Outgrown?

At this point in life, everything seems to be going about three hundred miles per hour over the speed limit.  "Now everybody, we're going to keep this down to a safe, steady pace, with lots of time for looking at the scenery and checking our instruments!"  Life: Riiiiiiiiiight.  *careens off anyway*  "Ladies and gentlemen, please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times... I'll be trying to keep on the track but it's going to be a wild ride!"

If it were a straight line, it'd be aaalll cool.  I can handle that.  You can look back, see where you've been, and look forward and see where you're going.  And everyone else around you can as well, and you can pick up with them where you left off quite easily.  Life: But what fun would that be?  Instead I'm making very imprecise turns all over the place, things changing rapidly and sometimes changing back.  I can't keep up with it all, much less communicate it to people!

Which is where the problem is.  Friend take a lot of work, if you haven't noticed lately.  They require frequent check-ups.  If you neglect this maintenance, you wind up broken down on the side of the road and nobody knows what the heck you're talking about anymore!  They're still back traveling a straight road and you've taken the exit ramp and are about four states away... cue an awkward conversation.  I've been there a dozen times.  Then they call you up, "Hey, where are you?" and you're like, "Well, I changed my mind... and then I changed it again, and then I changed it again... I'm a totally different person now... how's YOUR day been?"

Let it go a couple of months and then suddenly there's nothing to talk about.  No more shared interests, which is about the only fuel I'm capable of running on.  Sentiment is fine, but completely lost on me.  Which probably you all know already, haha.

I never thought like this before... never considered that friends could be "outgrown" and phased out.  I planned on being best friends with all my best friends for the rest of my blooming life.  And I still plan on being friends with all my friends, at least parting kindly with good memories, but I'm waking up now.  To the fact that people change.  Especially me right now.  And also that other people don't always like turning around to find a stranger at their backs.  So I need to do that gently.

I won't always have the same connections with everyone that I once had.  As I lose hobbies and pick up new ones, as my entire life really shifts gears in what I have to admit has been a short short time span, it's going to be difficult to pull that old-me out into the open and make her exercise her social skills.  I used to be a writer. I used to be a history buff.  I used to be into art and music mainly.  I still LIKE art and music, and I still like history to an extent.  Writing... I'm losing it.  It's not such a part of me as I may have thought it was.  But I'm definitely not guaranteeing it won't come back someday when I'm forty or so, haha.  But the point is my interests have changed.  It's not stories running through my head now, or accents or poetry.  Not for the most part.  It's equations and concepts and problems to solve, scientific facts and really random extremely nerdy trivia.  People don't like to hear that.  They expect you to get excited and bouncy about creative pursuits, or a new book coming out.  They do not expect a "fangirl" reaction to, say, implicit differentiation.  It will, repeat, will earn you blank stares.

So I spend all these years of my life building friendships with people who want to talk about and do things that are so far from my mind right now... it's hard to motivate myself.  Catching up is hard, since everything moves fast and gets away from me.  It would be the event of an entire afternoon to bring one person up to date sometimes.  And sometimes I don't want everyone up to date.  Sometimes I can't handle that kind of exposure.  This is the difficulty when very very important yet very very private things happen to me.  They change me but I can't explain them.

Bottom line(s):  It's hard to tell people this and do it without hurting them.  I'm not trying to hurt anyone.  I am always, repeat, always ready to listen.  Send me emails.  I read fast and I will write back.  Listening is not the problem.  The problem is me not being able to put things into words I'm ready for the world to hear.

It's hard to keep up with myself and everybody else.  It's hard to go back and play a role that I'm just not anymore.  A rock and a hard place.  And I'm still, if you'll recall, going three hundred miles per hour over the speed limit I'd prefer.

This is my explanation, my apology.  I'm not actually writing this to anybody in particular, but I know there are some of you I've hurt, completely unknowingly and unintentionally, by this distancing.  I don't want it to be like this, but I'm lost for a cure, at least for now... bear with me, okay?  Thank you.

AMZi