Yes about the friends thing. And I do believe it has to do with age. As Bonnie Raitt sings, "Time gets kind of precious when there's less of it to waste." Only the friendships with the most juice make the cut--as cold as that may sound.
This resonated with me hard. I turned 60 last year, and I just started losing friends. One moved and never spoke to me again. My best friend of 24 years took her boyfriend's side in a dispute that was clearly his fault. Another friend considered me a fake friend because I asked for a favor, despite my constant worry that he was dying in the hospital and no one would ever know.
But I am done with that. Like you, I don't have the stomach for it anymore, and I too believe it's age that took all my fucks away.
But I'm finding that the new friends I make are gentler, kinder, more fun, more understanding, and smarter.
I hope that happens to you.
I love your writing and how you wove your story into a review. (I'm not finished watching it, but I've seen the original version.) Thanks for sharing this.
Love your free associations here and I feel nostalgic for the Village Voice and I also don't want to go back to those days and I also don't want to live these days yet I still want to live and so it's confusing...
My adult daughter is high functioning autistic, struggles to read the room and struggles to know what other people need and want, like you mention you do. She’s in her mid twenties and it really impacts her life and I’m not sure how to respond/help or if I can at all. Is this something that can be learned or taught I wonder, or is it more “it is what it is” and we all need to learn to accept it? I don’t have good hair or a cashmere scarf lol but like Richard I don’t struggle with this issue and wonder what if anything to say or do when she complains about having no close friends. No woman in her twenties wants her only friend to be her middle aged mother. Friendship is not innate I’m learning.
Perfect: "Everything in me that could have been cowering or seething had been burned out, leaving only love for how life could sometimes go and admiration for the faces swimming past me."
At 71, I see so clearly the ways I should have maintained connections and so often did not. I could have maintained a life-long deep friendship with my high-school best friend's mother, whom I adored. Why did I not? Laziness? Indifference? I can not fathom it now. I reconnected with my friend on Facebook, and was able to give her a message for her mother's 95th birthday, and her mother remembered me. But we could have loved each other like relatives for 35+ years and I did not even try. I guess that getting older means we have to come to terms with a lot of this sort of thing. Thanks for addressing this issue.
Wow, I can feel this viscerally. I have allowed three long life gal-friends to fall away within the past four years. I got tired of these friends not having my back when I so desperately needed them. It was a lesson more about myself for always being the one to jump into the water to save them from drowning than it was for them to need saving. It took me years to develop a voice of my own, and when I found it, I simply ghosted out of their lives after the final altercations.
And like Leslie alluded, at 71, I too am done giving my "fucks away".
You want my help, you gotta ask for it. No more unsolicited advice or jumping into cold waters with all my clothes on.
I so get this about friends. I lost touch right out of high school. I moved city. I never wanted to attend reunions. Other people I met along the way in the many places I have lived haven't stuck around after I moved. I have very few people who I keep in touch with because we both make the effort. For too long I was the only one making the effort and after a while, like you I asked myself 'what for'. It turns out many of us feel shame to say we don't have many friends. I moved to where I live now 4 years ago. It was the worst timing to start again in a brand new place as we were in lock down as soon as I moved into my house. I live on the outskirts of a small village so I know my neighbour who is older than me but is able to physically do a lot more. She goes walking with other friends but I can't so I am alone at home. I've come to accept this now.
On a different note I just finished watching Ripley last night. You have encapsulated it perfectly. I enjoyed it despite being on edge a few times. It is creepy to see how he does things without remorse. He sees getting rid of a person just like getting rid of a problem. He is so arrogant, however, that he decides to stay in Venice. I let a big 'oh no, that is crazy' at the end. Thanks for your beautiful summary of this incredible series. It is so different from the movie with Jude Law. Ripley was a charmer in that one.
Here's the fractal message I'm hearing from this piece, and from so much of what I've read from you: "you can live... the feeling of a great experiment in freedom... a spirit of... love for things onto a whole society... [to] produce a vibration that can bend minds." I'm sorry about the heavy, brown cloud; to my mind, that's the vaporized kool-aid of cultural mishegas about relating as adults and aging that us oldsters are all gently, spontaneously rinsing out of our systems.
Thanks for your generous transparency and fortitude, wryly, playfully, shining light for us as we bumble our ways through this life project.
You're such a good writer; thanks for this post. "Exhaling" your "sad brown thoughts." Wow.
I wonder WTAF has happened to friendship? You're not the only one who is no longer interested in apologizing, or accepting apologies, or allowing for the sad grey humanity of others in order to keep a friendship going. I sit at the other end of that seesaw, my ass bumping the hard dirt of the playground, as one of my best and oldest friends from childhood stepped off the teeter-totter early in the pandemic.
From what I see and hear, that kind of thing is common right now. Common and sad. Some of it may be age; some may be brittleness and cruelty available to all ages, whether officially sociopathic or not.
As an unopened greeting card from my oldest friend sits on the credenza, I join you in the warm pool of resonance. After years of effort on my part and not much in response, the card feels like a passive/aggressive and somewhat feeble attempt at reclaiming what was meaningful. It may seem childish but it feels right in my heart. Thank you. ♥️
Great piece, Laurie. You are far from alone. I have a wonderful set of friends, both old and new. But I also have the relationships that I've left behind, that became unhealthy or were toxic from the start. Either way, I have no desire to return. I used to love smoking. I also have no desire to smoke again. Our bodies and our spirits know instinctively what we need as we grow. Our minds are what get in the way. Cheers to your new life!
Is friendship both a blessing and a curse? I recognise true, deep friendship, the frequent, (or rare) get-togethers that leave me feeling good after the encounter.
How many friends do we need though? How many friends can we cope with? Friendship has to be reciprocal, so there's a lot of 'giving' involved in maintaining a friendship. And it can be tiring maintaining friendships, especially via social media.
I recognise the brown cloud that lingers when the responding ends and the guilt envelopes me in the letting go. Alas, I have recognised that I just cannot cope any longer with too much 'giving'.
I feel truly grateful that I still have close and satisfying relationships with my childhood friends. There only a few. We don't see each other as much but I know they are a phone-call away. I can't imagine life without them! However, as I age I understand that there must be reciprocity in relationships for them to survive and the ones that aren't reciprocal are the ones that will fade away.
I love this one so much, L, especially tying in Ridley, which I adored, and losing friends, and the Voice, and the decision not to make things right, at least for the moment, and Richard anchoring the whole thing. This is tight writing with expansive scope. Brava, kid, brava. XXD
Yes about the friends thing. And I do believe it has to do with age. As Bonnie Raitt sings, "Time gets kind of precious when there's less of it to waste." Only the friendships with the most juice make the cut--as cold as that may sound.
This resonated with me hard. I turned 60 last year, and I just started losing friends. One moved and never spoke to me again. My best friend of 24 years took her boyfriend's side in a dispute that was clearly his fault. Another friend considered me a fake friend because I asked for a favor, despite my constant worry that he was dying in the hospital and no one would ever know.
But I am done with that. Like you, I don't have the stomach for it anymore, and I too believe it's age that took all my fucks away.
But I'm finding that the new friends I make are gentler, kinder, more fun, more understanding, and smarter.
I hope that happens to you.
I love your writing and how you wove your story into a review. (I'm not finished watching it, but I've seen the original version.) Thanks for sharing this.
Love your free associations here and I feel nostalgic for the Village Voice and I also don't want to go back to those days and I also don't want to live these days yet I still want to live and so it's confusing...
My adult daughter is high functioning autistic, struggles to read the room and struggles to know what other people need and want, like you mention you do. She’s in her mid twenties and it really impacts her life and I’m not sure how to respond/help or if I can at all. Is this something that can be learned or taught I wonder, or is it more “it is what it is” and we all need to learn to accept it? I don’t have good hair or a cashmere scarf lol but like Richard I don’t struggle with this issue and wonder what if anything to say or do when she complains about having no close friends. No woman in her twenties wants her only friend to be her middle aged mother. Friendship is not innate I’m learning.
The gloom and heartbreak of losing and letting go friends - I relate hard and deep and I hope you will write more about that. I need to understand.
Perfect: "Everything in me that could have been cowering or seething had been burned out, leaving only love for how life could sometimes go and admiration for the faces swimming past me."
At 71, I see so clearly the ways I should have maintained connections and so often did not. I could have maintained a life-long deep friendship with my high-school best friend's mother, whom I adored. Why did I not? Laziness? Indifference? I can not fathom it now. I reconnected with my friend on Facebook, and was able to give her a message for her mother's 95th birthday, and her mother remembered me. But we could have loved each other like relatives for 35+ years and I did not even try. I guess that getting older means we have to come to terms with a lot of this sort of thing. Thanks for addressing this issue.
Wow, I can feel this viscerally. I have allowed three long life gal-friends to fall away within the past four years. I got tired of these friends not having my back when I so desperately needed them. It was a lesson more about myself for always being the one to jump into the water to save them from drowning than it was for them to need saving. It took me years to develop a voice of my own, and when I found it, I simply ghosted out of their lives after the final altercations.
And like Leslie alluded, at 71, I too am done giving my "fucks away".
You want my help, you gotta ask for it. No more unsolicited advice or jumping into cold waters with all my clothes on.
I so get this about friends. I lost touch right out of high school. I moved city. I never wanted to attend reunions. Other people I met along the way in the many places I have lived haven't stuck around after I moved. I have very few people who I keep in touch with because we both make the effort. For too long I was the only one making the effort and after a while, like you I asked myself 'what for'. It turns out many of us feel shame to say we don't have many friends. I moved to where I live now 4 years ago. It was the worst timing to start again in a brand new place as we were in lock down as soon as I moved into my house. I live on the outskirts of a small village so I know my neighbour who is older than me but is able to physically do a lot more. She goes walking with other friends but I can't so I am alone at home. I've come to accept this now.
On a different note I just finished watching Ripley last night. You have encapsulated it perfectly. I enjoyed it despite being on edge a few times. It is creepy to see how he does things without remorse. He sees getting rid of a person just like getting rid of a problem. He is so arrogant, however, that he decides to stay in Venice. I let a big 'oh no, that is crazy' at the end. Thanks for your beautiful summary of this incredible series. It is so different from the movie with Jude Law. Ripley was a charmer in that one.
"Standing near him, it’s like having an external hard drive." Great line!
Here's the fractal message I'm hearing from this piece, and from so much of what I've read from you: "you can live... the feeling of a great experiment in freedom... a spirit of... love for things onto a whole society... [to] produce a vibration that can bend minds." I'm sorry about the heavy, brown cloud; to my mind, that's the vaporized kool-aid of cultural mishegas about relating as adults and aging that us oldsters are all gently, spontaneously rinsing out of our systems.
Thanks for your generous transparency and fortitude, wryly, playfully, shining light for us as we bumble our ways through this life project.
You're such a good writer; thanks for this post. "Exhaling" your "sad brown thoughts." Wow.
I wonder WTAF has happened to friendship? You're not the only one who is no longer interested in apologizing, or accepting apologies, or allowing for the sad grey humanity of others in order to keep a friendship going. I sit at the other end of that seesaw, my ass bumping the hard dirt of the playground, as one of my best and oldest friends from childhood stepped off the teeter-totter early in the pandemic.
From what I see and hear, that kind of thing is common right now. Common and sad. Some of it may be age; some may be brittleness and cruelty available to all ages, whether officially sociopathic or not.
As an unopened greeting card from my oldest friend sits on the credenza, I join you in the warm pool of resonance. After years of effort on my part and not much in response, the card feels like a passive/aggressive and somewhat feeble attempt at reclaiming what was meaningful. It may seem childish but it feels right in my heart. Thank you. ♥️
Great piece, Laurie. You are far from alone. I have a wonderful set of friends, both old and new. But I also have the relationships that I've left behind, that became unhealthy or were toxic from the start. Either way, I have no desire to return. I used to love smoking. I also have no desire to smoke again. Our bodies and our spirits know instinctively what we need as we grow. Our minds are what get in the way. Cheers to your new life!
Is friendship both a blessing and a curse? I recognise true, deep friendship, the frequent, (or rare) get-togethers that leave me feeling good after the encounter.
How many friends do we need though? How many friends can we cope with? Friendship has to be reciprocal, so there's a lot of 'giving' involved in maintaining a friendship. And it can be tiring maintaining friendships, especially via social media.
I recognise the brown cloud that lingers when the responding ends and the guilt envelopes me in the letting go. Alas, I have recognised that I just cannot cope any longer with too much 'giving'.
I feel truly grateful that I still have close and satisfying relationships with my childhood friends. There only a few. We don't see each other as much but I know they are a phone-call away. I can't imagine life without them! However, as I age I understand that there must be reciprocity in relationships for them to survive and the ones that aren't reciprocal are the ones that will fade away.
I love this one so much, L, especially tying in Ridley, which I adored, and losing friends, and the Voice, and the decision not to make things right, at least for the moment, and Richard anchoring the whole thing. This is tight writing with expansive scope. Brava, kid, brava. XXD