08/12/2026

what happens when someone has witnessed so many versions of you that losing them feels like losing continuity with your own life

losing the person who knew you before

experiencing profound friendship has ruined ordinary friendship for me. i had a friendship so total that while i was grieving my horrendous romantic breakup last year, i realized that i was actually grieving not being able to talk to M about it more than the breakup itself. for so many years, she was the person i wanted to talk to about everything that happened to me. the partners i had during the course of our friendship would often joke that they were third-wheeling us, even though M and i were actually long distance for the majority of our friendship. no matter the distance, she was still the person i was most excited to debrief anything with and the person who knew what was happening throughout my days and who all the characters were and why a small interaction that would mean nothing to someone else meant something enormous to me. i didn’t have to build the context before telling her the story because she had been there for the context too. most importantly, both of us made space for each other in our lives without having to ask each other for it. it was the most natural thing for us. 

we got each other through some of the best and worst moments of our lives and i know now, after having experienced this kind of friendship and then having lived without it, that it probably required a certain genre of childhood loneliness for us to be able to witness each other in all the ways we needed. we were both pretty sad and emo teenagers on tumblr who romanticized being part of the 27 club. we shared the same cultural references and quite a few similar life problems and i think there were parts of each other that we recognized before either of us had language for why they needed to be recognized. we cared about each other in the exact ways that made sense to us. she was much softer, kinder, and more empathetic than i could ever be and i like to think that we balanced each other out well, although i’m not sure if i’m romanticizing this in hindsight or if she even experienced the friendship the way i did, or if this entire thing was somehow more total for me than it was for her.

i’m not friends with her anymore, which kind of sucks obviously. there was no capital-D-dramatic friendship breakup, no enormous betrayal or unforgivable thing that happened between us. there was a small fight over something stupid (that i probably did) and one day we were friends and the next day we weren’t, and day after day neither of us chose to message each other again. i felt the void immediately and then kept feeling it, and i hope she did too, although i also know that hoping she felt the same degree of loss is perhaps its own strange form of possessiveness. i think we were both exhausted by our own lives and, in that moment, probably exhausted by each other too, and i also know i should have been the one to repair it. alas, i did not.

i would be lying if i said i have not fantasized about us getting back together as friends like issa and molly in that one episode of insecure. for a long time i think i imagined it as some kind of return - where we would talk again and everything would somehow resume and the years in between would collapse, although the older i get the more i understand that this is probably not how anything works. she has lived an entire life without me for almost two years and i have lived an entire life without her, and there are now parts of both of us that the other did not witness.

this has been the strangest part for me because M witnessed so much of my life before this. all my new friends feel like they’re from my “after” life and she knew me before. she knew me when i first moved out and when i started my first company and when i moved to the uk and then to san francisco and then to philly and then to new york. she knew earlier versions of me that i barely know how to access anymore because they existed inside a specific set of circumstances and ambitions and problems that no longer exist. she watched me become a lot of the person i am now, which means that when i think about losing the friendship, part of what i am grieving is not only losing her but losing one of the people who held the continuity between all of those versions of me.

the first time i ever wrote something that felt meaningful to me, she was the person who pushed me to write it. i think about that now because writing has somehow become one of the primary ways i make sense of my life, and it is strange to realize that even this thing that feels so fundamental to who i am now has her somewhere near its beginning. i often say that she witnessed me becoming different versions of myself. but in small and large ways, she helped make some of those versions possible.

there are people who know you very well and then there are people who have actually watched you change, and i don’t think those things are interchangeable. someone can meet me now and know me deeply and perhaps even understand the current version of me better than M did toward the end of our friendship, but they cannot know what it meant when i did something for the first time because they were not there when i had never done it before. they do not know which parts of my life once seemed impossible to me or which ambitions i used to whisper before i knew whether i was allowed to have them. they know the person who exists after all of those things happened.

i also complain all the time that no one understands me. i have said some version of this for years, that people flatten me or misunderstand what i mean or only seem able to hold one part of me at a time, and maybe part of why i am so sensitive to this is because i know what it feels like to actually be understood. because she does understand me in a way that has made it difficult to forget the difference. there were parts of myself i never had to make legible to her because she already knew the context they came from, and i think having experienced that has probably ruined my calibration a little bit too. it is hard to convince yourself that being partially understood is enough once you know what it feels like to not have to translate yourself all the way into being known.

i think this is also why i notice her absence most when something good happens. after we stopped being friends, i dealt with a breakup without her, which was a first, and there were other difficult periods where i desperately wanted her, but i have also accomplished a lot in the last two years and there is no one else i thought of more than M whenever something went right. when i got my O1 visa, when we got our dream patron, when we launched the new funds, when i dated an insane man, when i barely made it home from a Fred Again concert, when i made some questionable decision that i knew she would have an opinion on, there was always this immediate desire to tell her. i need her in the bad moments but i want her, especially her, in the good ones.

for a while i worried that maybe we were only friends because we were trauma-bonded, which i know is probably not even the right use of that phrase, but i was trying to understand whether the depth of the friendship was somehow dependent on how much we needed each other. we had been through deaths and career changes and health things and family stuff and all kinds of periods where one or both of us was not doing well, and so of course a lot of intimacy grew out of being there for each other through those things. but isn’t that also just the point of friendship? someone is there while life happens to you and then eventually the fact that they were there becomes part of what your life means.

and the more time that has passed, the less i think the friendship was only about needing each other through bad things because what i miss most is the ordinary intimacy of it. i miss telling her things that did not require support. i miss knowing how her day was going and who she was annoyed at and what she was thinking about. i miss exchanging songs and playlists. i miss sending her something and already knowing what part of it she would notice. i want to tell her about everything that went right and everything that went wrong and all the bad decisions i’ve made and the new characters i’ve met and analyze everyone with her. i want to hear about all the things i missed too. i want to know the people in her life now and what she has changed her mind about and what she worries about and what she is excited about and all the small things that never become important enough to announce but that eventually make up a life. my life, at least the highlight reel, can be pieced together through my twitter posts and spotify playlists. i wonder if she has been following along. i have tried to follow along with the little that is available to me, and the information asymmetry of knowing that so much of her life is happening somewhere beyond what i can see kills me.

the nuance of all of this is that not being friends with her probably did teach me to deal with things in a slightly healthier way because i no longer had someone i could immediately go to who would help me feel better. i had to sit with the discomfort of feelings a little longer and i had to learn that i could survive things without immediately narrating them to another person. i had to go through heartbreak without her and make decisions without her and have bad days without her and eventually discover that i was capable of carrying myself through them. her absence also probably created space, even if it was unwanted at the time, for new friendships, and some of those friendships have become very important to me.

but i also don’t know when we decided that needing people less was always the healthier outcome. i am glad i know that i can get through things alone, but i’m not sure being able to carry your life alone is the same thing as wanting to. there are ways in which my life has genuinely skyrocketed since our friendship ended and i became more self-sufficient and met new people and developed new ways of dealing with myself, but there is still a part of me that thinks i would have preferred for her to be there to see all of it.

the stranger part is that i genuinely like the person i became in her absence. i handle myself differently now in ways i feel proud of, and it is not a version of me she is familiar with at all. i am less reactive and less desperate for someone else to immediately metabolize whatever i am feeling with me, and i trust myself more than i did when we were friends. the uncomfortable thing to admit is that i’m not entirely sure this version of me could have emerged while we were still as intertwined as we were because some of it could only have happened in isolation from her. which makes wanting her back confusing because i don’t actually want to go back to being the person i was when i had her. i want the person who witnessed all of my previous selves to know the person i became without her.

none of the friendships i have made since then have had the time and marination to get to the level of mine and M’s friendship, which of course is not their fault because that kind of thing only happens through time and accumulated experience and there is no way to skip that part. still, having experienced it once has made it difficult not to know what is missing. i am starting to doubt sometimes that i will ever have that kind of friendship with anyone else, although maybe the unfairness is that i am comparing new relationships to one that had years and years to become what it became.

i think i also took the friendship for granted while i had it because when someone is woven so completely into your life it does not occur to you that one day they might simply not be there anymore. i don’t remember consciously appreciating that she knew all the eras of me because i did not yet know there would be an era she wouldn’t know. i didn’t know i should be grateful that there was someone who remembered what happened before the life i have now because i had never experienced what it was like to live without that person.

i’m worried now that i am too aware to ever feel the love of our friendship in the same way again. i’m worried that if we became friends again, i would be constantly observing the friendship instead of simply being inside it, wondering whether it felt the same and whether she still loved me the same way and whether i still had the same place in her life and whether we were rebuilding something or only remembering it. i’m worried she has moved on with her life and has new characters filling up her days, which of course she should, and i’m worried about my own possessiveness around her and her time because there is some immature part of me that still wants the place i once occupied even though i know i gave up any claim to it when i let two years go by.

and there is another possibility i don’t really like sitting with, which is that maybe losing me did not create the same kind of hole in her life that losing her created in mine. she has other close friends who have witnessed her across many of her phases, people who knew her before me and during me and presumably still know her now, and i don’t really have another person who holds that much continuity of my life. maybe she misses me and still does not need me in the way i miss and need her. maybe i was singularly important to her without being singular in the same way she was to me. i don’t know, and there is no way for me to know without making up a story about how she feels, but i think some of the grief is having to tolerate that possibility too.

there are moments when she likes something i post online and i notice it much more than i want to admit because it makes me feel like i still exist somewhere in her world, even peripherally, and i think this is probably part of why the loss has stayed alive for me rather than becoming something i simply remember fondly. she is not gone in the way people sometimes leave your life completely. she exists at the edges of it. i know she is there. she knows i am here. and neither of us has crossed the distance between those facts.

maybe the friendship i miss does not exist anymore because the people who made it do not exist anymore. maybe there is no way to get back something whose beauty partly came from being young enough not to know what we were building while we were building it. maybe if we ever became friends again it would have to be something different, not a continuation exactly but two people who once knew each other extraordinarily well meeting the versions of each other that appeared in the years they were apart.

there is a great deal of loss in that for me because some part of me does not want to meet her again. some part of me wants my best friend back. i want the accumulated ease and the shared language and the assumption that she will be there tomorrow because she was there yesterday. i want to not have to wonder whether i am allowed to tell her something. i want to be able to have some ridiculous thing happen and reach for my phone without remembering halfway through that we do not do that anymore.

maybe this is what it means to have been profoundly known by someone. even after the relationship ends, your mind continues to make space for them inside experiences they are no longer having with you. something good happens and for a second the old architecture of your life is still there and you know exactly where the news is supposed to go, and then you remember that the person who used to live in that part of your life does not live there anymore.

i don’t know if profound friendship has actually ruined ordinary friendship for me or if i am just still grieving one particular person. i don’t know if i will ever have something like it again and i don’t know whether that is because what we had was unusually rare or because every friendship that deep eventually becomes irreplaceable simply by surviving long enough to hold so many versions of you.

i only know that she witnessed me, and i witnessed her, and there are very few things in my life that have made me feel less alone than that did.

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PROOF OF LIFE 05 · © 2026

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