Moving on is Hard to Do

The other day a friend of mine told me she was moving on from a close friend. At first, I assumed this was “a lockdown argument,” - for frayed nerves and exhaustion are making us all a bit quicker to take offence - but as she went on I realised this was something else. This friend had not been there for her during lockdown, she explained, she wasn’t a real friend at all. This got me thinking: how many of us have re-evaluated the quality of our relationships in recent months? And how many of us have realised that without the comradery of the office or the convenience of playdates – that some friendships aren’t really friendships at all? I thought too of the fall out there must have been as we organised ourselves into bubbles - how many of us were left out of a bubble or worse, not even considered at all?

I have often struggled with friendships. Born and raised in England by Irish parents I came to Ireland to study English at Trinity College in the 90s. Standing on the ramp outside the arts block, listening to other students making connections I realised that Ireland was a tight network and that I would always be an outsider. Over the years this has played out again and again, particularly following relationship breakups when friends have experienced divided loyalties. I have had to move on many times, but as I have got older I’ve learned not to take any of this so personally – ending up in a different box in someone’s head doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There is something liberating about not being part of a clique, with all its petty rivalries and complications. And the whole business of moving on works both ways: I too have had my moments when I have realised I have outgrown a friend, noticing in a way I cannot ignore that a conversation has begun to feel scripted.

Not all friendships last forever, my mother used to say, some ebb and flow. Letting go of the old creates space for the new. But moving on does take a degree of tact. Everyone has their own formula: a friend of mine who gave up drink in her twenties invited all her old drinking buddies to yoga workshops and afternoon long rambles and left it up to them whether they followed her into her new life or not. A decade later, another friend, tired of partying, turned off her phone and stayed at home. It’s a decision she now regrets: “ I thought staying in was the only alternative to going out,” she said. “Now I look back on all those years and think, why didn’t I go out and get a new life? Start a new hobby? Volunteer?”

After years of reading Oh, The Places You’ll Go by Dr Seuss to my children, I understand she was in the waiting place. In this book, which describes the chequered path of life, the narrator explains that is easy after a few unexpected lurches, bumps and slumps, to end up in the waiting place, “a most useless place:”

“The Waiting Place…
for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or that rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or a No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.”

I think I spent a lot of my twenties in the waiting place. It’s all too easy to panic there, in other words, to believe this is the rest of your life. Looking back now, I wish I had enjoyed it more and used it as a time for pause and self-reflection, what a therapist might call “honouring the space between no longer and not yet”.

Now I am juggling parenting and working I realise moving on can be a version of downsizing, an ill-thought-through act of fire-fighting. Another reckoning happens in mid-life, with all its bumps and transformations. Last Christmas a friend of mine came back from her school reunion oddly cheered. “Now it’s getting interesting,” she said. “In my twenties, everyone boasted about how much they were earning, while the confused ones stood on the side-lines getting really drunk. Now the drunk ones have gone through rehab and well, the others are all having a mid-life crisis…you can see who is growing and learning and who isn’t.”

The other day I read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:

“Take pleasure in your growth, in which no one can accompany you, and be kind-hearted towards those you leave behind, and be assured and gentle with them and do not plague them with your doubts or frighten them with your confidence or your joyfulness, which they cannot understand. Look for some kind of simple and loyal way of being together with them which does not necessarily have to alter however much you change; love in them a form of life different from your own and show understanding for the older ones who fear precisely the solitude in which you trust.”

I thought about putting a clumsy version of this to my friend after she revealed that her strategy for moving on involved ignoring her friend’s phone calls and blanking her in Spar. She dug out her phone, opened Pinterest, and handed it to me. I’m channelling this, she said. You’re not lonely, I read. You are moving on and not everyone can go with you.

I wonder how many people around the world are thinking the same thing.

Nikki Walsh, December 2020.