It's overdue, that I start writing again. When I thought about why i don't post much here anymore, I really thought about the difference in me during 'peak' posting era versus now. It's not just that the entire blogging community has disintegrated. And it's not that life has become so busy, that my writing has all been technical and scientific and work-related. And it's not even that I don't have anything to say. Though all those things have felt true.
But I realized partly, I was writing to be seen, to be heard, to be understood. Even if it was only by one or two people, or even if it was only just for myself. It's the biggest difference I've noticed over time. I used to feel so lonely and feel so despondent. That I didn't have my people, those likeminded people who felt the way that I did, who valued the same things that I did, that I understood and who understood me. And for a little while, the internet harbored this promise that maybe those people, my people, were out there, just trying to find a connection.
Really, the only person who needed to know me was me, as cheesy as it sounds. But the fact is, that's the only person who can ever know me. I remember S said to me once that he had figured out our mutual friend B, but that he hadn't quite figured me out. There are two things about that which left me speechless. First, the utter arrogance to assume he had figured B out after knowing her for a few years as a classmate, and having a few deeper conversations with her. Second, I understood why he felt he had figured her out.
Because B was like a lot of people in this world. You can take the route that society indicates. You can fit into the norms. And you can seem quite knowable. It doesn't mean you are, it doesn't mean anyone actually knows you- but you seem pretty accessible.
It was what ultimately ended one of my very closest friendships. Sure, there was also the fact that he decided to become an anti-vaxxer and I decided to become a physician at almost the same time. But there was also this- I had spent almost 95% of our interactions trying to convince him I was someone worth knowing, and trying to make him see me. When I was younger, he'd accused me once of not wanting to be known- which should have tipped me off that we would eventually disappear from each other's lives, because my whole life I'd craved to be known. It wasn't just that I wanted to be known, I wanted to be known by him. I had conjured up this notion that he knew me better than anyone else in the world. And I think we both believed it.
And then I went to medical school, and I realized he didn't know me after all, when he muttered, flippantly, "what, you're going to talk to people about cancer?" with this disbelief. Like he couldn't imagine me having the capacity to treat a cancer patient. Like he couldn't imagine me caring for patients the way which was required.
Probably the toughest part of the dissolution of our friendship was grieving that- grieving that he did not, in fact, know me after all. It was my fault too. As much as I thought it wasn't true, in some ways I didn't want to be known. I didn't have the vocabulary back then. I didn't know about code switching. Part of our friendship was rooted in white-adjacency and the wedge in our friendship was the not-quite-whiteness. Part of our friendship was very Gen X, very rooted in rebellion, and then he became part of the establishment. But mostly our friendship was based on saying we were each other's oldest friends, that we'd known each other the longest. But we didn't, not really.
And maybe we didn't want to really. Once, a long, long time ago, when we were very young, he and I were out with his family on a cold night in Massachusetts. A friend of his mom turned up, an Indian woman from India, and she was probably around the age I am now. The age of IDGAF, frankly. And she also didn't have a notion about someone like me, someone born in EBF, in white bread central. When I was introduced to her, the woman laughed and jeered my friend for not knowing how to pronounce his alleged best friend's name.
I used to sometimes try to catch her, but never even caught her name, the song goes. I'm old enough now that I've had time to think about it, and I don't really care anymore. These are problems that nowadays, you don't even have to have. We got left behind, our generation who struggled to live in two different worlds without letting the colors bleed into each other, but I am happy for those who do not have to think about such things now.
But time does interesting things. You survive and the hurt fades away, and it's no one's fault even. To some extent, I'm not trying to be known anymore, because I recognize the impossibility of it. One of my dearest friends gets angry at me sometimes, because I can be a bit passive about my friendships nowadays. I love my friends, but I don't expect a lot in return, and I don't fight it if those friendships fade away. She wants to fight. But she's a decade younger than me. She just doesn't know yet. That even the friends you love most, the ones to whom you feel the closest, even those friends may drift away because of circumstance, or because of some wedge that drives you apart despite everyone's good intentions. And it's not something sad, not really. It's basic chemistry and physics. The world tends towards entropy- things fall apart, it's scientific.
And maybe I don't have anything to say anymore. Maybe my generation is supposed to just be quiet now. And let me tell you, in my personal life, day to day, I live pretty interiorly. This blog is pretty interior, considering it's hardly read and blogs are essentially dead. On Twitter, where I'm probably most active, I'm still pretty quiet, and the real joy I have there is listening to other points of view and learning. I'll never know anyone on Twitter, I'll never really know anyone who reads this. But is that so different from the world outside of the internet?
Anyway, nevertheless, more tomorrow, when I'm hopefully less rusty, if this #1000wordsofsummer thing works out.
*If you have not heard this classic Ben Folds/Regina Spektor duet, please correct your life here.
No comments:
Post a Comment