Conspirator
- Brian
- I went out there in search of experience To taste and to touch and to feel as much As a man can before he repents.
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Punctuated Equilibrium to the Face, 2 of 2
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Much like Oklahoma City has significantly changed during the last three years (see my previous post on this here), so do people. I've change in more ways than I can count and I've grown a lot. But, to write this is an understatement, almost a euphemism. It's not simply that I've grown, but I've grown in a particular direction, a particular trajectory, pursued certain things, a certain life. My friends here in the States did the same thing. We were once on a similar trajectory together, but I stepped off on another trajectory for a bit. You don't get to just jump back to where you were, though. I stepped off, things changed--perhaps drastically changed in a relatively short period of time--for everyone involved, but there is no fossil record. I don't know how they got to where they're at and I suspect they feel the same about me.
With some of my friends, I wonder if the changes are too drastic for our friendship to be as deep as it once was. It's difficult to explain. It's a little difficult for me to understand, so yeah it's difficult to explain. It's not like we were completely isolated from each other. There was email. There was Skype. We've been moving in different directions, though. You can call each other from your respective life-trajectories, but it doesn't mean you understand each other, comprehend that trajectory, comprehend how each person grows or stagnates.
I'm not angry or bitter. I'm not even that sad. I'm happy to see where my friends are at in life. I just thought I'd come back and easily be a part of them again. But, in that last few years, they found substitutes for me, for the role I played in their lives and I did the same. I, however, left my substitutes in Vienna so that I am now looking to replace the replacements.
Maybe that's kind of whiny. I don't mean to whiny and I'm not judging anyone. I'm just trying to make observations. I'm just trying to write down what it's like to go through reverse culture stress because, like I wrote in the earlier post, I don't feel like I was gone that long but now that I'm trying to re-enter an old life, it seems like I've been gone for a decade. Friends moved on without me. I moved on without them. Just like OKC grew without me. I just wasn't here for the growth and now it seems a little foreign to me.
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