Balancing Staying in Touch and Self Care
Listen to Chrystina discuss additional tips for balancing self care and staying in touch in Episode 35 of the Party Ideas & Logistics with Chrystina Noel podcast, above.
I’ve written so many blog posts on staying in touch in your late twenties, but you wouldn’t know that because I’ve never actually hit publish on any of them.
It’s a tricky subject trying to both empower people to make choices that work for them, remind people how important relationships are in their life, and not offend people in your own life (and by “your own” life I mean “my own” life). Let me start by saying, to all those people that our relationships have mellowed out in the last few years, and/or who I maybe haven’t seen in a while, thank you for everything. You are wonderful. And I’ll absolutely be here should our paths cross each other in a more consistent way in life again.
In 2015, I wrote a book called how to stay in touch: 27 ways to make it happen. It’s still a good book. There’s a lot of great advice about why to bother staying in touch, systems to put in place to make it easier, and easy ways you can incorporate it into things you’re already doing in your life. But one thing the book is missing is a discussion of the fact that as you transition into different periods in your life, the people in your life transition as well, and that’s okay. I’m still working on that last part.
I love people. They’re my jam. I love hearing their stories, supporting them, following their journeys, and meeting new ones. That’s why I’ve found it particularly hard over the years to accept the fact that relationships with people who at one time were the absolute most important people in life, may not be the most important relationships in your life now.
The logical side of my brain understands this is a thing that needs to happen for a few reasons:
Your sanity. There are a million quotes about staying in touch. I plan to poorly quote two of them right now: you are the combination of the five people with whom you spend the most time, and people can only maintain about 150 relationships well in their life at one time. There are no quotes about how easy it is to stay in touch with your 1,500 Facebook friends, because it’s not. At least, not in a meaningful way. And the older you are, the more people you’ve met, which means the more you need to really consider which relationships fulfill you, are challenging you (in a good way), helping you thrive, and inspiring you to be the person you want to be.
There are seasons to life. It’s easy to make a million new friends in college; there are people everywhere. All you need to do is go outside your dorm room to make a new friend. You’re all at the exact same point in your life where your goal is to survive the next four or five years together. (Similar to the same goal that you and all your high school friends had a few years prior to that.) But when you graduate college there’s no single path anymore; everyone is on their own journey. Some people go back to school, some people start full-time jobs, some people start their own businesses, some people pursue their passion, some people get married, some people have children, and some people do cool things I don’t even know exist. When people have a common goal, it is much easier to find reasons to stay in touch. When those common goals are completed or misaligned, it gets a little bit trickier.
People get busy. Like really busy. We didn’t realize how good we had it when we had no scheduled commitments other than class and/or activities in which we voluntarily chose to engage. Now we have work schedules, travel schedules, vacation schedules, wedding schedules, chores schedules, and self-care schedules to organize around. With that level of busy, it’s genuinely just not possible to see or talk to all the people you used to. The best case scenario of this situation is to at least be choosing which people you do want to be connecting with on the day-to-day.
People grow apart. It’s unfortunately just that simple sometimes. People find their passions, they try new hobbies, they learn new things, they become new people. And sometimes whoever those two new people you become just don’t jive as well as the old two people. It’s unfortunate, but true.
But it’s a bummer. It’s a real bummer. There’s so many memories that you share with those people and you’ve already put so much time into the relationship that you want to put in the work to keep the relationships growing. But sometimes you wake up and realize you’re exhausted and you need to start taking care of yourself. (You know, something you should have realized a long time ago, and you had a hunch about, but you were just ignoring that nagging little feeling because you’re too much of a people pleaser who wants everybody to like you to listen to it. Or was that just me?)
In the past two years (yes, years), I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about this. I was exhausted. I was sending out +200 birthday cards per year, +200 Christmas cards every holiday season, planning my vacations around seeing people, and spending $100s each month on food for parties. While it was possible to keep living like that, it finally occurred to me that I wasn’t living my life for me anymore. Instead of keeping up really strong relationships with the people that inspired me the most, everyone was getting some half-assed version of me where I was always physically there, but mentally only half there because my brain was just constantly spinning through my to do list. So I decided to use that list making skill for good.
I made lists of people in my life. I referenced old lists of people to whom I sent cards (because when you’re a list person you have a lot of old lists laying around). I reviewed birthday card lists. I noticed how many people actually send cards back in return. I thought about who the people were that would text me to say they were thinking of me. I started recording my time by the minute. I made lists of activities where I was spending my time. I made lists of activities where even though I was spending no time at all, they were still taking up all of my energy. And I made lists of people who inspired me that I wish I had stayed in better touch with.
Sidebar: I did an interesting thing where I took an online class by Sarah Von Bargen called More Money, More Happy which I highly recommend where you print out your credit card statement (after defining what things bring you joy) and highlight which purchases brought you joy, which were necessities, and which you felt like crap about later. (You may think that I just gave away all the goodies, but I promise you I didn’t. She guides you through defining your own version of happy and tips and tricks to stop spending.) This was a really interesting experience because I initially highlighted all of the things that involved people in green, because people were something that made me happy; therefore, any money I spent while with people (within reason) was good money spent. But after looking back on this, I realized that I was not being wise with my resources: both my money, and my time.
It was not uncommon for me to schedule half a dozen coffee dates in a week with people with whom I really had no connection and I would feel the need to put my card down to pay for their drink as well. Those interactions were filling my time, adding to my acquaintance list, and draining my bank account. It was time for me to stop focusing on all the people, it was time to start focusing on the ones that mattered.
Let me say that again a different way. (Mostly for me, because I need to hear it.)
Focus your energy where you want it to be.
Not where you think it should be. Not where other people think you should. Not where it just happens to end up because that’s how the day panned out. But where you actually want it.
You have to choose which relationships in which you want to invest. You have to choose where you want to spend your time. (And for me, this actually even came down to choosing which things I still wanted to have in my life Marie Kondo style. I’ve been doing a pretty deep clean of all of my stuff in the past two years as well. But that’s not what this blog post is about.)
So how do you do this? Make your own lists. (I know. I’m sure you’re surprised.)
And before you do this. It’s important to know that staying in touch is different from networking. In order to grow in your career, you will need to network. “It’s all about who you know,” they say. (They = Everyone) This post is not about staying in touch with business-oriented contacts. There’s a whole strategy to that about meeting people within your industry and meeting people in a tangential industry and finding mentors and mentees. But that strategy is for a different day.
These are the people you stay in touch with because you want to. Because it’s good for your soul. That leave you feeling better than when you entered the conversation. The ones who have always been there for you. That energize you and make you excited to take your next leap. The people who you adore so much as people in general that you want to stay in their world to find out what happens next. The ones who if your world was crashing down, you wouldn’t hesitate to call.
Aren’t those the kind of people that you want to be spending your time with?
So here’s what I did. I opened up a notebook and I made three lists of people:
The list of people with whom I want to make an active effort to stay in touch.
The list of people with whom I want to make a moderately active effort to stay in touch.
The list of people with whom I want to make a passive effort to stay in touch.
And it’s okay if not everyone makes the list. Because people have their own lives, and their own goals, and their own important people in their lives. And if they want to be staying in touch with you, they’ll reach out and then you can reconsider from there.
Now, this might sound crazy. Why would you need a list for this? Well, I needed to give myself permission to prioritize my relationships to manage my time better. Also, as an extremely left-brained person (most of the time), it was a good exercise in taking an analytical approach to figure out how much energy I should be putting into relationships. Being the one to always make the first move is tiring.
And of course there are some people who over the years have earned the right to my extra attention. Those are the people who have been in it with me in the past. Those are the ones that I know are in times of their lives right now where they don’t have the capacity to put in the extra energy. Those people have banked months or even years of extra energy from me. But that’s not always the case, so I decided to make some changes.
I decided to stop sending birthday cards for the year. I haven’t planned any vacations based specifically on visiting people. I stopped scheduling as many coffee dates with people I’ve met with whom there wasn’t an initial spark (yes, friendships have sparks). I have been inviting very specific people to parties as opposed to sending out large invite lists to people who don’t usually attend and/or respond. And I have stopped being the one to start the “we should all hang out” emails because that level of coordination was constantly stressing me out and leaving my inbox a disaster.
It’s been good. Cutting down on these activities has given me more time to send out spur of the moment handmade cards, to send gifts to people as I am inspired to do so, and to give me more of a direction when I do have a free pocket of time. I’ve been able to build stronger relationships with the people who are in the here and now with me, and it’s helped me feel like there’s more people I can actually rely on in the day-to-day as opposed to constantly being surrounded by people and still managing to feel so incredibly lonely.
This is a non-definitive narrative, just a series of thoughts, an update of life, and hopefully an inspiration of permission for anybody else out there who needs it.
If you enjoy this kind of relationship chat, I’d highly recommend listening to season 2 of the community made podcast. It’s exactly on point. Especially the episode about prioritizing relationships.
I’d love to hear about any feelings or tactics that people are using this day in age to feel better connected and build stronger connections with people who matter in the comments below. Thanks again, as always, for reading.
