I take a lot of relationships for granted, and have taken a lot of relationships for granted.
I mean this both in the oblivious, not fully aware sense (until such people suddenly disappear from my vantage point of life) and also in the kind of aware but placed in the back of my mind sense. I want to particularly emphasize the "until such people suddenly disappear" part because it gets to happen fairly often when you've met enough people. For another social media analogy, it's something that can be characterized by the hundreds of Facebook friends I have and the large enough subset of those who've either defriended me or who I don't really talk to in the first place anyway. In that respect, I've come to expect this as inevitable; who can really expect to keep up with that many people in their life anyway?
Even then, I can't help but feel a small pang of regret whenever I notice these things.
Back in college, I served in hospitality team for my Christian fellowship my senior year, and it made me ever more conscious, or should I say paranoid, of who was present/not present on any given week of the people I knew, even while I myself never quite entirely felt like I fit in to begin with (but that's another story). And although my role was largely focused around the experience of new, incoming folks who were much more likely not to stick around for too long in the first place (and whether or not hospitality team actually worked is a completely other subject of debate beyond the scope of this post), I would still notice when folks who'd been around for a while disappeared as well.
And I guess to a certain extent my role in this group resulted in a conflict of interest, particularly if I hadn't really interacted with these people much outside of the normal context of this group. Would it still be appropriate, or rather, would it be right to try and keep in contact with these people when I hadn't really done it much before? Would they see me as trying to proselytize them or just bothering them when they didn't want to be bothered? Why did I want to contact them in the first place, if we hadn't really established that sort of connection? Or to put it more bluntly, why did I never really talk to these people that much in the past to begin with?
Sometimes you don't realize the value of the presence of another person until they're gone.
One other thing I appreciated about my fellowship, or in particular my small group, was that it provided a regular context for which I could see people who I might not regularly be able to see or talk to otherwise (regardless of how much I actually talked to these people normally outside of that context, because as Ryan L puts it I'm like a sponge who soaks in the presence of other people... but don't take that analogy too far because that image is a little too much for my taste). But at the same time, I realized after a while that I took for granted that responsibility the group took on. For what about when the group ended, as it inevitably did with the end of college? How many of these people would I still actually keep in contact with, like I do with some of my closer friends in college? How many of these people would still feel comfortable having a conversation with me years later?
At this point, I've been both in a central position of a social circle, and also somewhat on the fringes of another one, multiple times each. I know what it's like to be feel included and left out, to feel both connected and disconnected, to feel like I've contributed something or other times feel like I'm taking up space. I acknowledge that the best kinds of relationships are the ones that last long beyond the context they originally started in, but at the same time I can still see value in the ones that only persisted for the duration of that context. I still find it difficult to accept the latter case sometimes when it happens, though.
These thoughts come to me now as I start to see some of my existing social circles undergoing a recognizable state of flux, as past ones have done: people coming and going as their own personal life circumstances change. I might not ever see some of these folks again, or at least not for a long while. I've wished I could've been closer to some of them even though I find my own ability to do so a bit lacking, since it becomes much more difficult to establish close relationships with people in your life as you grow older. These kinds of relationships take effort and work to start and then maintain; they aren't generally the kinds of things that you can simply leave alone until the person on the other line arbitrarily decides one day to hit you up again out of the blue (as much as I would love to be on the other end of that line...). Well, technically it does happen sometimes, but usually only with the people with whom you've established a precedent for allowing that interaction to occur in the first place, like good old friends.
Presently, I've grown accustomed to holding most people sort of at arm's length for lack of consistent and persistent contact compared to what I had in college combined with growing accustomed to living alone, which has made it rather more difficult to develop the close kinds of relationships I've enjoyed in the past. So when people in my current circles for example tell me about how they don't feel as connected or comfortable with the way a group is, it sort of takes me by surprise because I'm already used to that sort of detachment and maybe don't mind it as much.
Sure, in the past I've wondered why I still bothered coming out to some events myself, but that never really stopped me from coming out in the long run- I think that's partly a function of how my personality is, if anything. I could still find something worthwhile out of the moment even if I didn't really fit in the same way that others did. But after hearing from other people who don't experience these things the same way, it makes me wonder how much I've overlooked the concerns of these individuals for the sake of some group, let alone those who I haven't really talked to that much. How much did I take the mere presence of these people for granted, rather than see if I could try to engage their own social and personal needs just as I was getting mine own fulfilled already? You should already be able to tell from this blog how preoccupied I often am with my own thoughts; seems like hardly enough attention is given to the concerns of others as it is.
Engaging people on their own terms means a willingness to put oneself out there as available, to sometimes be willing to lend an ear, to listen to another, even when that person isn't necessarily expecting to be heard in the first place. I've often stumbled before ever getting to that point, out of fear out of offending another person or coming across as being too pushy or just not knowing where to start or if I should even bother trying why am I thinking about this I should just go home and mind my own business like everyone else does. But really, this just ends up with conversations years later of some people asking me, "how come you never talk to me?"
Because I'm complacent with a status quo where I only respond to people who reach out to me first (but if you do reach out first, I'd love to respond!... in a somewhat delayed fashion). Because I'm afraid of risking the possibility of being rejected by you the moment I try to reach out. Because I often overthink these things and focus mostly on how I feel and not about how you're feeling or doing. Because I worry more about how what attempts I might make to communicate with you will affect your perception of me (do I come across as too persistent or annoying to you?) than I do about how they might help maintain our relationship. I take you as a friend for granted.
And I'm sorry for all of that, honestly.
...But I also feel that saying sorry is not enough, and have even been told as much before in the past, because I have a shallow tendency to say sorry all the time even for things I shouldn't be sorry for or am not actually sorry for. And for what it's worth, writing these words on this blog won't really matter all that much, when they probably won't even reach the people they ought to be meant for (I'm presuming if you're still reading this blog, you're probably likely to still be in contact with me in some form or another even if only once in a while) and won't make up for what's happened in the past, what I did or didn't notice. And as my last post put it, maybe there just wasn't much there to develop to begin with, and I'm just making much ado about what could've happened scenario in my head, rather than accepting the past in all of its imperfection for what it was.
My real hope in writing this thought process out is to make myself more conscious of these issues whenever they inevitably do happen around me, and to step out of my comfort zone of pleasant detachment from the lives of other people for once. And that these words wouldn't simply be laid to rest here, but would serve as the root for some actual action at hand to be taken.
Now if only I had more time to do something other than maybe read something quick and sleep. I originally felt like writing something about goodreads (see link in sidebar) but then this came up. Another time. Good night!
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