If She Wanted To, She Wouldn’t
There’s a trend going around on social media where people imagine they’re meeting their younger self for coffee. When I picture sitting down and having a chat with a past version of myself, it’s 21-year-old Eliza. Dramatic, insecure, several stone lighter, dressed head to toe in purple. She didn’t know who she was yet, but she had an inkling.
I know what she would ask: am I thinner? Do I have a boyfriend? Have I published my novel? Do I have a good career? I would answer: no, yes, don’t ask, and no but I’m on the way there.
She would forget to ask about friendships, the thing she yearned for until she was 19 but took for granted by 21. I would have to explain the pandemic and how our best friends moved away. I’d tell her we live in London now and we’re making new friends for the first time in years and that feels so good but also comes with a tonne of anxiety. 21-year-old Eliza would ask why we live in London, are we working in television? I’d tell her no, we’re a PhD student, researching Ukrainian refugees. A good chunk of our conversation would be about the geopolitical events of the past few years, because contrary to her belief, we’re not the centre of the universe.
When I consider it, I don’t think we’d meet for coffee. Instead, she’s sitting in an orange subway train in Glasgow, and I’m on the Picadilly line in London. The cider we both drank created a time-traversing telepathy link, and here we are. She’s going in circles and I’m hurtling northwards.
My younger self’s anxieties have hit me like a tonne of bricks this week. She whispers in my ear, telling me to be messy, to strategize instead of letting sleeping dogs lie. She can’t read social situations, she thinks everyone hates her but also thinks she’s significantly closer to them than she actually is. She doesn’t know how to tell whether someone is an acquaintance or a friend (my 16-year-old self has now entered the chat). I tell her I thought we’d have grown out of it by now. I don’t understand why we haven’t.
Maybe I’m talking with her now because somehow all roads still lead to her.
I lived most during those years, and now that I’m starting to feel alive again, I can’t help but see the parallels. The problem is, I can’t tell which people have come to heal me and which are here to repeat old patterns. I look at the friends I have now, and see a mosaic of all the friends I loved before, personality traits woven together to create a different picture from the same colours. The affection I have for my new friends feels so familiar, a half-forgotten memory springing back to life.
I have had so many beautiful friendships in my life, and a whole lot of shitty ones, and this time I wanted to do things right. I didn’t rush into things, I didn’t emotionally imprint on people, I let myself be calm and measured. And it feels like everyone else became close while I was building up to showing the tiniest fraction of my personality. I was polite and pleasant and lacking in all the things that made me who I am. I removed the bright colours from my wardrobe, hid my Taylor Swift laptop background, tried to smooth out my sharp edges.
But that isn’t how you make friends. The only way people will like you is by showing them who you actually are, but I don’t know how to do that smoothly. Each time I try, it feels so jarring. I want to just say to people “I really like you; I want to be better friends with you,” and put in the effort to make that happen. But I’ve learnt that earnestness usually backfires, and being upfront with people comes across as needy.
I wish there was an instruction manual for how to make friends with people, how to move from one stage of friendship to the next, how to text people without coming across as stilted and awkward, how to be wanted and included. How to deal with your emotions without writing a blog about it, etc.
I’m in this liminal space where my old friends are far away and my new friendships are still in their fledgling stages, and all I want is an honest conversation. I want to talk about my feelings with people I’ve known for years, but we’re all so busy that by the time we reply to each other, the moment has passed. I want to spend time with my new friends without feeling like an imposition. All I really want is to get everything right on the first try, and to stop feeling like I’m sixteen and socially incompetent. But alas.
I don’t have to talk to my old self to know her fears around friendships, I’ve read her diaries too many times to count. Her fears became my regrets. There were so many times when she wanted to text her friends, to ask them to hang out, or just tell them she missed them. And she didn’t, because she was scared of rejection. One of my biggest regrets from that time in my life is that I didn’t spend more time with a lot of my friends, because I was too scared to ask. I don’t want to make those mistakes now; I want to be the kind of person who can initiate. Yet each time I want to try, I get it in my head that people don’t like me, and the cycle begins again. “If they wanted to, they would” and all that, but I want to and I don’t, so where do we go from here?
My historic strategy of “write blog about it and hope for the best” can only work so many times. I am a great friend but I’m an uninteresting acquaintance, and bridging the gap between the two seems to be my life’s Sisyphean challenge. It’s always so much easier in my head, where a version of me exists who is brave and bold and doesn’t have panic attacks in public places.
On an ordinary day, I would take my 21-year-old self by the hand, and tell her it gets better. I’d tell her she’ll mellow out at 25, and leave behind her feral, impulsive side. The curtains will close, the drama will fade, and she will exit the stage with confidence. But life is never that easy. Last week I was so happy and confident about making friends here. Then I only got one hour of sleep on Sunday night, and all the sanity left my body, replaced with a ferocious anxiety that’s still spreading through me like wildfire two days later. I feel like I’ve undone all my hard work. But when I look back, I remember how often I used to get like this. The anxiety, the desperate overthinking, it used to be my every day. I have grown since then; I have better self-esteem than I did then. All the things I want for myself are still in reach. I’ve learnt time and time again that the price I pay for getting the things I want in life is waiting double the time I expect for them to appear. Good friendships are worth waiting for (and working for).
The real moral of this story has little to do with friendship or the passage of time, and everything to do with the importance of getting enough sleep. Don’t drink coffee at 4:30pm, kids, it will make you question everything you know.