Reunited and it feels so…me?

via GIPHY

By coincidence (if you believe in those*), the past week has been full of reunions with people from my past. It all started when I ran into a classmate from elementary, middle, and high school at the Barcelona airport. In the week that followed, I:

• Exchanged texts with someone I worked with nearly 15 years ago
• Caught up with my best friend from high school on the phone
• Chatted with a friend that moved away a few years ago while I sat in traffic
• Received an email update from a friend from college
• Hosted a good friend who I hadn’t seen in over a year for the weekend
• Met up with another faraway friend who happened to be in town for the weekend
• Ran into two former coworkers (from different jobs) while out and about

That’s nine people who I don’t see or talk to regularly (or regularly enough), all in one week. Sure, I made an effort to connect with some of them by arranging a visit or a phone call, but still. That’s a lot of reconnecting.

And since it had been a while–too long–since I had caught up with all of them, it was easy to get confused about what details and updates I shared with each person. And you’d think that would be exhausting.

But it wasn’t! In fact, the opposite is true.

Perhaps it’s the extrovert in me, feeling energized by spending with others, but I think it’s more than that because I spend a lot of time with lots of people most days of the week. These blasts from the past somehow made me feel more like myself than I’ve felt in a while.

Not that I haven’t been feeling like myself. At least not noticeably.

It’s like when I grew my hair out during grad school. (I’ve had short hair since 9th grade.) I was still me with long hair, and I felt like me, but when I went back to a pixie cut, I felt more like me than I did with long hair.

Anyway, it made me wonder if perhaps I’ve been craving connections with people who have known me for a long time, or at least knew me when I was a little (or quite a bit) younger. I’m not sure, but I can say that it felt great and that I’ve resolved to do better connecting with those folks–and others like them–so that there isn’t as much re-connecting and playing catch-up.

What about you? Have you ever realized you were missing something only after it surfaced or presented itself to you? Or maybe you’ve been meaning to catch up with someone and needed a nudge. Let me know!

*Whenever I think about coincidences, I think about the star-studded 2004 movie, I Heart Huckabees because of the conflicting theories the existential detectives (yep) have about them.