I Was the One Who Left

If you've been with me these past weeks, you know I've written about what my childhood wound cost me and what it has taught me. This week it taught me something I did not want to learn — that a wound doesn't only shape how you're hurt. It shapes how you hurt other people.

Because this week's confession is not about being abandoned. It's about being the one who does the abandoning.

At the start of this year, with a heavy heart, I let go of a friendship I'd carried for thirty years. 

I told myself it was a decision. It felt more like an amputation done slowly, in the dark, so no one would notice — least of all me. I hadn't heard from her in nearly a year. And when I scrolled back through our messages, I could see the truth I'd been avoiding: the thread had been one-sided for a long, long time. So I stopped reaching. I stopped adding her to the inner-circle things — the celebrations, the small gatherings that mean you belong to me. I didn't invite her to my last birthday. I kept her off the guest list for my engagement party. Quietly, without a single conversation, I moved her to the outer ring and then off the page entirely. To my mind, the friendship was over. I had closed the account and filed it under lesson learned.

Now, here is what I could not see at the time, and can see with painful clarity now.

The woman whose whole nervous system was built around the terror of being left had become very, very good at leaving first.

Of course I had. That's the wound's cleverest trick. If you are certain that people eventually go, the safest thing in the world is to go before they can. To be the one holding the scissors. I hadn't grieved that friendship — I had pre-empted it. I'd read a year of silence not as a season, not as a friend who might be drowning in her own life, but as the confirmation I'd been braced for since I was one year old: see, you are forgettable. Leave before she does. And I called it maturity. I called it protecting my peace.

Then my mother died.

Grief does something I keep trying to warn you about: it hands you a magnifying glass. But sometimes, instead of sending you looking for old wounds, it sets you down in front of old love. I was in London, sorting through pile after pile of photographs — my mother's whole life in my hands — and there it was. The two of us are in our twenties. Grinning. Ridiculous. Alive. And I was flooded. I remembered the day we met. I remembered the promise we'd made to each other, the one young women make and mean with their whole chests: we will always be there for each other. We will never turn our backs. Thick and thin. We had kept that promise for decades. We had held each other through more than I can write here. 

Without stopping to think — without my usual committee of second-guessers convening — I forwarded her the photograph with a note.

She didn't know about my brother Michael. She didn't know about my mother. So I told her, and then I asked the only honest question I had: I'm not sure what happened to our friendship.

She replied within minutes. 

Her condolences came first, and then an apology, and then a request to talk properly when she finished work. We spoke that same evening. And what I learned — what humbled me — was that the friendship had not died at all. Not on her end. She had been struggling in ways I knew nothing about, because I had stopped asking. She told me, gently, that as an only child she can disappear into herself, that isolating is her wound the way leaving-first is mine. The silence I had read as rejection was never rejection. It was a friend going quiet in her own storm, trusting that thirty years meant I'd still be there when she surfaced.

And I had almost not been there. I had almost let it go for good.

Here is the part I find almost too neat to be true, except that it happened. On that very same day, there was a second friend in my heart. A woman I love to bits, who has been walking through a brutal two or three years — health crisis after health crisis. I hadn't seen her much. We'd tried to find a time to catch up and never managed it; I was buried in grief, she was buried in illness, and the calendar kept winning. No partner, no children. I could imagine, with a pang, how alone she must have felt in it.

So even with my own heart in pieces, I reached out to her too. And I did something I'm not in the habit of doing: I apologised. I told her I hadn't been a good friend to her, and that I was sorry. I promised her that when I was back from London, I would be in touch — the real kind, not the kind you post about. 

We met, the two of us, on the very same day I reconciled with my thirty-year friend.

I want you to feel the richness of that day the way I did. Two broken bridges, both mended, within a single turn of the sun. One friendship I had written off, returned to me. One I had let drift, pulled back in close. By the evening I was on the phone again with my first friend, the two of us catching up on twelve lost months, laughing and crying in the way that only people who have known you since your twenties can make you do. My heart, which had been so heavy for so long, was suddenly, impossibly, full.

I have been thinking ever since about what my friendships have actually been in my life. Not decoration. Not luxury. As an expat with no family in this country, it is my friends who have been my family. It is friends who sat up with me through fevers and through heartbreaks. It is friends who once loved me enough to stage an intervention when my drinking had slipped out of my own control — who chose the awkward, terrifying honesty of we are worried about you over the easy comfort of looking away. My friendships have, quite literally, saved my life. More than once.

And this year I nearly let one of them go without a word, because a fifty-year-old wound told me to leave before I could be left. 

So this is the reckoning I'm sitting with, and the one I want to hand to you. We talk about being abandoned as though it's only ever something done to us. But those of us who were left learn the choreography of leaving very young. We rehearse it. And if we're not careful, we perform it on the very people who would have stayed — cutting the cord ourselves and calling it strength, so that we never have to feel the cord cut for us again. 

Healing, this week, looked like putting down the scissors. 

The girl who was always left behind had learned to leave first. It took grief, and an old photograph, to teach her how to stay. 

I don't ever want to take these women for granted again. I don't want to mistake a friend's silence for a friend's absence. I don't want to protect my peace so fiercely that I abandon the people who taught me peace was possible.

With love,

Faith

Routines and Rituals That Held me this Week

This week the ritual has been nourishing the people I love. As I prepared to visit my friend, I wanted to fill her up as much as I possibly could — so I gathered my bone broth, a gift bag of Silver Sirens goodies, and an armful of flowers. Her home is a cute little space overlooking the city skyline, and I knew these small offerings would be exactly right: not grand, just tender. There is a particular kind of love in arriving with your hands full — in feeding someone, in bringing beauty into their kitchen, in saying I thought about you before I came. I went hoping to soothe her soul. What surprised me is how much it soothed mine.