Echoes at the Crossroads
I recently lost a friend.
Not to death, so finite and absolute. Not to the conspicuous departures marked by moving trucks, grand farewells, or the erosion of missed phone calls. Not to the ruptures of fights, whisper of gossip, or harsh words. This loss was executed deadly with quiet subtlety. Months slipped by, nearly a year if you tally them up, since we last saw each other. We had both traveled to different places for a brief week, and when we returned, life moved on as it does, unnoticed. Neither of us seemed quite the same. There were a few texts, but my friend remained distant. She withdrew from our reading group, detached from the things I shared to amuse or provoke thought. She had retreated into her own space. Inevitably, I found myself doing the same.
In the past year, life began catching up with me, pressing down hard on what I once believed to be a strength, now revealing itself more as a self-serving weakness when left unchecked. I have this tendency to see people not for who they are in the present, but for who they could become. I see them through the prism of their potential, their talents, their hopes, and their aspirations, imagining the world adoring them for all these qualities — just as I do. This fascination with the latent riches of their possible futures has a significant drawback. The problem, as you might guess, is that I often miss who they are right now. It’s not that I overlook their less endearing traits or the flaws they might possess; rather, I fail to see how they perceive themselves. I forget to notice what thoughts and concerns fill their minds, the psychological tension they navigate between their own aspirations and their currently experienced reality.
This is how I lost my friend. I failed to recognize that her many words and views served as a cloak, a mechanism to avoid confronting her own fears. Wrapped in that cloak, those fears grew unchecked, and eventually, I became their embodiment. My words, my behavior, every aspect of me transformed into a projection surface, a caricature of naivety in need of correction. In this reflection, I no longer recognized myself. Her reprimands were an external manifestation of her subconscious self-punishment. Yet, I did not perceive this unfolding transformation. I failed to see it, until it was too late.
It was too late when the hurt set in. When we met one last time, months apart, it wasn’t just a singular occurrence but a death by a thousand cuts, until the last cut was met with raw psychological flesh. Words without empathy arrived when empathy was all I sought. Blank reactions to matters of importance to me. The things that once mattered to her now felt distant, detached from our conversation, from our friendship, even from herself. Suddenly, I was confronted with two strangers: I saw her, and I saw myself, yet neither felt real.
My friend imparted a crucial lesson, albeit in hindsight. She revealed to me who I was not, or not any longer.
She was not an outlier, just the messenger who brought the lesson home. Friends should be different from those with whom we share no deeper bond. Yet her actions and words mirrored those of strangers more than those of someone I believed understood my inner life. I now see that I expected something from her that I didn’t even expect from myself. Last year, I found myself increasingly subjected to erratic attitudes, dismissive behaviors, and the exploitation of goodwill. With each incident, week by week, month after month, I diminished into a formless entity, shaped by these strange, repeatedly incoming blows. My mistake was letting it happen. I lost the ability to trust my own sense, my words and actions instead tossed around by the insecurities, wills, whims and wants of others. These others had no obligation to treat me better than I treated myself, yet some were individuals in whom I had placed trust due to their words and sometimes their positions. I was in for a rude awakening. When it came, I found my feet back on the ground.
I scaled back, I sat down, and over the months, I focused on what mattered to me. I began to say no. I stopped smiling only to placate others. In a daring move, I applied for a cosmically placed opportunity. Preparing my job materials and final talk, I realized it wasn’t about securing the job. It was about recognizing myself in the way I once saw others: through the lens of their potential and future. In that moment, I reclaimed the momentum, the shape, the trust in myself I had once abandoned. And I was reminded of something Hannah Arendt once said in an interview with Günter Gaus:
What other people think of me is none of my business.
And with this turn, I rediscovered not only myself but suddenly saw more of other people. I watched them navigate their own paths, articulate their own narratives, and occasionally, we found ourselves at the same crossroads, seeing each other anew.
Though I lost a friend, in the end, it was not to the pain of hurt but to the relentless cycle of Saṃsāra.
Until we meet again, my friend.
