Here’s where the self-sufficient self falls apart
I’m a bit lonely. The thing is, it’s hard to live a number of time zones away from your family and all the people you grew up with. Bryce truly is my best friend in the world but I am really missing all those years-long friendships with girlfriends — where you knew what each other was like when you were 15 and have seen how you’ve grown up in the intervening years. I wish I had a girlfriend I couldn’t wait to be with and talk about important stuff — someone who challenges me, sharpens me and who calls me on things when I’m off base. It’s not that I don’t have great girlfriends here, but they’re just different from friends you’ve known for a decade.
I realise this all sounds very selfish — and I’m not even sure why I’m blogging about such things to the world. But I read blogs and get occasional emails from friends back home and I miss our closeness (and see them forming new bonds with other friends) and, as the holidays approach, it makes me miss that friendship more. However, I know even if we are reunited, that closeness won’t magically appear; I’ll always be somewhat a stranger when I go home now, having spent so much time in another place. I guess that’s part of living so far away and in another culture — part of my life experience is simply too foreign for old friends to enter into — and part of just being a real grown up. That is, when one’s ‘grown up’ it’s the family that takes over what the friends previously supplied. Being that we’re in sort of a limbo — grown up and married and yet still in graduate school and not having kids — I don’t feel like we’ve achieved a legitimacy in claiming ‘family status’ in some areas — we definitely don’t fit it conventionally.
Anyway, maybe it’s just my INFJ coming out so you needn’t worry about me. 
November 29th, 2005 at 3:42 pm
Ashley
Don’t worry those stong bonds will still be there when you get home, and you;ll be suprised at how easily you will fall back in to company,with old friends, you might even feel like you’ve not been away. When I came back to Edinburgh from the Canada and the States it took a while to rebuild some friendships but I was happlily suprised to fall straight back into some. You will all have had life changing experiences in the time you’ve been away but that doesn’t have to cause divides. I sympathise with the home sickness - have a great holiday over christmas. Jo x (ps Thanks for the pumpkin pie - delicious)
November 29th, 2005 at 3:58 pm
Jo thanks for your sweet comment. Glad you enjoyed the pumpkin pie (though Neyir made it so I can’t take any credit). So sorry you couldn’t make it to Thanksgiving; you’ll have to come next year!
December 1st, 2005 at 12:07 pm
Ashley, I so sympathise. I’m feeling much the same way. I’ve come to identify a couple of people here in Scotland that are sort of filling in the empty places where other people were back home, but it doesn’t change the fact that the new friends aren’t the old friends and the old friends know me so much more fully. I, too, miss being able to say, “Remember when…” to my friends.
And it’s especially hard when you are pretty certain you will never move back to the exact place where home once was. Chances are I’ll never live in Fayetteville again, and it hurts to see the place in everyone’s life I once held being sewn up and not needed anymore. Wow, I didn’t realise just HOW sad I was until reading your post!
At any rate, we’re together in loneliness.
(See you soon.)
December 1st, 2005 at 1:03 pm
Oh no, I didn’t mean to make you sad too!
I’m doing better but sometimes I just wish for ‘the olden days’ or some such nonsense — and I’m not even an octagenarian yet either! haha. Are you and Scott coming over to Edinburgh soon?
December 1st, 2005 at 7:31 pm
I completely understand the longing for old friends who have known you forever. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever have those kinds of relationships again.
Btw, nice use of the word “octagenarian”!!
December 2nd, 2005 at 11:02 am
We don’t have official plans to be in Edinburgh soon, but I’m sure we’ll be there soon anyway. And wow, octOgenarian - what a word! (Ok, ok, so I had to look it up and that’s the only reason I know it was spelled wrong….)
If we could all just find a place to stay put, these friendships would start to happen. Unfortunately, that’s not always an option.
December 2nd, 2005 at 1:38 pm
Lori, thanks for fixing my spelling.
I’m not such a great speller anymore now that I have spell check. Quite true about staying put…we might be staying put though for a while here. 