Look How Far You’ve Come

From ed 472 of The Big Issue… with thanks to those champions…

You know those people you don’t see for years? The lost connections. The old pals. The ones you used to see regularly but haven’t spent so much as five minutes with for decades. I’ve seen a few of them lately. A neighbour from way back. A school pal who lived overseas. A work buddy whose relationship woes were a constant point of outrage to all of us at the work morning tea for months at a time, suddenly next to me at the supermarket, a partner next to her tiredly packing things into paper bags, a baby strapped to her chest.

Here’s to those friends, not even because of who they are (some of them are better as featured extras than as main characters after all) but because isn’t it nice, sometimes, to realise how far you’ve come? Public Service Announcement: look how far you’ve come.

You probably can’t see it.

You might even be able to measure it.

We’re not very good at measuring how far we’ve come, are we? We tend to see things as a slow, gradual gradient that isn’t tilted as dramatically as we’d like it to be. There’s always someone you can point to who did something faster or won something more gloriously or looked like they were making the most of something better than you ever could.

How good is it, though, when you meet one of those people from the past and they ask you something like, ‘how’s it going working in the chicken shop’ or whatever and you think: hey, that was three jobs ago! Look how far I’ve come! Or they tell you they like your hair. Or that last time they saw you, you were nervous about an exam that is now a distant memory.

Sometimes, it’s been so long they’ve missed something big - a shuddering disaster or an eclipsing triumph - and even being further along from those things can bring the feeling right to the surface. Look how far I’ve come.

You know what can help you measure all these things better? Technology. Search in your phone for pictures from five years ago. Search your emails. Look at an old CV. Take a little mental picture of yourself being somewhere else. Maybe it was a better time. Maybe it was worse time. But every time becomes another time eventually and this moment? Right here? Not going to last forever.

The caveat here is that there will always be someone killing it on instagram. Looking gorgeous or being charming or making people laugh or all three.  Someone will always mention airily over lunch that their grand-daughter just made it to the finals. The finals of what? Who cares! Your grand daughter doesn’t even play netball? You don’t even have a grand daughter? Not the point. Other people’s achievements can really grind your gears when you’re stuck in the right now.

One of the people I used to know from work who I hadn’t seen for over a decade? She came at me sideways recently, at a big public event we were both at, and something about her gait took me instantly back to the times we spent in the office together. I knew it was her before I saw her. And then there she was, right in front of me, arms wide, huge grin on her face. She was full of life and light and joy and she was dressed in different colours with new hair and you know what? She probably looked older. She’d probably had a few disasters in her life since I saw her, and a few triumphs, and yet here she was, right in front of me, in the right now.

I said a strange thing to this old friend I hadn’t seen for years but used to see every day. I said, ‘I see you on Instagram sometimes and I wonder if you know that we’re still besties.’

She was being pulled by a friend towards the bar and I was about to be introduced to someone. Still facing me, now walking backwards, she called back to me: I do know that! I absolutely know that!

And then she was gone. Part of the crowd. We said we’d find each other later. We did not.

But we’re besties who never see each other, and when I see her next time, I’ll think all the way back to last week and I’ll think: look how far we’ve come.