Stumbling Toward God?

It’s no secret that a friend is someone who lets you help
It’s no secret that a liar won’t believe anyone else
–U2

I lost two friends last week. I mean, not “lost” lost, but they have moved away. One moved physically, the other, for lack of a better word, emotionally. I know that I just recently admitted to more or less lying to everyone I know, but these were two of the people who, among my current acquaintances, had known me the longest, that I saw with the greatest regularity, and were on the very short list of people whom I consider to know the *real* me, if anyone could make such a claim.

I wanted to clarify: I do not lie on my blog. When writing my last post (which I think unintentionally ended up as a sort of summary for the entire blog) I found myself having to reread a lot of old posts in order to refresh myself about sequences of events and so forth. Clearly a lot of the posts are vague. [No, really?] I like to think that was more so in the earlier ones and that I have gotten better over time, but your opinion may vary. I also go through long periods of not posting anything, but then sometimes come out with a rash of posts that are about as brutally honest as I have ever been about anything in my life. A lot of times I will work in a subtle joke that I might only expect one other person to get. There have also been a few cases where I have attempted to conceal a private message for one specific person. (Not always for the same person, and I actually do not know if any one of those attempts has ever been successful.) I guess I have to admit that the last example does seem to border on deceitful. But I stand by the statement that I do not lie on my blog. I do not write something intending for you to believe one thing when I know another to be true. Or at least, I do not remember ever doing it on purpose, and I hope that I never have, because the whole point of the blog was to be honest.

In one older post, I mention that it is actually the person who writes this blog that is the “real” me, and the one that you see walking around that is the made-up personality. That may be a bit extreme, and it certainly is the opposite of what you would probably expect, but it is reasonably accurate. I have a lot of “friends” on Facebook who (as far as I know) have no knowledge of this blog. [Edit: well I guess they do now.] There are people who read this blog that I know are not on Facebook. And of course, there are people I interact with in the real world who do not do either. I would say that anyone who does not read my blog is probably missing the larger piece of my personality. I’m wishing that was not the case now. It would be much better for me if I could talk openly in person about the things on my blog.

There are a lot of things that have lead me to question the nature of friendship lately. A little while ago I watched the entire series of a show called “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” I’d never heard of it until it was recommended to me. The show is about the cast and crew of a “Saturday Night Live” type show (not unlike “30 Rock”, except that it’s a drama instead of a comedy.) Anyway the first episode is about these two guys who are coming back to the show as Head Writer and Producer. Basically, a few years prior to the current story, one of them had been fired/encouraged to quit over some controversy, and the other guy had quit in support and they ended up making a couple of successful movies together, but now the second guy was being coerced into coming back to the show and the first guy came back as well, rather than continuing to make movies and his reason was basically that they were a team. Of course it’s only a TV show, but I was inspired by that friendship and loyalty and just that overall sense of “what are ‘we’ going to do now”. The series actually had a second example of such a partnership, but I won’t go into that.

Back to my two friends. The first was a simple case of new-job-new-city-ok-bye. It all happened quite suddenly, but that is the way life goes. My regret there is that we were never really as close of friends as I always thought we could be and I am sorry to have let that opportunity pass. The other case is challenging because it is a lot more my “fault”… at least in the sense that if I had said and done things differently in the past then this particular trouble might have been avoided, and I fear that my efforts to correct mistakes of the past have only made it worse. Is it too late to heal? I honestly don’t know.

A long time ago there was someone whom I cared about very much. This person was on what I saw to be a very destructive path, and nothing I said or did seemed to make any difference. This was so painful to me that eventually one day I made up my mind that if they insisted upon self-destructing, then at least they were not going to take me down with them, and I walked away. I still tend to think of that as the hardest thing I have ever done, to turn my back on a friend. Was it the right thing to do? I have questioned that many times over the years. But I was so young. Is it possible that I have never been truly able to care about anyone since? I never thought about that before, but I suppose it might be.

I bring that up because I realized that I (quite unintentionally) wrote two posts in a row in which I mentioned my own funeral. That is probably not a good sign. Along with everything else, I could see how someone might read that and finally say, “That’s it, I’ve done all that I can for you… I’m done.” Not that anyone has, but I recognize the possibility… because it is exactly what I once did.