I Thought I Knew You Then, But Who Are You Now?

As I try to wake up in the morning, as if arising from the dead, I like to lie in bed for a while and read. If no book is handy, I will reach for my phone, and scroll through the social media posts. I like to see which of my fellow night owls were up late, and what thoughts that were hatched in the dark are floating through to the morning…

This morning there was a post from a high school friend that really touched me. I have been on social media for years, but never spent much time on it until my oldest son moved abroad, and it became an easy way to communicate with him, and see what was going on in his daily life. I never sent out multitudes of friend requests, or cared how many friends or followers I had compared to other people. Lately, though, I have been following an inner directive to reach out to people I have known, to connect with people from my past, make deeper connections with people who are in my life now, and to make new connections. This particular high school friend is one of many that I have sent requests to recently, and who graciously accepted my request.

My friend posted that during his commute, he had spotted a deer on the freeway that had been hit by a car, but was not dead. He started to stop, out of an innate instinct of kindness, but then realized he would be jeopardizing his own life by stopping. He went on to say that he felt weak, because he could not stop crying. He empathized with the deer, and said he couldn’t imagine being in the middle of the road and no one stopping to help. I am not sure that those were the exact thoughts of the deer, but the fear and pain part would be universal. What struck me was his statement, “I used to be so cold…Maybe I’ve finally learned to feel…” It has been 35 years since I last saw my friend, and I had to stop for a minute and wonder what those years have handed him, and what could have happened in his life that would make him say that.

This is a person that I would have never described as “cold”. He and I share a birthday, and I remember when we were in school, and he and another friend, who also shared the same birthday, came to my house one year with a piece of their birthday cake. For reasons that had nothing to do with them, I didn’t invite them in that day, and I have always felt bad about it. It sounds like a minor thing, but for teenage boys, it took a bit of gumption to figure out where I lived, and knock on my door with cake in hand. I am sure it came across back then as conceit, shyness, or some variation of aloof. In looking back, I see it as a symptom of my fear of connecting too deeply with people, and a fear of letting them see the real “me”. As a teenager, I was still trying to figure out who I was, and was too caught up in what I assumed others thought of me. Afraid that the fragile shell of whatever good things they might have thought about me would crack under close scrutiny.

I had the good fortune of being able to grow up in the same neighborhood, and I graduated from high school with many of the same people I went to preschool with. That stability was a gift, but a gift with a few tangled strings attached. When you grow up with the same people, you stop seeing them. You think you know them. But you can spend nearly every day with someone over a period of 18 years, and not really know them at all. My best friends had things going on at home that they kept from me, things that I was shocked to learn of later. And I was just as guilty of hiding things from them. It made people invisible when we all grew up enough to start looking at each other as potential dates, rather than playground teammates. I can remember sitting in English class my senior year, chatting with a group of male friends. They were lamenting that there was nobody left to ask as a date for the senior prom. I did not have a date, and I am sure they knew that, but I may as well have been their sister, I had known some of them so long. I felt invisible, and I couldn’t wait to leave that school, my community, and go away to college, where nobody knew me, there were no preconceived notions, and I could be seen again. I realize now that I was not really seeing others, either.

I ran across some old journals from high school recently, and I reread them all. What struck me was the voice of that teenager is the voice still inside me. That voice did not match the costume I presented to the world back then, but is much closer to how I try to present myself now. It has taken me nearly all of my 53 years to be comfortable and confident enough to truly not care what others think, and to embrace and be proud of who I am, flaws and all. I wonder about all of the people I grew up with, and who they really were back then. Every time I look at a post by someone brave enough to really put themselves out there, I am amazed. The quiet boy with the devastating sense of humor now flies in helicopters and shoots machine guns. The beautiful girl who is now a beautiful woman, and you would assume her life must be perfect, by extension, gracefully endures a deep pain. A man who says he used to be so cold, but was a sweet and kind boy, can weep over a dying deer. I had a goldmine of humanity at my fingertips growing up, and I sailed through with blinders on, and in the years since then, I have let everyone slip away.

I have attended a couple of high school reunions, and they were as one would expect. The same people, sitting with the same groups. I would love to propose a different kind of reunion. One where we don’t judge by the pound, number of wrinkles, clothing and accessories, lack of hair. A sort of speed dating version, minus the speed, and the dating. A scenario in which attendance was mandatory. Where every person had a chance to talk one-on-one with every other person. Where we had enough time to remind each other of who we pretended to be then, what we were hiding, what has happened to shape us since then, who we are now, and who we want to be. For a class the size of mine, this should only take about a week or two. Who’s in?

In the absence of that unrealistic vision, I am trying to connect in whatever ways I can, with whomever I can find. Life gets in the way, and there is never enough time. I send out friend requests, and most are accepted. I will send out more. I make calls, I leave notes, I show up on people’s doorsteps. I write blog posts, and hope people will read them, and hope they will respond. I don’t want to reach the end of the line, and regret that I didn’t connect, when the opportunities knocked. And the next time someone knocks on my door with cake in their hand, I will smile, and invite them in to share it with me.