Hard Time

What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses. ~John Irving, The Cider House Rules

It's hard to keep in touch with people. It's hard to admit that, too. I know I've let friendships wither, and I know what it's like to come to the uncomfortable realization that someone I would have considered a great friend a year or two ago is now someone to whom I am a stranger and vice versa.

As it was happening, I guess I just didn't realize how much I've grown apart from people after college, in both physical and emotional distance. I have spent the last two years in a world few friends understand, and I readily admit that it is a world I try to keep an arm's length away from others who don't inhabit it. I can't - or don't want to try to - talk (and I mean really talk, not just offer repeated vague and bland generalizations) to people about teaching if they are not teachers themselves. My classroom experiences are one of the few things I haven't shared with my parents, and that's saying something. I look back on these two years incredibly fondly, and there was nothing that happened that I wouldn't feel comfortable sharing with my parents or any close friend. I simply choose not to. This experience is a part of me, and it belongs to me in a way that I don't think they could begin to comprehend.

I recently read a blog post that compared TFA to a cult, which is not a new analogy by any accounts, and I realize the above paragraph does nothing to dispute that. (For the record, I think many groups could be consider cults by definition and interpretation. Hello, alma mater?) But it was (and is) by choice that I didn't talk about teaching with my family and old friends. It seemed too overwhelming, too heavy, too maddening to get into. And it was too meaningful to reduce to small talk, and so I rarely tried.

I sent out periodic newsletters to many people from pre-TFA life, and I peppered them with photographs and uplifting stories, making sure to avoid negativity and anything else that could color readers' perceptions of the work I was doing, or worse, the students I was teaching. Call it what you will - spin, dishonesty, protection - but I couldn't justify filling someone's inbox with anything less than optimism, and anyone who knew me well enough to get one would have expected nothing less.

It may well be that I never get to a place where I can open up to everyone, and if I actually do, by that time, I may have already forgotten most of the best stories, the smaller triumphs and failures. I hope that moving back east will allow some of these friendships to flourish again, but I know that mere proximity will not be enough. It scares me, too, that the phenomenal people I have met and cultivated friendships with here might also fall victim to the distance that invaded my other friendships from college. (I feel less troubled by friendships from high school because those that mean the most to me defy time and distance apart time and time again.) Will I hide law school away from everyone detached from it? Will I find it not worth the effort to describe?

Rita worries that we will lose each other, and I hate to think it could ever happen, but I worry too. My roommates have been my three absolute best friends here, and it's awful to think that we could ever not be in touch. But I have said the same things about other people and, well, it's those deteriorating friendships that have inspired this post.

I didn't mean to be such a downer. Whoops.