There’s a particular kind of pain that comes with old friendships, the ones that stretch back to childhood bedrooms and adolescent sleepovers, to high school hallways and first heartbreaks. These friendships are like songs, familiar from the first note, yet soaked in a kind of melancholy that only memory can bring. They hold the echo of who you once were, wrapped in laughter, longing, and the bittersweet weight of time. They comfort you, but in the same breath, they are a quiet reminder of the self you’ve outgrown and all that lingers in the spaces between who you were and who you’ve become.
There is of course beauty in knowing someone who once knew your locker combination, your first crush, your house phone number by heart. They remember your braces, your bad haircuts, your big dreams when they were still unformed and naive. But these connections come with ghosts too. When you’re around these friends, it can feel like being pulled back into your 14-year-old self – unsure and half-formed. No matter how far you’ve come, there’s something about the presence of an old friend that folds time like origami, collapsing the years between then and now.
In the latest season of The White Lotus, this unraveling plays out with eerie familiarity. Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate, three women who’ve known each other forever, vacation together in what should be a joyful reunion, but instead we watch the undercurrent of resentment, competitiveness, and deep, unspeakable hurt slowly bubble to the surface. They love each other, clearly. But they also bring out the worst in each other, perhaps because they remind one another of the versions of themselves they’ve tried to outgrow. There’s a sadness in that dynamic, an exquisite pain, where the history is so rich, so binding, and yet the present feels like trying on clothes that no longer fit.
Photo by Red Nguyen
As you move further away from your twenties, the gap between who you were and who you are now grows more distinct. You build new routines, families, careers, beliefs. You stop being able to relate to your friend’s choices, and they stop being able to understand yours. Conversations, once effortless, begin to require navigation, carefully skirting the landmines of politics, parenting styles, priorities. The shared language of the past is still there, but it feels less and less fluent.
Old friends have a way of brushing against the soft spots you thought had long healed. There’s something about being around people who knew you before you found your footing, before you figured out how to protect your peace, your confidence, your identity. They can unknowingly bring old insecurities to the surface bubbling up like the champagne you inevitably drink on your yearly catch-ups. Maybe it’s in the way they still joke about how dramatic you were in high school, or how you always cried over nothing, or how you were the “needy” one, the “flaky” one, or the one who couldn’t take a joke. To them, these memories are lighthearted, harmless, shared stories. But to you they can be pressure points. Reminders.
And it’s not just the teasing. Sometimes it’s more subtle, how easily they fall back into the roles that made you feel small. The way one friend dominates every conversation. The way another dismisses your opinions without even realising it. The silent hierarchy that still somehow exists even now, decades later. It’s not that you haven’t grown, or that you’re not proud of who you are now. You have grown. You’ve done the work. You’ve built a life, maybe even a family, a career, a confidence you might not have had back then. But when you’re back in that familiar circle, you can feel yourself shrinking a little to fit the old mold. Laughing at jokes that don’t feel funny anymore. Holding back parts of yourself because you’re not sure they’ll understand, or worse, that they’ll roll their eyes and lament that you’ve changed so much.
And yet, you love them. That’s what makes it complicated. Because even when they bring out your insecurities, they also remind you of who you’ve always been underneath the noise. They were there for the early chapters. They were witnesses to your becoming. And sometimes you wonder if maybe you do it too, maybe you also hold them to who they used to be, instead of who they are now. Maybe you all keep each other in those old boxes without meaning to, because it’s easier than confronting the distance that’s grown between you.
So you stay. Because leaving would make you feel untethered. You stay in the friendship, and you try to soften those edges. You try to remember that love and discomfort can coexist. That being seen, truly seen, is sometimes painful, especially when the lens is a decade old. You keep showing up. Because they were there before. Because they knew you before. And sometimes that is enough.
Photo by Inga Seliverstova
These days, the group chat has become the modern campfire, flickering constantly, yet rarely warm. It’s where old friends now mostly live, scattered across cities, careers, and time zones. But for all its convenience, it’s a disconnected kind of closeness. You dip in and out of each other’s virtual lives, tossing emojis and heart reactions like pebbles into a vast lake. Someone gets a promotion or has a baby or buys a house, and we all cheer with exclamation points but rarely do we understand what that win really felt like. What it cost. What it changed. The textures of each other’s lives get flattened into texts and screenshots, a shared scroll of milestones, curated and clean. Even the way we speak in the group chat reflects who we’ve become – some cryptic, some always-on, some barely there. The old rhythms are still there if you squint, but there’s a strange distance, like talking through glass.
I envy the Boomer generation in this respect. They still believe in the drop-in, unannounced and unbothered. They still pick up the phone and call just to talk with no calendar invite required, no explanation needed. They don’t carry the same social hang-ups that generations that follow them seem to. They aren’t chasing ‘aligned values’ in their friendships so much as they are holding onto shared humanity. They don’t need their friends to be mirror images of themselves, they just appreciate them for who they are.
There’s a kind of peace in that. Maybe, as we get older, we’ll grow into it too. Maybe we’ll learn to hold those old friendships without needing them to reflect who we are now. To let them be what they are, imperfect, messy, tinged with nostalgia and longing, but also real and rare.
Because in a world that’s always asking us to change, evolve, move forward, there’s something sacred about the people who knew you before you knew yourself. Even if it hurts sometimes to be seen through that old lens, there is also grace in being known like that.
And maybe that’s the point. Not to recapture who we were, but to find a way to love who we’ve all become, side by side, if a little differently than before. As the Divinyls’ immortalised – it’s a fine line between pleasure and pain…and it’s exquisite.
By Mia Cowling
There’s a particular kind of pain that comes with old friendships, the ones that stretch back to childhood bedrooms and adolescent sleepovers, to high school hallways and first heartbreaks. These friendships are like songs, familiar from the first note, yet soaked in a kind of melancholy that only memory can bring. They hold the echo of who you once were, wrapped in laughter, longing, and the bittersweet weight of time. They comfort you, but in the same breath, they are a quiet reminder of the self you’ve outgrown and all that lingers in the spaces between who you were and who you’ve become.
There is of course beauty in knowing someone who once knew your locker combination, your first crush, your house phone number by heart. They remember your braces, your bad haircuts, your big dreams when they were still unformed and naive. But these connections come with ghosts too. When you’re around these friends, it can feel like being pulled back into your 14-year-old self – unsure and half-formed. No matter how far you’ve come, there’s something about the presence of an old friend that folds time like origami, collapsing the years between then and now.
In the latest season of The White Lotus, this unraveling plays out with eerie familiarity. Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate, three women who’ve known each other forever, vacation together in what should be a joyful reunion, but instead we watch the undercurrent of resentment, competitiveness, and deep, unspeakable hurt slowly bubble to the surface. They love each other, clearly. But they also bring out the worst in each other, perhaps because they remind one another of the versions of themselves they’ve tried to outgrow. There’s a sadness in that dynamic, an exquisite pain, where the history is so rich, so binding, and yet the present feels like trying on clothes that no longer fit.
As you move further away from your twenties, the gap between who you were and who you are now grows more distinct. You build new routines, families, careers, beliefs. You stop being able to relate to your friend’s choices, and they stop being able to understand yours. Conversations, once effortless, begin to require navigation, carefully skirting the landmines of politics, parenting styles, priorities. The shared language of the past is still there, but it feels less and less fluent.
Old friends have a way of brushing against the soft spots you thought had long healed. There’s something about being around people who knew you before you found your footing, before you figured out how to protect your peace, your confidence, your identity. They can unknowingly bring old insecurities to the surface bubbling up like the champagne you inevitably drink on your yearly catch-ups. Maybe it’s in the way they still joke about how dramatic you were in high school, or how you always cried over nothing, or how you were the “needy” one, the “flaky” one, or the one who couldn’t take a joke. To them, these memories are lighthearted, harmless, shared stories. But to you they can be pressure points. Reminders.
And it’s not just the teasing. Sometimes it’s more subtle, how easily they fall back into the roles that made you feel small. The way one friend dominates every conversation. The way another dismisses your opinions without even realising it. The silent hierarchy that still somehow exists even now, decades later. It’s not that you haven’t grown, or that you’re not proud of who you are now. You have grown. You’ve done the work. You’ve built a life, maybe even a family, a career, a confidence you might not have had back then. But when you’re back in that familiar circle, you can feel yourself shrinking a little to fit the old mold. Laughing at jokes that don’t feel funny anymore. Holding back parts of yourself because you’re not sure they’ll understand, or worse, that they’ll roll their eyes and lament that you’ve changed so much.
And yet, you love them. That’s what makes it complicated. Because even when they bring out your insecurities, they also remind you of who you’ve always been underneath the noise. They were there for the early chapters. They were witnesses to your becoming. And sometimes you wonder if maybe you do it too, maybe you also hold them to who they used to be, instead of who they are now. Maybe you all keep each other in those old boxes without meaning to, because it’s easier than confronting the distance that’s grown between you.
So you stay. Because leaving would make you feel untethered. You stay in the friendship, and you try to soften those edges. You try to remember that love and discomfort can coexist. That being seen, truly seen, is sometimes painful, especially when the lens is a decade old. You keep showing up. Because they were there before. Because they knew you before. And sometimes that is enough.
These days, the group chat has become the modern campfire, flickering constantly, yet rarely warm. It’s where old friends now mostly live, scattered across cities, careers, and time zones. But for all its convenience, it’s a disconnected kind of closeness. You dip in and out of each other’s virtual lives, tossing emojis and heart reactions like pebbles into a vast lake. Someone gets a promotion or has a baby or buys a house, and we all cheer with exclamation points but rarely do we understand what that win really felt like. What it cost. What it changed. The textures of each other’s lives get flattened into texts and screenshots, a shared scroll of milestones, curated and clean. Even the way we speak in the group chat reflects who we’ve become – some cryptic, some always-on, some barely there. The old rhythms are still there if you squint, but there’s a strange distance, like talking through glass.
I envy the Boomer generation in this respect. They still believe in the drop-in, unannounced and unbothered. They still pick up the phone and call just to talk with no calendar invite required, no explanation needed. They don’t carry the same social hang-ups that generations that follow them seem to. They aren’t chasing ‘aligned values’ in their friendships so much as they are holding onto shared humanity. They don’t need their friends to be mirror images of themselves, they just appreciate them for who they are.
There’s a kind of peace in that. Maybe, as we get older, we’ll grow into it too. Maybe we’ll learn to hold those old friendships without needing them to reflect who we are now. To let them be what they are, imperfect, messy, tinged with nostalgia and longing, but also real and rare.
Because in a world that’s always asking us to change, evolve, move forward, there’s something sacred about the people who knew you before you knew yourself. Even if it hurts sometimes to be seen through that old lens, there is also grace in being known like that.
And maybe that’s the point. Not to recapture who we were, but to find a way to love who we’ve all become, side by side, if a little differently than before. As the Divinyls’ immortalised – it’s a fine line between pleasure and pain…and it’s exquisite.
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