moving and losing contact with people

do you feel guilty about it? is it normal? is it sociopathic if you move and never talk to anyone you knew from the place you moved from? thinking about philly cuz of a thread on ilm and i never really think about it anymore and when i moved from there i didn't really stay in touch with anyone other than an old friend who i had known from high school. he pre-dated philly. and i knew LOTS of people. anyway, i've kinda done this everywhere i've lived. no letters or cards. i just move on. maybe it is normal. facebook probably makes people feel less guilty. you are still kind of in touch. 6 years on marthas vineyard and i'm not in contact with anyone from there really but theoretically i can still send beth parker a message if i want. she knows i like her though. i've always felt a little weird about it. i can remember getting a couple of phone calls from people i knew in the past and being surprised that they called me. because i didn't live near them anymore. okay, that sounds kinda weird.

bright side is i'm never moving again. maybe when i'm old. and then everyone i knew will probably be dead anyway.

sociopathic? no. it's hard. social media helps a lot

i've moved and lost contact with everyone, several times. once from my hometown to my undergrad city, again from undergrad to graduate school, from dc to nyc, from nyc to chicago. a lot of it was definitely my fault. the first few times i didn't actively make an attempt to stay in touch except for a few exceptions, so when everyone else acted the same way it just led to a big break in communication. later on i tried to make more of an effort to stay in touch but it was largely fruitless. after each step i ended up having fewer overall friends. these days i am really concentrating on my friendship with my dog, just hanging out and making memories together. she is the best dog in the entire world.

^ Sounds awesome Karl

the best part was when we decided to fill out a friendship scorecard check-in on each other, and it turns out we gave each other perfect 100% scores! we had a big hug after that

This is the entire story of my life. Dad was in the military, we moved all the time, and I kinda maintained that tendency for movin' on. I have zero contact with any extrafamilial people I knew before high school, and not much contact with people from subsequent past locales. And yeah, I've felt guilty about it for pretty much my entire adult life, at least since I was self-aware enough to recognize how important a skillset I'd failed to acquire. I've tried to be more accepting of the fact that my attempts to fix the problem had failed and that this is just who I am for better or worse (and the long-term friends I do have are generally accepting of my well-meaning flakiness), if only because beating myself up over it wasn't getting me anywhere. I just try to keep things small-scale nowadays. Lived in the same metro area for most of a decade, maintaining mostly pleasant but relatively unintimate chumships with a handful of the aforementioned lifers (who understand that there's nothing personal if they don't hear from me for six months or more) sprinkled around the world. And I try to not compare my experience to that of 'normal' people who have like extensive interpersonal history with a number of people, because there's nothing really very constructive to be gained down that road, I find.

on the other hand, this guy who i grew up with and had known since i was THREE years old and who i hadn't seen since high school came in my store one day a year or two ago and i was SO happy to see him. it was so unexpected. he's the nicest guy. not that we'll stay in touch or anything, but it was still nice.

i have a small family too. my immediate family and some cousins and a couple of aunts and an uncle i rarely see. maybe people from big families who are in close contact are better at juggling old friends and keeping fires lit.

I'm not on my own but I know from past experience that I'm really, really good at being on my own. Possibly too good. I dunno. But I think I'm awesome company.

yeah i'm good by myself too.

Oh, also at a point I got over my guilt about this tendency enough to realize that most people (in my experience, anyway) are also really shitty at this. Like, it takes two to do the 'whoops sorry I forgot to keep in touch' tango.

same here in the opposite direction. at first i thought it was everyone else's fault but as i've gotten older i've realized it's pretty much just my fault

the summer before i went into the 4th grade we moved across town and i was devastated. it really rocked my world. it was genuinely traumatic to me. i LOVED where i lived before we moved. heaps of kids. it was my domain. after we moved to our new house my best friend from the old neighborhood came to the door with a cake his mom had baked as a housewarming gift. i stood in the doorway and i couldn't comprehend why he was there. he was from the old neighborhood! i never really hung out with him again. see, this goes pretty far back...

i really should have grilled my therapist about all this before i stopped seeing him...

what if your therapist changed careers and never responded to any of your emails again? sounds like something the what about bob therapist would do

it felt a little weird to say goodbye to my therapist. he was a nice guy. he had a lot of problems though.

I kind of abruptly split from the Chicagoland area several years ago for a much-needed 'sabbatical' and made an effort to send mass emails to all of the people in the area that I'd been close to in order to keep everybody in the loop and express an interest in maintaining friendships despite the distance and I think like two of them ever bothered to respond so that kinda blew and I haven't been particularly gung-ho about cultivating friends since then.

i'm bad with friends. but now i just stay in one place and they know where to find me if they need me. main street in greenfield 5 days a week. i don't put pressure on myself. i'm happy to see people when i see them. plus i have the kids excuse. when the kids are older i'm actually looking forward to going out and about more and seeing people. going to more events/shows. i've gotten a little bit better at it with age.

living here i have been WAY WAY more social than i've ever been in my life. this is a great area for casual friendships among like-minded smart older folks. very mellow. i feel lucky to have that at an advanced age.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9CjnDufqeQ

It's kinda interesting -- in my case, my two closest friends from all the years of my OC life, donut bitch (formerly of ILX) and Stripey, both moved away first, so contact with both has been mediated that way since. I see DB once a year in April during the Pop Conference; Stripey I have yet to see but I hope either she can swing by SF or I have a reason to visit Santa Barbara. We talk online or via phone as we do.

In terms of the people I left behind in turn in SoCal, there's one close group of friends I will aim to see yearly if I can in OC itself -- was down there briefly last November, hopefully again this time around as well -- while I'd like to attend a June/July get-together that Simon Reynolds and Joy Press regularly hold in Pasadena having missed it the last two years. But beyond that I have little need to return to the area; instead I'm terribly lucky that some friends come visit up here instead. Ever since I went on social media break I guess there's less of an online 'presence' for me in that regard but I'm still around as needed and we chat as we do.

Finally after two years here I'm enjoying the occasional meetups with friends old and new in the area but I'm doing far less of them than I used to down south -- probably because, simply, I'm in a lovely relationship with my girlfriend and we're both ultimately more low-key than you might think, and being comfortably middle-aged at this point, both having turned 46 the other week, has plenty to do with that in turn. (She definitely thinks I'm the more social of us two and that's true but at the same time I've heavily downshifted, and while I do sometimes wonder about that, I'm not too fussed.) Also, compared to the high volume/high activity job I did have at UCI -- which allowed me to meet a lot of people who became friends over the years, from coworkers to patrons to academics -- my current job is much more low key all around; all five of us in the small library get along nicely but we all have our own lives and foci, and we don't get many patrons per se. This said I've made a couple of new friends in the area in turn, often through Kate, and it's all very pleasant.

Oddly -- but I think notably -- in a big, big city like SF, some of the easiest 'friendships' to maintain are the business ones -- in this sense: I have my weekly routines in terms of running errands, most regularly Saturday mornings at the Ferry Building and its weekend farmer's market. A couple of sellers I catch up with each week -- I always show up early, it's nowhere near as busy as it gets later in the morning -- and we find ourselves talking about all sorts of things. Even a couple of checkout folks at the more permanent stores and things know me by now. It's a nice, simple thing, not a deep friendship but still far from dull anonymity. Meantime I am going out to more and more shows lately, and that's a nice feeling as well, starting to regularly run into people I know there too.

We moved around a good deal growing up so having best friends come and go has never been strange. Not only natural to socialise in your current environment rather than a past one, positively healthy imo.

Granted my best friends are the ones from school 20 years ago, but within that it's only the one who lives locally that i spend any time with.