Interview yesterday went very well; I left with the promise of a second interview, hopefully later this week. Luckily, I can do the second interview over the phone; the train ride was incredibly hellish and took 7 hours longer than it was supposed to, due to a combination of mechanical failure, a bomb threat in a station we were supposed to be passing through, and a variety of coordination problems sharing the tracks with other trains (since we were so far behind schedule).
Now the bad news: I’m afraid I have lost a dear friend. Apparently (it is always apparent in hindsight), I was losing his friendship slowly for some time, but the incident last week was the last straw. Simply put, he doesn’t believe me — he doesn’t believe that I was ever addicted to anything during the time that he’s known me, he doesn’t believe that that’s why I was fired, and, seemingly contradictorily, he doesn’t believe that I’m sober now.
I lost several friends all at once in an incident in January, 2000 that led me to realize the depths of my own problems. That incident was an inflection point, a time when every aspect of my life — my professional career, my choice of friends, my daily habits (both good and bad) — was suddenly up for grabs. I chose to commit myself to total sobriety, and in the process, I lost several more friends — smoking buddies, bar buddies, etc. — to whom I could only relate through the activities I had sworn off.
But I kept this one, and our relationship grew deeper as I became a more reliable and stronger person overall. Throughout last year, we each went through extremely stressful incidents (unrelated to drugs or alcohol) and were both there for each other. He helped me realize that I was stagnating in my job and needed to find a new one.
But after I got my new job, I suppose we started to drift apart. We had met through work, and now that we had no work in common, there was less to talk about when we got together. We were both absorbed in our respective romantic relationships. He says now that I was slowly becoming more bitter and dismissive, especially when talking about my job, and I believe him. When I told him this summer that I was moving, we kept trying to get together one last time, but we never did.
And then last week happened. Most days, in a broad sense, are the same as every other day. Most days you go to the same job you went to yesterday; you talk to the same people; you read the same web sites; you go home to the same house. Most days you smoke the same number of cigarettes you smoked yesterday, love the same person you loved yesterday, pet the same dog you petted yesterday. Most days are simply not that earth-shattering. Like a log rolling down a gentle slope, you are unlikely to stop, unlikely to change direction in anything but the smallest increments.
But there are a few days that are inflection points. It’s as if someone came along, picked up the log, filed the end to a point, stood it up, and spun it wildly like a top, equally likely to come down in any direction. These times can be great opportunities for change, but they are extremely dangerous, because they are so sensitive to conditions. A small gust of wind, normally ignored, can suddenly make all the difference in determining which way the top comes down.
He emailed me last Monday, having heard the news and wondered what was going on. I gave him a short answer and promised to get back to him, but by the time he got back to me at the end of the week, he had apparently already made up his mind. The way he chose to see it simply reinforced the smaller rifts which had been growing between us, which, by association, suddenly seemed more important themselves. A vicious feedback loop, and now I’m afraid it’s far too late to salvage anything of our friendship.
Could I have responded sooner last week, and tipped the top in another direction? Possibly. Should I have been more mindful and noticed that the log was slowly veering off course? Most definitely. Hindsight, as always, is 20/20.
I had a whole slew of links and other interesting thoughts that I had collected over the weekend, but they all seem irrelevant now. There will be no further updates today. There may be no updates for a while. Most days I have the same friends I had yesterday. Today I don’t.
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