“Am I the same girl?”

One of the very interesting things about this year has been reconnecting with a few people from my past. Regardless of whether it was five or twenty-five years that had passed, I found myself thinking about how much had happened since our last meeting, and, inevitably, how much we’d changed, as a result of our life experiences, as well as the ageing process. 

When these encounters happen, sometimes there’s a relaunching of the friendship. In the initial stages, there tends to be a lot of nostalgia, as each party tries to remind the other about things that happened all those years ago. What I find myself dealing with is the awkwardness of having forgotten something the other person has remembered; I feel like I’ve let the person down, somehow, by not having retained the memory. Fortunately, it also happens the other way around.   

What I like is when the rekindled friendship feels like a comfortable fit, where, despite the relationship having discontinued many years ago, there’s an ease of communication, ready laughter, and a natural flow of who and where we are at this stage of our lives. It’s a really good feeling, and something that I find wonderfully affirming. I love it when the energy of a good connection, made at one stage of life, resurfaces many years later. It confirms my belief that certain bonds are permanent, even magical, defying geography or the passage of time.  

But what is decidedly in a category of its own is a friendship revisited after forty-plus years, when your last connection was in your childhood, and you meet up again as middle-aged people. Very strange. In so many ways, I feel like a different person to whom I was when I was 11, yet when I hear the other person’s views of me, it seems one’s essence remains unchanged. Having said as much, what unnerves me - ever so slightly - is someone expecting me to hold the same views I held decades ago, when surely the whole point of life and growth is shedding what no longer serves us, and taking on what does. I rather like the process of redefinition, both conscious and unconscious.

As I approach the end of yet another year, I can’t help but smile as I contemplate the regaining of lost connections. Some destined to play a bigger role in our lives than others, they definitely give us a fresh perspective on who we are, and of how big a ripple we’ve caused in the pond of life.   

            L-R: Aunty Helena, Mom, Wendy, me & Dad, +- 1970, when I was 9 or 10 yrs old.