Lessons from Cheryl Strayed and the Loss of Lifelong Friends

Recently I read a Cheryl Strayed quote that went something like "...understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again." This is a line from a letter to her twenty-something self (which you can read it in its amazing entirety here), that I had read at the end my twenties with the satisfied feeling of one who has already mastered much of the material.

But today, as I stood in my kitchen making some lunch and mulling over a problem I've been having lately with two good friends, those words in particular came floating back up in my mind and the truth of them hit me full-force. I realized that the lesson behind them is that lessons need to be learned and then learned again. And again. And then I stopped chopping the carrot I had been dicing and stood there, and probably said something like dammit aloud.

Because there comes a point, I think - maybe when we hit 30? - that we want to say "Okay! I'm a grown-up now! I 've had 30 years of stuff happen to me, and I have learned all the things I need to know! Where can I get my grown-up pin that lets everybody know that I know all these things now?"

And it's incredibly humbling and frustrating to realize that maybe you don't.

The reason I was thinking about all of these lessons and lines to begin with is that these two good friends I mentioned are currently not speaking to me. This is tough.

A little background: these girls have been big parts of my life for years.  I've known one since we were 10. We're 30 now. 20 years of friendship can lead you to believe that a person will always be in your life. When you conjure them up, it's as part of the warm, fuzzy fabric of Who You Really Are. They live in the heart of your heart, at the root of the "you" you know and like best.

Because you've had sleepovers with these girls. Ridden to prom with them in a limo a lifetime ago. Known their high school and college and post-college boyfriends. Known their fiances and stood next to them in breath-crushing bridesmaid gowns as those fiances became their husbands. Seen them through the loss of jobs and grandparents, cried and laughed together countless times, had 4-hour conversations pondering the direction of life, answered their calls in the middle of the night. 

And after going through all of that, you can get comfortable with your friendship with them, become confident that it can weather anything. You assume they'll stay with you through marriages and divorces, births and deaths. These women were there before the men in your life,  after all, and will be there, you think, after they're gone too. Along with maybe your siblings, if you're lucky, they will form the truest and most lasting relationships of your life.

But then something happens. You forget to remember to treat them the way you treat the new friends of your life. This sounds utterly clichéd because it's utterly and commonly and depressingly true.  You make those new friends when you move, when you get a new job, when you're in someone's wedding. You form unexpected bonds and remember to ask these new people how their days have been, and maybe to even let them talk first. You need to make a good impression on them. 

But the ones that know you...maybe you start to feel like they already understand that you're a good and loving soul. Maybe you feel like they get who you are and are going to stand by you no matter how unflattering a side of yourself you let them see. 

These girls have lately seen an absolutely unflattering side of me. The side that's more wrapped up in herself than she cares to admit. The kind that needs to be heard first and asks questions about others last, or not at all. It's not a good place to be. But I thought we had a pact. I thought that when one of us was in a tough spot, those bonds of friendship would draw taut and give us the strength to hold fast. 

It turns out that that might not be true. I don't know the future, how all this will get resolved. I like to think that we will be able to trudge our way through this crappy chapter and get on to the good stuff ahead. I hope we can have another one of those two-hour talks in which we say I was an idiot; I did this wrong; I didn't mean to hurt you; I didn't realize I made you feel like I only cared about me. Of course of course of COURSE I care about you.

I hope we do.

Because part of me fears that I don't know who I am without these friends. When you define yourself largely by your connection to others, you worry you will lose some of that self if you lose them. 

But today in my kitchen I realized that maybe I needed to remember the wisdom of Cheryl Strayed. Maybe I needed to resolve a lesson that I thought I had resolved within myself before. 

Because yes I want my lifelong friends to prove just that.  But -- and this is the hard part, the painful truth part that I would rather not know -- by the age of 30, I have lost people before. I have lost boyfriends and a dearly loved grandmother and the man whose genetic code makes up half my DNA.

And I've learned that I am still here after each of these people go.

Losing others has taught me that sometimes people are in your life for just a chapter. That some connections are fleeting, some are long-lasting, and a whole bunch are in between. I know this is sounding more like a Hallmark card with every minute, but I'm just gonna go for it and say that maybe friendships are meant to serve a purpose in our lives. Maybe they last as long as we need them to. Maybe they show us a part of ourselves or the world we didn't formerly know, and then they go.

This is probably over-simplifying it, but I think that might be true, at least sometimes. Maybe we need to realize what we've learned, take stock of who we are, and let some people go.  Maybe, even if we don't fully want to, we need to be grateful for what they've taught us or helped us through, and then look to our new friends, to the bonds that we've just formed, to anchor us in the here and now. Maybe the disappearance of some friendships we thought were rock-solid will just help us to see more clearly the ones that really, truly are.