Invitation to Zoom Conversation
Friendship Loss, navigating the anger and grief, and learning to move forward
For the past five months, almost since we moved here, I’ve been meeting with a new therapist. In my intake form I wrote these words: “Because of a mix of the pandemic, the politics of the last several years, some pretty painful friendship break-ups or betrayals, and a few other things, I’ve found myself curving into myself instead of curving outward.”
Curving inward is not necessarily a bad thing. If you’ve joined our book club this winter, you know we’re talking about how the journey inward is actually a really important part of our spiritual growth. I’ve learned to notice this inward curve when it’s happening and begin to look forward to what will happen during its time and also look forward to the ways I will come through changed as I curve back out. It’s just seasons and I’ve learned accepting them is better than judging them or shaming myself for them. It’s been said that nothing is in full bloom all year long, there is a time for dormancy and even death.
Each week my therapist and I are pulling back some layers on why trust in friendship is so difficult for me especially, and also some other things that are better left to the conversations happening in that room. But one of the particular pain points I’ve been having to move through is the reality of friendship loss.
If you’ve read The Understory, you know this is a big theme in the book. I wrote it as I was losing some really important relationships in my life in real time. There’s a rawness to the loss that I describe in more detail in the book.
Friendships are lost for many reasons, some of them terrible, but most of them, honestly, are because of the above mentioned seasons. We’re all moving through various seasons in our lives but none of us are moving through the same seasons at the same time with everyone else in our lives. Sometimes we’re in an adjoining season to another and so the disparity doesn’t feel so deep, but other times we’re in a completely opposite season, or even different years altogether. Someone is in a seed year and someone else is in a seven year oak sapling year. We all have things we can learn from one another in different seasons, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to find our deepest source of friendship in those places.
Sometimes friendships have weathered all the seasons together that they can and, for one reason or another, the weathering has grown too thin. The fabric of forgiveness or peace or solidarity or sameness has grown too threadbare and there isn’t much to hold it together again. The grief of this can happen to both individuals at different times or in different ways, but it is often a more slow moving process.
Other times, there is a deep and painful fracture, a betrayal, a rejection, or inability to see eye to eye, that causes the loss of a friendship. The grief here is sudden, sometimes accompanied by anger or rage or shock. It is potent and it can feel all encompassing.
There is a time and a place to talk about lasting friendships, what makes them and what sustains them, but in tomorrow’s Second Tuesday Zoom call we’ll be talking about friendship loss, both the slow loss and the sudden loss, and how we can navigate them with peace and grace and hopefully a lot of generosity toward ourselves and the other. I don’t have all the answers here, not even some of them, but I do think there are some helpful Big Picture things to keep in mind as we navigate them. These are always rich conversations and I’m especially looking forward to our conversation on this.
Our Second Tuesday Zooms are a perk for paid subscribers of Sayable. If you’re a free reader, now would be a great time to upgrade your subscription. Supporting Sayable means you’re supporting me and my family, and the commitment we’ve made to the vocation of deep thinking and writing. Especially in years where I don’t have a book contract, Substack is my main source of income and I am profoundly grateful for every penny you send my way. I’ve tried to keep it affordable for everyone but I’ve also always said if you absolutely can’t afford it, drop me an email and I’ll upgrade your subscription, no questions asked.
The invitation to the zoom conversation is below. I hope you can join us!
Lore Wilbert is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Lore Wilbert's Zoom Meeting
Time: Jan 14, 2025 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)