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Hi there 👋🏽
Earlier this summer I took a trip back to a city I once called home. Trips like this always ensure you get a heavy dose of nostalgia - great to always come back face to face with the people, sights and smells you grew around. But the one thing different this time around was I did not make the effort to meet a lot of people whom I would have in previous years gone out of my way to meet.
Being away from them made me realize that a lot of people that I was friends with growing up was because of proximity, convenience, or inertia. You do outgrow some friendships. It is totally okay to acknowledge that and move on. It is fine to refer to someone as an acquaintance / colleague / classmate or an "ex-friend"!
It's fascinating how popular culture tends to romanticize the idea of BFFs, those eternal connections that are supposed to withstand the test of time. While it is really special having a friend who has been with you through it all, the honest truth is many Friendships don’t always last forever they often fizzle out gradually, almost imperceptibly.
We talk so much about breakups and failed romantic relationships, but why don't we give the concept of ex-friends its due attention? It's important to recognize and normalize that friendships, just like romantic relationships, can run their course.
We've all experienced it, haven't we? That friend who was once an integral part of our lives, someone with whom we shared laughter, secrets, and perhaps even tears. We had amazing adventures together and created countless memories. But as time went on, something changed. The connection that once felt so strong started to strain, and the things that brought us together no longer resonated.
And you know what? That's okay. We're not meant to stay the same people we were when we first met someone. Life is a constant evolution, and as we grow, our friendships may naturally drift apart
Maybe I have just grown up but I now find it completely pointless to desperately cling to a friendship that simply doesn't fit anymore. This doesn't mean that friendship was any less valuable or meaningful. I have loved each one of those friends and am forever grateful that our paths crossed. I am letting go because only by allowing friendships to naturally evolve and gracefully part ways, we create space for new connections that align with who we are in the present. Our lives are like a beautiful intricate mosaic, constantly shifting and evolving.
We should embrace the notion of ex-friends, not as something negative or dismissive, but as a celebration of personal growth.
This maybe my very contrarian view but I do think over indexing on old friendships can limit us. It is important to give ourselves permission to reinvent our social circles. And if that requires us to relabel a few folks as ex-friends, then so be it.
☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…
No coffee chat today! It is kinda still brewing ….
I had a bunch of very interesting conversations over the last few months, still working through the backlog to clean and transcribe them before I share with you all!
🤓 Open tabs…
(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)
⭐Do people last forever?’ Why it’s important that parents talk to their children about death
Having my first child brought with it an urgent fear of dying: I couldn’t bear the thought of ever being apart from my son. When Arlo was three days old, I saw an old man and I burst into tears and said to my partner, Cal: “One day Arlo will be old and we will be dead and we won’t know how he is or what he’s doing!”
So when my son started circling around the subject of death, I avoided it. I redirected; I lied. Miranda Featherstone, a school social worker from Rhode Island, wrote an essay on how to talk to children about death: “When children are very young,” she writes, “death can – and should – be yet another matter-of-fact feature of our world. It is like the moon; we might call their attention to it, even though we don’t live there: Look up and see!”
Though we tend to see history as just one political event after another, it’s technology and ideas, not politics, that change our lives the most. History should reflect that.
⭐The Magic of Your First Work Friends
There's an electricity to forming that first close friend at work. It's the thrill of staying too late at drinks to keep giggling. It's the delight of darting to someone's desk and dragging her to the bathroom to gossip. It's the tenderness of showing up to work on a rough morning and realising a co-worker will know instantly that something is wrong.
Those early-career friendships have become something of an endangered species. For some young people, including those who work in industries like tech and law that have yet to fully return to the office, work life now means taking video calls from bed. They have yet to meet their co-workers in person - let alone form the relationships that feel most consequential at the start of a career.
📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…
(My Twitter use has drastically gone down, I am now more active on Threads)
I would love to hear from you, feedback is always welcome!
And if you happen to know an inspiring working parent who should be featured in a future edition (or if you yourself are one) - please do get in touch
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Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer
Also: the word "friend" means a million things to a million different people. People say "my friend" when they mean "I met this person once", but others won't call someone they've hung out with every day for ten years a friend.
Inyeon is a Korean word I learned after hearing an interview with Celine Song, creator of a new movie called Past Lives (in theaters now!). Inyeon is a term that refers to the pre-destined crossing of paths between people. That is, every person we meet in our life has a meaningful connection to us, whether they are someone we chat to briefly on the train, someone we met on our first week on a new job, or someone who may now be an ex-friend. I love this concept because it's not about throwing out old friends, but remembering the times we had and letting the mind move forward to what is meaningful in the present. Or at least, that's what I understood.