Despite being someone who needs a fair bit of reliable solitude in life, I sometimes wonder who, if anyone, would maintain a friendship with me for as long as I live, however long or short that might be. I think one or two people I know might be relied upon in this respect, but otherwise it's a very small number of colleagues I consider good friends and hope to sustain some long-lasting, if eventually increasingly intermittent, contact with to the end of the road. I suppose my siblings will maintain contact too. But what about some people I've come to really care about, part of the big workplace family I'm in, who have on at least one occasion described themselves as friends (as distinct from just colleagues) - will they just fade away, drift apart, in the fulness of time? I know that all things dissolve in time, and that everyone (whether they have a partner or kids or otherwise) will leave this life alone. But I'm suddenly feeling anxious and quite despairing of the impermanence of it all. The unreliablity of 'I hope we'll always be friends' followed sooner or later by a forgetting of that sentiment as your very existence fades from their mind as they drift into unplanned indifference or a purposeful detachment based on a mercurial attitude to former stated intentions?
Sorry, that's all a bit of a ramble. But typing it out and sending it (so it's not just a falling tree in the forest, though maybe for dignity's sake it should be) has helped a little to dampen down some surging anxiety about the issue. This has spun off from a conversation with a colleague who just casually referred to the fact that he expects all communication with everyone he's ever worked with (even those for whom he has contact information outside of work) to be lost rapidly should they ever leave or upon his eventual retirement. That it's the same for most. I know there's some realism in that, but it's so comprehensive in who it includes (and he's a much more adept interactor with people than me - what chance have I got?), that it's left me with dwindling hope of keeping the friendship of even the very few here who I've connected with deeply and who it would really upset me to think of never crossing paths with literally ever again, or getting a once in a blue moon card or text from. I'm not even sure what I'm saying, except that - as someone who struggles at the best of times not to become a hermit, due to social anxiety among other things- I'm suddenly very unsettled by the doom-y (but I suppose realistic) prediction that even the firmer of (especially workplace) friendship foundations will be shown to be illusory the moment that keeping in touch requires additional effort. It's made my brain spiral into the future way more than I'd planned it to this afternoon, and I know I'll be turning that over in my head a lot in the coming hours and days. To an extent that, had he known what he was triggering in terms of the intensity of my inner anxiety, my colleague would have said nothing. I think?
Does anyone have a slightly more optimistic view to offer? Only if you authentically feel that way of course! Or is the above essentially correct (everyone drifts away at the first sign of reciprocal effort being needed to do otherwise) and I should attempt to be coolly indifferent about it, the way that most NT hearts and minds seem to default to a position with no lasting inner turmoil (instead just momentary and fleeting regret in advance) resulting for them? But how does anything reliably mean anything then? I didn't expect that I'd be so thrown off balance by the prescribed hopelessness of the sentiment he expressed (caught in the wrong moment maybe, with shields down), and in a way I'm surprised at myself - as something of a natural loner a lot of the time. But I do value my tiny number of friends - it's about quality not quantity of course, but what if I've misidentified the apparent former just because it's on my doorstepi n the 9-5? I'm experiencing a deep existential horror about it all suddenly, but as I say, this stream of consiousness has helped take the edge off very slightly as I try to get a purchase/perspective on my heightened inner state.
