PeopleKeeper

My past week has mostly been focused on getting ill then getting better. As this is interesting for NO ONE, myself included, I am going to focus on explaining a bit more about my PeopleKeeper experiment. Most of the week I have looked like this:

Friends who have read this blog for a year or more have probably experienced firsthand that I no longer live in the physical place where I met you.  I grew up in a very small town outside The Big Scrapple for the first 17 years of my life. If things had gone differently, I very well could have become Leslie Knope and stayed in that little town forever.

When I was 17 years old I ran away from home for about two months. This was the first time I’d ever moved in my life, but it would be far from the last. In the past decade I have moved at least ten times in many different situations. Some moves have been across town, multiple have been cross-country.

My personality is such that I have an easy time creating space for deep connection with limited amount of time knowing someone. I have always been good at maintaining relationships without needing immediate proximity.  My best friend from elementary school moved away for middle school and we stayed in close touch through high school.

The flipside is that I have not realized until recently that there are emotional costs of constantly maintaining relationships, particularly long distance ones. A lot of people are either self-proclaimed “bad at keeping in touch” or are just unused to dealing with long distance friendships. Even near-distance relationships can be challenging, especially in big cities because there are so many things one can do with one’s time. I find that I have at least four distinct friend groups locally with modest overlap.

So when I set out to do my PeopleKeeper project this year, a big aspect of the project was to do some serious introspection regarding how I spend my energy. Though I am not currently diagnosed with mental illness or invisible disabilities, I have been diagnosed with Major Depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder in the past. I have been reading a lot of interesting and novel access stuff. I really like the SpoonTheory of discrete energy units that may be become depleted by doing basic chores if one’s invisible disability reigns that day.

At the time of writing this entry, I have 1,077 “friends” on Facebook. I do try to “prune” occasionally but I am much nicer than a lot of people. Horrible as it may sound, I generally “unfriend” people on their birthday because it is the one time of year their name comes across my feed. Before acting, I go to their wall and look at several of their profile pictures to see if I remember meeting them, having conversations with them and what kind of person they are. I check the “see friendship” action and see if they have interacted with me publicly in the past three years. Sometimes, if I’m unsure, I also check our shared messages; but usually we haven’t spoken directly so that’s not an issue. If at any point along this checklist I either don’t remember them at all or there has been zero interaction, I solidify my decision and “unfriend” them. Generally though, if someone shows up with a birthday I go to their timeline and post “BAPPY FIRTHDAY” and leave it at that.

OK. So starting with a number 7 times larger than my target of 150, I decided to go the other way around. When I came up with this idea in January I decided that I chose the number of people before I chose the people themselves. I have noticed at times before that I get exhausted and overwhelmed talking to the same people too frequently so this new approach would hopefully give me insight into what contributed to this type of exhaustion.

Intimate (5/150, daily): The people I put on my “daily” contact list are my best friends. PartnerPenguin is at the top of this list. These are the folks that I share everything with and we have clear boundaries about when we need to stop talking.

Close Friends (15/150, weekly): Typically the people on this list have a day assigned and that’s the day I reach out and just say hi. The point of this experiment, on any of my “levels” is that a reminder to reach out is just to say “hi”. I am trying to work on the timing of when I reach out so that I get people at times that work better for them, but one nice thing about SMS or FB messenger is that you don’t need to respond immediately. If a conversation happens, great! If not, there’s always next time.

Loose Friends (≈30/150, biweekly): This is a confusing category for some but I’ve found it useful. A lot of folks in this category live in various parts of the country that are not in my immediate vicinity. They are busy people. I want to know what’s going on in their lives but don’t need to be nosy. I also don’t need a play by play of their lives, unless they wish to live Tweet it. Every two weeks is a good spacing to say “Hey, how goes?” Highlights of a two-week period can be summed up in a couple sentences. It’s a long enough period that generally my friends have some degree of introspection and don’t dump daily drama from this time period, but still feel close enough to share if something negative is going on.

Acquaintances (≈40/150, monthly): When I was asked recently what differentiates someone from being on the biweekly list from the monthly list I thought for a minute, looked the person in the eyes and answered “The monthly people are people I want to talk to twelve times a year.” This is the frequency for what I feel is the required boundaries of certain relationships. In a lot of cases, many friendships in this category are strong and long lasting. But my friends are busy, awesome people. Poking them once a month isn’t too much but helps me keep a good pulse on their lives.

One thing that I’ve been asked several times is whether my categorization is rigid. No, it isn’t and if people reach out to me I will generally respond. Except if I’m not in a good place, then I have been practicing a lot with drawing boundaries! A big reason I created the “less frequent” categories of biweekly and monthly were that I have noticed a trend in my adult life. I am almost always the one to initiate contact. I have historically been responsible (generally voluntarily) for the entire upkeep of most of my relationships. I wanted to give myself a break. Decreasing the frequency allows me to either let others step up if they want a more intimate relationship. It also allows me to forgive myself for “letting things go” in a relationship. I have only committed to reaching out once a month. I met that commitment. I can forgive myself for not being a “good” enough friend. I am good enough.

Professional Acquaintances (≈45/150, quarterly): Folks in this category are people I’m interested in knowing professionally or I need to keep a lot of distance for my emotional health. This type of category used to be accounted for by holiday cards but these days it’s a bit difficult to find holidays everyone can get behind. I have a lot of former classmates on this list and I hope that as we progress into our professional careers that they will become valuable players in our job searching quests. Part of going to a Big American University should be the benefits of the alumni network, right?

At this time you might notice that my total is closer to 135 than 150. I’m going to call that as a win for right now because the folks on this list are by no means the only people I talk to. It was more of a way to formalize my energy expenditure and give myself permission to chill out.

I am working with a company called Contact Otter to help design a product that my friends might be able to use. The founder of this company has put together a survey that you might be interested in taking if you would like to use that product. If you’re a computer programmer and you’d like to design a different system, let’s talk! I feel like I put significant time into crafting this the way that works for me, but I’m sure lots of other people work differently and there is space to make multiple tools.

**Challenges**

Sometimes my reminders pile up on my calendar so I wind up with 15 or more in one day. I have generally tried to work around that so there aren’t more than 10 people in a day. But when I was working the security gig the other week, the timing of the workday was really bad for actually communicating with my network. I tried to still contact people because I have found connection, whether deep and genuine or quick and frivolous, is legitimately the best preventative medicine for Depression. I generally gain energy from being around people so reaching out to friends and letting them know I’m having a hard day has actually increased my relationships and also lessened the burden of having a bad day.

**Surprises**

I don’t know why I found this surprising but this experiment has lead to SEEING a lot more people. Saying hi regularly has led to several impromptu get togethers. I have learned that more of my friends are OK with being physically present even if we’re working or it’s a challenging day to be mentally present. A lot of my friends will see my name pop up and then next time they have an extra ticket to a show, offer me that ticket. I realize this is exactly what I signed up for but I have been touched by how much closer I’ve gotten with so many people. My house has become so much more of a home, housing far more friends on a more regular basis than I’d ever dreamed. Once we even had ribs…though everyone involved that night agrees there was a level of serendipity there that was unreasonably lucky.

I hope this entry has given you a peek into my methodology. Thank you, as always, for listening to me. Here is a random giant ball of yarn to reward you for getting to the end of this post!

And now a show tune. A dismal, dissonant show tune. ^____^