Do you ever think about anyone from your distant past?

[Moksha]

I mean people you only knew briefly, or friends, schoolmates, etc you haven’t seen for years?

A few I think about

1. A boy I used to slip out of school with at lunchtime. We weren’t supposed to, but we both hated that ****ing place so much it kept us sane. We’d walk round to the chip shop. If I hadn’t had that escape route, I don’t know what I would have done. I even went camping with him and another friend. Yet after we left I never saw or heard from him again. He isn’t on Facebook either

2. A girl I sat next to in my A level politics class. She was great and we got on so well. We were both dunces in a group of high achievers, and we would sit there making each other laugh. Never saw her again either.

3. Guy I briefly shared a house with at university, before I fled home. This was in the late 90s, before social media and mobiles, and I didn’t bother to get his address. I also never learnt his surname, so I have no idea what happened to him.

I don’t have much nostalgia. It’s been a horrible, empty life, and none of these people bring back happy memories. Still, I do wonder what happened to them.

[Bluebear]

1. A friend from school who left as the family were moving abroad. I missed her.

2. A friend from college when I was taking A levels. We had “silly” fun together.

3. A couple of people from a shop I was working in at that time to fund a few clothes for me to wear. They were friendly and accepted me (and my anxiety)

There are others, “good” and also not so ”good”..

[Avalon]

I try not to. Most people from my distant past, with very few exceptions, cause me to experience feelings of deep sadness, disappointment and regret. Looking back doesn't take me to a happy comforting place.

A lot of these people would be contactable via Facebook but I figure if they were that important to me in the past, or should I say I was in any way significant to them, then years and years wouldn't have passed without contact.

I'm very much of the thinking these days that the past is probably best left where it is and, for me, nothing very positive comes from dwelling on long ago acquaintances/friendships.

[Mr. Spaceman]

Just rose tinted thoughts of the kids I knew in those innocent and carefree days in primary school. The only time I really felt connected to other people. Inevitably when I find them on Facebook they are ordinary people in their 40s with jobs kids and even grandkids, and I realise that despite being considered the brainiest kid in the class I've undoubtedly turned out the least successful.

Then there was an American guy who was my roommate when I spent the summer of 1993 in the USA. He was always pretty good to me and I had good memories even though it ended on a bad note when he tried to steal some money off me. Actually found him on Facebook earlier this year, or to be more accurate a tribute page to him. Seems that he died of a Fentanyl overdose last Christmas.

[Displaced]

I sometimes think about a woman I used to work with. I was 22 at the time and she was 39, though until she told me that, I assumed she was around my age. She was very attractive. We were good friends at work, but thinking back, she was always trying to flirt with me. However, I was rather naive at the time, so thought I was imagining it and she was just being friendly. Even when it was more obvious (for example she once jokingly calling me a 'trollop' when I told her I was at the beach and picked up this random bird at the weekend - a seagull flew in the open window - then trying to get round it by saying blatantly "it's because I like you"), I was afraid to act on it, for fear she was joking/meant 'as a friend' and I would ruin a good friendship.

There was a curious short conversation one time that still confuses me. She had an 18 year old son, whose girlfriend was pregnant (I didn't know that at the time). I popped into the office downstairs where she had recently been moved to, and the conversation went along the lines of:

Her: Oooh, come and see this. Look, here's my little baby, isn't he amazing? *shows me ultrasound photo*
Me: (jokingly) Your baby? Is there something you want to tell us?
Her: Haha, no, it's [Sarah's].
Her to her co-workers: [Displaced]'s panicking.

I wasn't panicking as I had no reason to, and hadn't reacted strangely or anything, so it struck me as an odd comment. Now, we were both temporary staff working for an agency in a building where pretty much everyone else was permanent, and everyone seemed to know we were pretty good friends, but this conversation made me wonder if she had ever suggested to anyone in her office that we were more than that (and that I was panicking thinking I'd got her pregnant).

Am I just overthinking it? Either way, I still have fond memories of those days.

[firemonkey]

I used to think of a boy who I thought was my only friend at prep school. I found him about 46 years later on Twitter. He'd turned into the kind of middle aged man who drools over photos of scantily clad young women .

[Percy]

People I went to school with, I was badly bullied. Sometimes I think about others. Old friends and people I was fond of.

[choirgirl]

Yes, I do, I've been doing it a lot recently. And there's two friends from uni I'd really like to reconnect with but I'm embarrassed I've got nothing to show for my life and I can't even find them on the internet.

[neilm]

Sure, yes, on many occasions.

I always thought that most folk were similar....

[john smith]

Yes especially high school. None of it good. Had a profoundly negative impact.

[Pink*Lady]

1. My sister
2. My great grandmother
3. My uncle
4. A girl I was good friends with in school lost her father just before Christmas. I've thought about him recently.
5. Teacher in primary school.

[mossieman]

Often

[Fibbs]

Reminiscing can be good but has its flaws too. I havent posted for hmm 10yrs or so, but do nip in now n then. Doubt anyone around will remember me, theres a few I remember. Lot has happened since back then but the anxiety still lurks beneath the surface, bubbling up now n then. Im friends with most of my ex's, not the grudge type. 1 from here back in day tho has kinda haunted me over the yrs, I tried reaching out but never got replies. Have tried other relationships over the yrs but meh, just dont work out, better off single just my n my daughter now x

[gregarious_introvert]

I don't think about anybody from my past and don't want to; I used to worry that I might bump into someone from school in the street, but I never did (I moved away to university as soon as I finished school, but although I never returned to exactly where I lived, I did still live in South London, only a few miles from my childhood home). Curiously, though, I can still recite the class register from my secondary school so even though I don't think about anyone, I can still remember their names (well, surnames at least).

The past is another country and I don't live there anymore.

[Blackflies]

The past is all I have and yet every time the past says hello, I seemingly make every effort to close the door on them. The present is where I need to be and I’m afraid the past will derail me. But the present is such a lonely place that I can’t help but look back even though I must keep looking forward even if it means being alone.

[chocolatechip]

I do this a lot. And they are easy to find on the interweb! I'd love to reconnect. But don't quite know what to say... Any suggestions?

[Gosties]

I'm not particularly interested in most people from my distant past. I've moved on and don't give them much thought. At the time people who I thought were friends really were not.
It takes a level of experience and insight as you get older to realize things. I don't bear them ill will but have no thoughts of looking them up or re-engaging any contact.

I'm much more open to new people than the so called friends and acquaintance from younger days and I understand that they may have changed and be different people now but I have no level of trust in them.

The period from beginning primary school and through secondary school and into my early twenties caused damage that still affects aspects of my life.
I don't trust most people's intentions which sadly affects the way that I approach new work or romantic relationships.

[sophie79]

I think about a friend I stopped talking to around 1998. I had got cold feet on the friendship and just stopped talking completely. Felt guilty ever since. Poor guy was nice and didn't deserve that.

[Tight on the mic]

I've just moved back to the place I grew up in which has sparked off loads of good memories of school and my mates there. Its weird how much stuff I suddenly remembered just by seeing a wall or tree lol.

[Tonkin]

I totally randomly saw a family relation of an old friend/mate (who I haven't seen in about 11 years) the other other.

We didn't acknowledge each other but did see each other. Not sure if they recognized me as I haven't seen them for a good 15 years and wasn't friends with them.

But then I started to worry that the old friend/mate would find out and try and get in touch via email etc.

We weren't proper friends back then, and were more drinking/partying buddies, and 10+ years on I wouldn't think we had anything in common any more.

It's a good example of a small thing that can set me off worrying/thinking about worse case scenarios, when a normal person wouldn't care either way, and if they did get in touch, I normal person would just say "Hi, but I don't want to meet up " or make an excuse if they did get in touch.

In fact, I often spend a fair bit of time worrying that old people from my past will try to get in touch and want to socialize as that's something I wouldn't be keen to do (depending on the person).

Crazy, eh?

[Rockysocks]

I often obsess about it and it makes me feel anxious and depressed.

[Hayman]

There are certain individuals, yes.

A former crush of mine from school who I haven't spoken to for close to 20 years and haven't seen for around 10 years (bizarrely, I saw her from a distance in a pub about ten miles from home once...it was definitely her - she worked there). I doubt she remembers borrowing a pen off me in Chemistry once but it was the highlight of my year. How sad is that?! The last I heard is that she got married and moved to the Manchester area. That was about seven years ago.

A former high school friend of mine who I haven't seen face to face since I was about 17. We got on well. We kept in sporadic touch for a few years afterwards. He was very much into science and went to university across in Groningen (Netherlands). I haven't heard from him since he finished. He literally disappeared off the face of the planet and I have no idea where he is now or what he's doing. There wasn't a fall-out or anything like that so I don't know why communications stopped. Given we're both 36 I'm trying to figure out when he finished. I'd estimate 12-14 years ago...

There's one work colleague in my last job who was approaching retirement age. He was there for a few years after I started (went part time into his retirement) and was genuinely friendly to me, with an incredibly dry sense of humour that often cracked me up. He eventually retired in around 2003/4 and I know he moved to Tavistock shortly later, as his daughter lived down that way. He'd be around his mid eighties now if he's still alive (which I sincerely hope so). Sadly I have no contact details for him. I've often thought about him when I've been on my annual holidays to Devon.

There are a few others, but these are the main three that come to mind.

[hellotiger]

I think about the best friend I had from ages 10-18. She moved away when she went to uni and hardly ever got in touch with me, when she did it was drunk and to cry about our dead friend. She got in touch a few years later and we met up. She blamed me in an email about how I made new friends without her when I was in college and accused me of wanting to keep them separate from her, which wasn’t entirely inaccurate. She deleted me off Facebook at some point, I never really noticed. I do know she got married though and I feel resentful that she completely and totally shut me out of her life.
I’m stuck between being resentful and not caring and it’s that which keeps bringing me back to it. I don’t know which way I feel, both, maybe.

[Finlay]

I sometimes get reminded of people by them randomly appearing in dreams. I won't have thought of them that deeply for maybe years, then they appear in a dream and for days after that they are freshly on my mind, like I'd just recently got back in contact with them at a school reunion or bumped into them while on holiday.

It happened recently with an old crush of mine from school. For a number of years after school I held an unrequited torch for her. She moved away to another part of the country not long after school so there was no hope of bumping into her like I did with other folk post-school, but I held onto the hope that my tenuous online link to her through Yahoo Groups and Friends Reunited, and then onto Bebo, would bear some fruit at some point. I think she did sort of like me too a little, at least initially: she got my mobile number off my friend (this was back in the days when there was no social media, so getting someone's mobile number was the way to initiate contact); she deliberately sat next to me at a friend's 19th birthday party all evening; she was the one who made contact through Bebo. But sadly my shyness and anxiety meant I never pulled the trigger on making a move on asking her out, and then when everyone moved over to Facebook and Instagram, she disappeared from online world and my final contact with her was gone. This was probably about 2007ish.

Time went by and the torch dimmed. I never truly forgot her, but she was filed away in mind and my life moved on. Cut forward to 2021 and she randomly shows up in a dream one night. Nothing particularly of note happened in the dream (in the dream she's just filming a student film in Glasgow City Centre and I'm watching from afar) but upon waking it seemed to unlock the old filing cabinet in my mind, and it feels like it's 2007 again and she's only just recently disappeared from my world.

I'm older, (a bit more) wiser and more battle-scarred compared to how I was in 2007, so I'm not the same lovesick guy in his mid-20s I was then, but I do still wonder what happened to her and why she disappeared online. I'm not particularly a fan of Facebook and Instagram as such, but at the same time pretty much everyone from school is on there, so why isn't she? Especially when she was quite active online up till that point, so it's not like she was particularly anti-social media or anything. I hope she's okay. I guess she probably just met someone and moved on, and didn't feel the need to keep in contact with folk from the past. But then again, pretty much everyone from school met someone and moved on, but they still showed up as mutual friends on FB because of the old connections. It's weird, I want to know but at the same time I don't want to dig too deep because it feels a bit stalkery and like a line I don't want to cross in my mind, so I just think about it and wonder.

I do wonder if maybe my life might've went down a different path if I'd just had the guts to at least ask her out at the time. It might've came to nothing, but not knowing does kind of eat me up a bit, and even after all these years of having put it to the back of my mind, having that dream rekindle the memories and getting me thinking "what if?" again is quite frustrating.

Anyway, sorry big rambling post. Short answer is yes

[firemonkey]

I occasionally think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Helm in same school house but a year above me and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tyrie who I was in a few classes with.

[limey123]

Great thought on this theme:

“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.”
-- Lao Tzu

[AuroraSky]

I don't know why, but in the past I have given myself a hard time by looking at people I either knew at work or was at Uni with. One owns his own company, one built up a successful publishing company and I think became a millionaire when he sold it off, one got a PhD and is a Senior Lecturer at Newcastle Uni, one is a Director of IT, one was head of an advertising agency. All the ones that I knew about were married with kids. I guess they thrive on ambition and stress and I'm just not like that so I wouldn't want their lives, in fact I want more simplicity in my life, but let's just say I won't be turning up to any alumni reunions

[climber9]

Marguerita, who lived round the corner from me but who moved away when I was eight.

Paul, my best friend from junior school who went to a different secondary school when we were eleven.

Neil, who I used sit next to in secondary school. We went to different universities.

Colin, Keith, James, Tim, Michael and Bob, who were in my class but not really friends. We used to sit at the same table in the school library during study periods.

I’ve never seen any of these people again. I’m now 67.

[Hayman]

Someone else has come to mind recently and I think it comes from the fact that there's a house across the road from me which has recently gone onto the market.

I've thought about a former neighbour of ours from my childhood - who we moved away from very late in 1998. It was a family of four and I was in the same year and class as their daughter. She also went to the same High School as me and when I left in 2001 - there was no contact between us again. We didn’t get on particularly well or anything, but we lived next door to one another for some ten years. I distinctly remember her mother was a truly horrible person which my mum had a few cross-words with over those years. She eventually ended up leaving the family for another man...