If you've ever had a drink with me, you will not be surprised that I have been accused of exaggerating some of my stories.
Occasionally I've come across old journals and emails and compared the version of a story I tell to what I wrote at the time. I'm generally amused to see changes a creative writing teacher might approve of. Multiple minor characters are combined. Superfluous details omitted. The essential plot remains the same, just easier to parse. The key quotes and the punch lines remain, word for word. The least believable details are there from the very beginning.
I've become far less of a storyteller recently, opting for connection rather than the boisterous version of me that commands/hogs attention. Maybe things are just more subdued as we live through a pandemic. My stories are much less fun to listen to now that I'm out of practice and more likely to go off script. This is why we edit things with each re-telling: life is too complicated to depict in its full detail and editing on the fly generally results in a rambling, lopsided story where I botch the punchline.
So it's funny to occasionally find that I've been edited out of a story I imagine myself a part of. A friend explained the origins of the ceramic bear head in his apartment...when I remember being the one to spot it and pick it up off a Brooklyn curb. Another friend told me about this great party where they constructed a tiny city out of cardboard and everyone dressed up like superheros and supervillains and did battle. There are approximately a thousand slightly embarassing photos of me, and us together, at this party. That night led, in a roundabout way, to my (now ex)wife getting matching dinosaur hoodies for me and my cat.
I find this interesting because these are people I'm still friends with, years after the events in question. I would have let them keep their lines. It's the people who are no longer in my top contacts who get their lines reassigned or who get merged into a composite character.
It makes me wonder who I've edited out. Looking through old photos to try to find a picture of the cat and I in our matching hoodies, I'm surprised to see how my memories, while not wrong per se, are incomplete. Had I tried to say who was there at the important moments of my life, I would have gotten the names wrong, heavily skewed towards the people who remain in my life and the people who left with a dramatic flourish. The people who drifted off as our lives diverged have seemingly drifted out of my memory, too.
I'd like to say that it's because those people weren't so important to me. That, unfortunately, isn't the case. The people who aren't in my life yet remain clear in my memory are there because they’re the ones where things went unsaid or far too much was said. They’re staying there not because of our deep connection or their important role in my life, but because they haunt me.
Maybe it's different for you. It's probably different for you. Our internal experiences are so difficult to convey, I suspect there's a lot more natural variation than we're led to believe. Still, I don't think I'm the only one who's lost touch with friends because we simply didn't stay in touch.
When Rajiv Mehta first showed me his program to map out the people involved in care work, I realized just how many people are involved in our lives. It’s really something to map it out, like we used to in the early days of social media. Even people who are sole caregivers without any respite are still coordinating with (and usually responsible for coordinating) a huge group of people. It’s no wonder so many of them slip from our memories.
The more isolated a caregiver is, the more likely that everyone else who gets drawn on that care map is a professional who is involved for seven minutes or one PT session at a time. The longer someone has served as a caregiver, the more likely it is that their social circle and their care map are one and the same. These two things, in combination, lead to an incredible sense of isolation.
When someone is really cut off, they can't just go out and make new friends. When we're in the slog of a crisis that's unfolding over years, we need people who already know who we really are. Not just what we can do for the person we're supporting, but who we actually are as a person. We want someone who has known us in a time when we weren't just a to-do list. We need them to remind us of who we were and who we can be.
That's where those vanished friends come in. Maybe they won't pick up the phone or text back. Maybe they will.
As I realize who I've edited out of my stories, there's a question to answer: Who do I want to edit back in?
One year my mom’s best friend showed up particularly late to her birthday dinner. She’s not known for her punctuality, so we hadn’t been concerned. It turns out she’d accidentally gone to someone else’s birthday party at the restaurant next door.
She’d been a little confused that my mom and our family weren’t there, but that’s where she’d been led when she said she was at the restaurant for Karin’s party. Everyone was familiar and she knew some of their names. Everyone seemed to know her, too, and she was welcomed warmly to the party.
Eventually they figured out that the Karin whose birthday party she was at was a nurse at the ICU where her son had been treated a few years before. Everyone had a good laugh and she finally made her way to the right Karin’s birthday party. So, maybe you can befriend the random professionals who fill out your care map.
You can make your own Care Map.
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