Three things I learned reconnecting with old friends

I’ll start with a confession — I’ve never been good about keeping in touch with people. For one reason or another, physical separation from a person usually leads to me losing touch with them. Given that I just started grad school this past fall in the middle of a truly bizarre time in the world, the past few years have seen many life transitions that have created plenty of separation and led to plenty of moments where I’ve lost touch with a friend.

After spending most of my life in the same place and going to college in my hometown, I decided to choose the path of growth and move across states, miles, and time zones for grad school. It was a difficult decision to make, but I knew that at some point in my life, I would have to learn how to be more independent, and now felt like as good a time as any. While my first year in grad school has felt like a positive one, there have certainly been a few of those moments of feeling isolated. That sense of isolation, in some ways, brought back guilt that there are people who were really important to me that I lost touch with. So, one evening, I decided to text a bunch of people I hadn’t talked to in a while, ranging from a few months to many years, to see if they’d be willing to catch up some time.

I sent A LOT of text messages out. Some of them went completely unanswered, some led to a few text conversations, and others led to some amazing phone/video calls. From the minute I sent any of these text messages, there was the pang of anxiety that hit me…“after so many years, will these people even want to talk to me? Will they respond? Will they be upset that I didn’t reach out for so long? Did they secretly hate me back in the day?” I eventually realized that I didn’t really have much to lose other than the 30 seconds it took to compose a message to someone. If I never got a response, I wouldn’t be that far away from the place I already was.

Through all of this, I didn’t set out to accomplish anything other than just catching up with people who were important to me at various points in my life, but each of the conversations I’ve had so far left me feeling like I’d learned a pretty cool, distinct, lesson that I felt like sharing.

Nikita: It’s completely normal to still be “figuring it out”

Nikita was one of my first mentors in college, and she was one of my closest friends for much of college, something of an older sister figure to me who’s given me advice on everything from academics and careers to the disaster that is my love life. Even though she graduated halfway into my junior year, we still managed to keep up for a while after. But, with life transitions on both our ends, it had been about 6 months since we had spoken.

We weren’t missing a whole lot of context on each other’s lives, but there was still certainly a lot we had to catch up on. That’s why I decided that she would be my first call. We got to talk a lot about where we were in our lives since we last talked — both of us had moved to new cities and were in new careers, and it was really great to hear about all of the amazing things she’d been up to. Our conversation lasted for 2 hours, but the time zoomed by (pun only sort of intended) much quicker. I got to see that it isn’t weird to not be completely adjusted to life in a new situation.

I had gotten so used to social media, which was showing me people I know moving to new cities and having what looked to be the times of their lives while I was still trying to figure out who I was in this new context in my life. But, talking to someone who had just gone through that transition and was open enough to talk about both the positives and negatives of it made me feel a lot better about where I was at.

I also saw the light at the end of the tunnel — that it does get easier as time goes on. Nik is doing amazingly well personally and professionally, and through her I got to see a picture of where I might be a little bit down the road.

Alex: It can be possible to revisit great parts of tough times in your life

Alex was another mentor of mine during some tough times in my collegiate life. I had joined student government in college as a way to bring some of my ideas to action and eventually decided to run for student body president. If you have never paid much attention to a college student body president election (I wouldn’t blame you), you may not know that the candidates and their teams take these things wildly seriously. Hundreds of hours and dollars are spent crafting campaigns and the elections can get…dramatic. In my case, we lost the election by a historically slim margin and the context surrounding it left some bad memories that I was having some trouble moving on from — I pretty much kept mostly to myself in the aftermath.

Alex, who had been a sounding board and confidant, in addition to a really good friend, before and during that time, was one of the people that I ended up losing touch with in the aftermath, partly because it was hard to separate the person from the stage and context in which they were a part of my life. I carried around a lot of guilt for losing that connection, because he’d done so much for me during my time in undergrad and I wasn’t exactly showing my gratitude here. But he was also someone I was really excited for the opportunity to reconnect with.

I got to hear about his life now, we talked a lot about what we were trying to do to achieve work-life balance, and he inspired me to try and lean further into some of the hobbies I was starting to pick up. And while some conversation about the old student government days came up, I found myself not feeling that same pain that I used to when thinking about it.

I’ll offer the disclaimer that the notion of revisiting this time in my life was done after a lot of careful consideration, so make sure to do something like this only after careful consideration of your own and competent advice as well.

In my case, though, I was able to have an amazing conversation with someone who means a lot to me, even talking about a difficult time in my life, and really enjoy it deeply. It was absolutely a worthwhile reach-out for me.

Gabby: It’s never too late to reconnect

The person I was most apprehensive about reaching out to about this was my friend Gabby. I’ve known Gabby since middle school, and we became pretty good friends in high school. By the end of high school, I’d venture that she was one of very few people I considered a true friend. Unfortunately, with college starting and both of us at different schools, we lost touch for the most part by the time the first semester of college had wrapped up.

Over that first winter break, after social media algorithms dug up some accounts that were created in high school to say some hurtful things about me, I decided to pretty much purge my social media of anyone who I knew in high school, friend or otherwise. In hindsight, this was probably somewhat unfair towards people like Gabby, who was and is an absolute ray of sunshine, but what it meant more functionally is that neither of us really even knew what the other person was up to over the last half decade or so.

When the cameras turned on, we both sort of started laughing at the absurdity of the whole situation that we were reconnecting after so long. We talked for close to 2 hours as well, and it was one of the most fun conversations I’ve had in a long time. We reminisced over our high school days, talked about how we both wished our French (which we took together for more than 5 years) wasn’t so rusty, and about what it’s like to be trying to figure out what you’re passionate about. While this conversation made me wish I had texted her (much, much) sooner, I was so glad that I had done it now rather than never.

As long as it took for me to finally reach out to Gabby, after years of considering it, an amazing conversation— and a rekindled friendship — resulted from me finally doing it. So it really is never too late to reach out to those in your life who you wish you’d kept in better touch with. For some of the difficulties that come with our perpetually-connected world, we really do have more ways to stay connected than ever before, and it’s so worth it to take advantage of those.

Everyday happiness can be about doing something a little bit adventurous, a little bit interesting, a little bit out of your routine. My hope in writing this is that someone might read this and decide to reconnect with people in their past. If I learned one overarching lesson in all of this, it’s that it takes someone deciding to send that text/email/carrier pigeon out after that long, and that we can keep wanting to and planning to reconnect, but never get around to it. For me, I’ve decided to turn this into more of a habit than a project, and hopefully that will mean that the list of people I feel like I’ve “lost touch with” will continue to shrink.