I have lost most, if not all, of my decade-long intimate friendships. It happened the ways these things happen: slowly and then all at once. We fell out of each other’s lives. Atrophy through the years and then suddenly, startlingly, you’re no longer friends. I feel some grief (I thought these people would be in my life forever), acceptance (it is what it is), gratitude (how lucky am I that for a time, for the length of a shooting star, these people dazzled my life). But also, I feel relief. Now that we’re formally out of each other’s lives, there’s no more work to be done to nurture the friendship, no more flits of guilt and resentment over a dying friendship. The friendship is no longer a complex, present thing—it’s a wonderful past.
But the main thing? In the last few years, I have lost all willingness to share myself with people. Which of course means I have lost all willingness to nurture relationships. It’s good and bad. For one, it’s made it magically easy (borderline psychopathically so. Never in my life, have I given less of a fuck) to let go of poisonous relationships. But on the other hand, I’m not nurturing healthy relationships. I don’t want to therapize myself. It would be easy, lazy even, to ascribe this change to some trauma, or grief, to believe it is a coping or self-protective mechanism. But I think really, I simply have fallen out of the habit of letting people in. It simply is work I’d rather not do. I have been a socially anxious introvert my whole life. And even though I no longer am socially anxious, I have taken that instinctive inclination to solitude to its nth degree.
On Thursday last week, I had an amazing afternoon. I went to see Spiderman: Brand New Day in the theatre by myself and then afterwards, I went book-shopping. I chose a weekday too see a movie for obvious reasons: few people in the cinema but in the end it was just me and you should have seen how giddy I became when the projector screen lit up and I realised no one else was coming. It was a good movie. I laughed, I cried, I got to talk to myself and think out loud. I finally understood why people have screening rooms in their houses. But afterwards, in the bookshop, I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me to ask any of my friends or acquaintances if they wanted to go see the movie with me. The previous weekend, I had gone to a literary festival by myself, and even though I met people I knew at the festival, it didn’t occur to me to hang out with them. If anything, I felt an active resistance, bitterness even, at engaging in any sort of meaningful conversation. In the last couple of years, it’s hardly occurred to me to ask people to spend time with me. Whatever social life I’ve had has been externally driven. I could chalk it up to a fear of rejection or vulnerability, to the friction and pain and exhaustion of trying to make friends as an adult, but I suspect I simply don’t want to. I don’t ask people to spend time with me because I really would rather be alone.
In my head and in my heart, I know that this is bad for me. If anything, the death of my friendships has clarified the model of friendships I do want. I don’t want a catch-up friendship. I don’t want to see my friends a few times a year and have them report their lives to me. I want to actively be in my friends’ lives—to run errands and go to movies and help them move, etc. But I’m just not doing it? Like, I don’t even think about doing it? I don’t even think I’d like to do it. I dropped and broke one of my favourite bottles of perfume while getting ready to go see Spiderman. It was a gift from my sister. I thought of sending a picture of the broken bottle to my sister but then immediately, I thought, what for? Just to have a short conversation commiserating the loss of a nearly-full bottle of perfume? I think part of it is that I knew my sister would be sad for me and I didn’t care to indulge my sadness. In the moment, my only reaction was, well that sucks. I am swift and efficient with my grief. A traumatic, prolonged near death experience does that to a person. It reinforces perspective. I cannot feel sad about a broken bottle of perfume for longer than a few minutes. Like my god, this shit doesn’t matter, you know? And feeling bad about it for days on end is literally pointless. I didn’t text my sister. I thought, I don’t want to have an ultimately pointless conversation about this. But even in that moment, I knew the conversation wasn’t the point. It was about sharing that moment, no matter how frivolous, with my sister. It was about inviting her into this tiny part of my day. If I texted or called her, I would have told her I was on my way out to see Spiderman and then afterwards, we could have had a conversation about the movie and the amazing afternoon I had. I could have shared my day with her. Instead, I swept up the shards and went about my day and I still haven’t said to a single person, “you know? I had a really good day on Thursday.”
When I was younger, I was really bad at small talk, but I worked so hard at nurturing connections. Now I’m really good at small talk but I just couldn’t be bothered unless it’s with a stranger I will never see again. Like, I can chit-chat with an uber driver all day. If I were a Joan Thatiah kind of writer, I would write a whole book about the bizarre marriages of Nairobi Uber drivers. I’m much more at ease with a trauma-dumping Uber driver than with the prerequisite thirty seconds of small talk with my sister before a phone-call gets going. I willingly enter a conversation, only if I am not required to share myself. Contained bursts of one-sided connections—the priest on the other side of the confession box.
I think, if left to inertia, if I just went along with my instincts, I will build a near-empty life. A solitary figure roaming literary festivals and cinemas, perfectly content, ecstatic even, that this is my life. But I know it would be a bad life. That it would be an abandonment of my needs, a betrayal of my ideals on friendship and community. I know how exactly you build deeper, meaningful friendships. “Inconvenience is the price you pay for community.” I know. I know to have good friendships, I might have to occasionally give up solitary Thursday afternoons in a movie theatre. I know. But I’m terrified. What if? What if I’m not that generous?
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Photo by Karen Zhao on Unsplash
