Spotted Another One

The internet is a strange place. I have moved around a lot. If you have read some of my other pieces you might know I am currently ramping up for move number 15, so It should come as no surprise that I have known many people from many places. What is so amazing about the internet, is that even though there are literally Billions of people in this world, because of the way algorithms and the rest of it all… work you seem sort of stuck in this whirlpool of the familiar unless you go searching outside of it.

So even though I have moved all around and haven’t seen or heard from some of these people in over 20 years, I have suddenly spotted 3 different people I knew as a child on social media in the last year or so.

One is an influencer on Instagram. She’s doing pretty well making humor and beauty content. We were friends in Kindergarten. I considered her my best friend, of course now that the whole Autism explanation has come up, I understand why so few of my best friends ever thought of me as their best friend. It kind of bothered me growing up, it finally doesn’t anymore.

I thought about trying to strike things up again. I sent a hello message, and she didn’t remember me at all. This is what I expect from everyone, and I am shocked when anyone actually does remember me, so that was no surprise. I obviously left off that endeavor immediately.

Then after I joined Medium I found two more people I recognized, one of my other friend’s mom, and another best friend’s brother. The Friend’s mom looked just like I remembered her, and she seems to be doing quite well, she has published a book, is doing great on medium, and is using Mastadon to the full, which is more than I can say for me. I try with Mastadon, but I always feel Like I am using that thing wrong somehow.

The big memory I have of her is running up the basement stairs of their house right passed her screaming into the backyard, as she watched open-mouthed. Then coming up chuckling with the HUGE wolf spider that was living down there in a cup to let it out. So I ran back inside. I guess it wasn’t so much of a basement though, it was more of a converted root cellar, hence the door in the backyard.

As for the guy, I say he was my friend’s brother, but he was my friend too. He was the one in my grade at school(she was one year ahead of me), and was in some of my classes. I hung out at their house when I had free time for years. They had a tree house our whole friend group played in. So it wasn’t difficult to identify him either. She was my best friend on the edge of my memories so I have always remembered their family at least a little, even if I didn’t have lots of fully formed memories of daily activities.

Of course, by then I had firmly started going by my middle name, and seeing as how I am also married, fully grown, and unwilling to relive the hell of my childhood beyond the therapy writing I am doing, I just gave up. Trying to stammer through an explanation of who I was vs who I am is the last thing I want to do.

There is a point at which you not only can’t go home, you have so fully divested from the person you once were, that you can no longer interact with any of the people you once knew. Thankfully I have one friend left from when I was a teenager, but that is pretty much it. I have had to leave everyone else behind.

There are some benefits to reinventing yourself, You get to wear whatever you want, and no one says, “Wow, you look… different now”, because they don’t know what you looked like before. Fewer and fewer people comment on whether I look well because they can’t rightly tell. And everyone I have told my name since adopting my second as my first has said “That is a nice name”, or “What a pretty name”, instead of saying it back wrong or forgetting it altogether.

There may be a select few people or things from my former life, like some recipes I will never eat again because of allergies, and that will be dearly missed. Moving on and rebuilding my life safely is way more important than hanging on to the people that I used to know. Have you reconnected with anyone from your past on Medium?

K.B. Silver

P.S. If you think you know me, you probably don’t. If it is I who doesn’t remember you, don’t take it personally, I am only now remembering who I used to be.