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I found an old photo the other day—me and four other guys, probably 1986, before anyone cared about their appearance or money or status. We’re at a lake. Someone brought a cooler. Nobody is taking a selfie because cameras don’t work that way yet. Someone’s girlfriend is off-camera. We look genuinely happy in a way that doesn’t require performance.
I don’t really talk to three of these guys anymore. The fourth lives three states away and we text once a year. I hadn’t thought about this as a loss until recently. I’d just thought of it as natural drift. People grow up, move away, get married, have kids, build their lives in different directions. It happens to everyone. But the way I was thinking about it was starting to feel like a lie I was telling myself.
The truth is, I was grieving. And the grief was weird because I wasn’t actually grieving the loss of the friendships so much as I was grieving the loss of the person I was when I had them.
I started really thinking about this after my therapist pointed out that when I talked about these lost friendships, I was always talking about them in the past tense. Not just in terms of the friendship, but in terms of myself. “I used to be the kind of person who had these intense friendships.” “I used to be able to just hang out and not worry about anything.” “I used to know people who knew me really well.” I was treating my entire early self as a historical figure instead of someone I still was underneath.
What I’m understanding now through the lens of something called continuity theory and nostalgia (PMC6419160) is that nostalgia is often about more than just missing people or times. It’s frequently about self-continuity—the sense that you’re still the same person across time, that there’s a coherent narrative connecting who you were to who you are. When that continuity breaks—when the person you were seems completely disconnected from the person you are—you grieve. And what you’re mourning is the loss of that integration.
I’ve been mostly successful in my adult life. I have a career that worked out. I have financial security. I have a marriage that’s lasted. I have kids who are functional adults. By almost any measure, I did well. But the person who did well is not the person in that lake photo. The person in the photo was unselfconscious. He cared what people thought but didn’t let it paralyze him. He was loyal in a way that didn’t come with conditions. He was spontaneous. He was funny without being trying to be clever.
Becoming the person who succeeded meant becoming someone else. It’s not that I became evil or fake. But I became more careful. More strategic about relationships. More focused on productivity and status. I started measuring myself against people I didn’t actually like and chasing things that didn’t matter. I became better at hiding anything that seemed vulnerable or uncertain. I became, in short, an adult.
And the friends from the photo? They either became adults the same way I did, in which case we had nothing to talk about anymore except the logistics of our lives, or they found different paths. Some of them stayed wilder. Some moved away. Some just weren’t interested in the kind of success I was chasing. And instead of seeing them as people on different paths, I stopped seeing them at all.
The grief I was actually experiencing was grief at the realization that I’d essentially abandoned that earlier version of myself. Not deliberately. But by making all these “adult” choices, by prioritizing certain things over others, by becoming reliable and responsible and financially successful, I’d moved into a world where the old friendships seemed incompatible. They felt like reminders of someone I’d outgrown, rather than continuations of someone I still was.
Here’s what’s tricky: I don’t regret becoming a responsible adult. I needed to. I wanted to. But I’m starting to understand that “growing up” didn’t have to mean abandoning the person I was. It could have meant integrating him. I could have kept some of that spontaneity. Some of that loyalty without conditions. Some of that ability to just be rather than constantly be achieving.
My therapist suggested something radical: what if I reached out to some of these old friends? Just to see. Not to restore what we had—that’s impossible, and we’re all different people now—but to see if there’s any actual continuity there. If the person I was is still alive in the person I am.
I’ve done it with two of them. With one guy, it turned out he’d been thinking about me too. We grabbed coffee. It was awkward for about ten minutes, and then we fell into old rhythms. Not the exact same rhythms we had in 1986. But something similar enough that I could feel the continuity. He got older and more conservative, but he’s still fundamentally the same person underneath. I got older and more ambitious, but apparently I’m still fundamentally the same person too—I’d just learned to hide it.
With the other guy, it didn’t rekindle the same way. We went to dinner, and I could see that we’d diverged in ways that matter. He was interested in things I’m not. We had different values. And instead of that feeling like a loss, it actually felt like an ending to a story that had already ended. It gave me permission to let it be what it was—a genuine friendship at a certain time in our lives that had naturally expired. Accepting endings without turning them into failures is something I’m still learning.
What I’m discovering is that the grief wasn’t actually about missing the people. It was about the terror of continuity. It was about the feeling that I’d broken some fundamental part of myself in the process of becoming successful, and I was mourning that break. But breaking isn’t necessarily the same as losing. Sometimes you break and become something stronger. Sometimes you break and you get the chance to integrate the broken pieces.
The work now is figuring out which parts of the person I was actually matter to who I want to be. Not because I want to live in nostalgia or pretend I’m still twenty-five. But because I’m starting to understand that continuity isn’t the same as stagnation. I can be the person I’ve become and still honor the person I was. They’re not enemies. They’re chapters in the same book.
