiting. It still does.
And yet, I had grown boring too…so it wasn't just them. Remember my life had shrunk to a shell of my former self so I was no longer cultivated and interesting. I was not who I'd want to hang out with. And yet, I wanted to be. I wanted to change and morph into an entirely different self that was truer to me and away from this shallow life around me. But I was SOo out of touch with how to do that, like I had been sucked into some vortex of stupid and didn't have the strength to pull myself out. Or got distracted by the pretty bells and whistles blinding me while it sucked my brain out through my ears.
Part of me is glad to have moved on from people who may not have been the best for me. Maybe I wouldn't have done it due to the whole trying to be friends with everyone syndrome still lurking inside of me. I needed to move on and start over, finding better healthier people and be more discerning with the choices I made so I could have the life I wanted and NOT stay in a life that was killing me. I wanted to be healthier, to be a better person and things around me had grown stagnant and irritating. But I didn't want to be bailed out on like this?!
So I was planning on doing this…anyways; slowly but surely yet actually doing it once and for all, was scaring me on a deeper level; to be alone, to start over and move away from all you know. Even if it was toxic and staid. It's still a scary thing with no road map but your own shiny newly reformed instinct of self-preservation. What was I thinking?
Am I a masochist? To actually start over completely, from scratch and rebuild my life in the way I really truly deep down needed, was utterly terrifying and meant possibly saying goodbye to most of what I had known, most of my life. Because it just wasn't working for me anymore. But I hadn't planned on suddenly losing multiple friends over the course of a few years like this!
I thought I would do it nicely, slowly disappearing from people's lives while building a life elsewhere. No drama, no hostility or teenage fugue states but just gently move on knowing that if I ever saw them we'd hug, catch up and part ways in a kind manner. Why not? There's enough crapola going on in the world for us not to create more. I think that's kind in some ways, you don't have to insult someone on the way out just because you don't like where you ended up.
You can just leave politely.
Perhaps they did me a favor because I was being too patient, too willing to tolerate. Damn watered down, fool-hearty delusional Buddhism from my childhood.
Either way…I have ended up here, starting over. It feels good, cleaner but still a little scary at times. There is no road picked out and paved or worn down for ease. I am still wearing in new soles. But I like it. I like having pulled my gaze from the burning sun to look instead into the depth of the night sky and all the stars it contains. The magic of unchartered territory awaits me and I'm embracing it with confidence caution.
I think really what happened, is that many of us said goodbye for no other reason other than something to do that added drama to our lives and gave us the illusion we were doing something exciting, rather than actually living.
9/14©DanyaMosgofian
:P
