i think i just stopped looking

There have been times when I have typed someone's username into a search bar while actively thinking, I'm going to regret this.

Not after I found their page. Not after I saw something I didn't want to see. Before. Sometimes I hadn't even finished typing the username yet and I could already feel the anxiety building in my chest. I knew there was probably nothing productive waiting for me. I knew I wasn't going to reach out. I didn't want them to know I was looking. Half the time, I didn't even want them back in my life. I just wanted to see.

And then I would press search anyway.

I don't think this has ever belonged to one person for me. Old relationships, old friendships, people who at one point knew almost everything about my life and then, eventually, knew nothing. Sometimes someone would randomly come into my head or their name would come up in conversation and suddenly I wanted an update. What do they look like now? What are they doing? Who do they talk to? Who are they dating? Who are their friends? Are they happy? Are they different? Sometimes I wasn't even looking for anything specific. I just wanted to reminisce.

I think that's one of the strangest things about losing people now. People don't really disappear anymore. Before social media, there must have been people who simply left your life. A friendship ended, somebody moved, a relationship fell apart, and eventually you genuinely did not know what happened to them. Maybe you heard something through someone else years later. Maybe you ran into them at a grocery store. Maybe you never saw them again. There wasn't necessarily a tiny rectangular window you could open at two in the morning whenever curiosity got the best of you.

Now somebody can be completely absent from your life and somehow still accessible.

I can know absolutely nothing about who you are anymore and find out what you did last weekend. That has changed everything. How we meet people, how we become friends, how we define friendships, how we date, how we break up, and especially how we move on. There is no natural disappearance if you don't allow one. You have to actively decide not to look. I wasn't always very good at that.

I would tell myself I was done. I would block someone. Clear my browsing history. Try to forget the username, the phone number, whatever little trail I knew could lead me back to them. I would make a promise to myself that I wasn't going to look anymore.

Then I would look.

And afterward, there were two things to deal with. Whatever I found and the disappointment of knowing I had broken another promise to myself.

Sometimes I found something that made me angry. Sometimes something that made me sad. Sometimes I felt relieved. Sometimes I felt absolutely nothing. Occasionally I would see something and think, Thank God I don't have this connection in my life anymore.

You would think that last feeling would have been enough. Apparently not always.

Because sometimes I would check again. The weirdest part is that I don't even think I was always looking for information. I think sometimes I was looking to hurt my own feelings. I don't completely understand that. Maybe I wanted to feel stuck. There were periods of my life when moving on meant admitting that something was actually finished, and there is something very strange about accepting that. You can know a relationship needs to end before it ends. You can know a friendship no longer belongs in your life. You can even be the person who closes the door. None of that changes the fact that there used to be an entire life on the other side of it. There were conversations and trips and stupid jokes and birthdays and routines and places and versions of yourself that only existed because that person was there. Then one day there aren't. Maybe that's why I checked. Not because I wanted to open the door again. I think I just wanted to make sure it was still there.

There is something especially humiliating about checking on someone shortly after a relationship ends and discovering that they seem perfectly fine. I know social media is not a reliable measurement of anyone's happiness, but that has never stopped the human brain from being incredibly stupid about it. There were times when I wanted someone who hurt me to get hurt too. I wanted another woman to do to him what he had done to me. I wanted him to struggle to find contentment somewhere else. I wanted life to deliver some perfectly proportionate consequence that would make everything feel fair.

I don't feel that way anymore. But I did.

And I don't think pretending otherwise makes me a better person. Sometimes seeing someone doing well after they hurt you feels humiliating. You're sitting there trying to put yourself back together and they appear to be having a perfectly normal Tuesday. It can feel like you've lost some competition you never agreed to participate in.

So you look again. Maybe something changed. Maybe now they're miserable. Maybe now they understand. Maybe now you win. Except there isn't anything to win. I think I learned that slowly.

There was also a period after one of my breakups when I was genuinely afraid of completely moving on. I didn't want the relationship anymore, but the pain and grief felt like the last things connecting me to it. If I stopped being angry, stopped wondering, stopped hurting, stopped checking, then I would lose him completely. That scared me. It's strange admitting that now because I am beyond grateful that the grief is gone. I held onto it for so long because I thought letting go of the feelings meant letting go of the person forever.

It did. That was the point. I just wasn't ready for it to be. I have never really believed in closure. I think sometimes closure is just ripping the scab off a wound and being surprised that it starts bleeding again. I don't need one final conversation. I don't need somebody to explain themselves perfectly. I don't need a message from anyone in my past now. There were times when receiving one would have meant everything to me, even if I never responded. Just knowing someone reached out could feel like proof of something. Proof that they missed me, maybe. Proof that I mattered. Proof that I wasn't as easy to leave behind as I felt. Now I don't think it would prove anything.

That's probably one of the strangest parts of getting over something. The thing you once desperately wanted can eventually become completely useless to you. I think old friendships are even stranger in some ways.

There are girls I once spent enormous parts of my life with. We knew each other's families. We made plans, traveled, went out, laughed until things hurt, knew what was happening with each other's lives without having to ask. And now we don't know each other.

One of my old best friendships comes back to me mostly as fun. That's the first thing I remember. We had a lot of it. I loved her deeply. I loved having a best friend, having someone to make plans with, somewhere to go, someone to travel with. I liked being fun. At some point, being the life of the party became almost a role I knew how to play. But I was also sad. I don't even remember the sadness as clearly as I remember knowing that I was trying very hard to be attractive, trying very hard to have fun, trying very hard to look happier than I actually was. There was a point when I watched her start finding her footing. She became more dedicated to school, to herself, to changing her life. She seemed to find people and a place there that helped her move forward. Meanwhile, I was working full time and taking classes here and there, and I didn't feel like I had found mine yet. I don't remember envying her while we were friends. Maybe afterward I did. Her life looked good. Our values were different enough that somewhere inside me, I think I always knew we probably weren't going to be friends forever. I just thought the connection was strong enough to somehow override that. It wasn't. But I don't think that makes what we had less real.

Maybe that's another reason I've gotten better at leaving doors closed. Something doesn't have to last forever to have been good. A person doesn't have to belong in my life now for me to admit that I loved having them in it then. I don't need to rewrite somebody into a terrible person just because we aren't friends anymore. I also don't need to bring them back into my life just because I can remember when we were happy. Sometimes the door is closed because the room served its purpose. I still think it's weird that people from my past carry versions of me that don't exist anymore. Someone could remember me as the girl who was always out, always making plans, always having fun. Someone else might remember me as angry. Someone might remember me as insecure, funny, difficult, generous, jealous, loud, quiet, heartbroken, careless, whatever I happened to be when our lives overlapped. And I carry outdated versions of them too. Neither of us gets an automatic update.

Maybe that's what makes looking at someone's page so tempting. For a second, you get to peek at what happened after your version of their story ended. But you still don't actually know them. You're just looking through the window. I have an entirely different relationship with my own past, which is funny because I have been keeping diaries since I was a kid.

Physical ones.

They're everywhere. Some are in boxes in a garage. Some are in the library at my parents' house in Arizona. Some are probably buried in random storage somewhere. I've been writing in diaries and journals since elementary school, and I have basically never gone back and read them.

A therapist once asked me why. I didn't have an answer. I still don't really. I've always imagined I'll read them when I'm old. In my head I'm very old, sitting somewhere comfortable by a fire, drinking hot tea and reading my entire life like a transcript. Why isn't twenty-three old enough? Girl, it just isn't.

I think I want enough distance that I can have grace for every version of myself I meet in there. I already know I'm going to read things and think, Oh my God, I cannot believe I thought that. I'm sure there are things written in those notebooks that I have completely forgotten. People I cared about whose names wouldn't mean anything to me now. Problems that felt enormous and disappeared. Ordinary days that I would give anything to remember because nothing important happened on them.

My only real fear is that I didn't write enough. There are gaps. Days, probably weeks or months, where nothing was preserved. I think older me might be disappointed by that. Not because I failed at journaling, but because by then I might desperately want more evidence of the ordinary parts of my own life.

It's funny. I used to have enough curiosity to search for updates about people who were no longer in my life, while entire versions of me have been sitting quietly in cardboard boxes for years. Apparently she can wait.

Maybe I've finally learned that not every curiosity has to be satisfied the second I feel it. Because I don't really do the searching anymore. That's the part I almost didn't realize until I started thinking about all of this. I can remember the anxiety. I can remember promising myself I wouldn't look. I can remember typing something while already knowing I was going to regret pressing enter. I can remember the strange adrenaline of wondering what I was about to find. I can remember spiraling after I found it and continuing to search even though searching had already proven itself completely useless. But I don't have someone I want to search for now. I don't want a message. I don't want someone to regret losing me. I don't particularly care whether the people from my past think about me. If I ran into most of them, I think I would just keep going with my day. Maybe I'd hope they looked at me and thought something harmless like, Oh, there she is. That's about it. And I don't know when that happened.

I don't remember making some final promise to myself and successfully keeping it. I don't remember deciding I was officially done. There wasn't some profound moment where I chose peace, closed the door, locked it, threw away the key and walked dramatically into my new life.

I think I just stopped checking. Maybe I got bored. Maybe enough time passed. Maybe my life became more interesting than whatever I was hoping to find. Maybe eventually you can only reopen the same door so many times before you finally believe what you already knew. It's closed. And strangely, that doesn't make me sad anymore. There was a time when I thought moving on meant losing someone forever. Now I think that's exactly what makes it moving on.