On Losing Witnesses

It is undeniable that growing up comes with its fair share of losses; whether that is the death of a grandparent, friend break ups, romantic break ups, loss of childhood innocence, material losses, the list goes on. But no one talks about the loss that is as silent as it is cruel. The loss of witnesses.

A witness is not simply someone who knows you. It is the person who has known versions of you. The person who has seen the toddler who was opinionated before she was mobile, the clumsy child who believed in fairies and magic, the teenager who believed she was the most embarrassing person in existence, the student who always color coded her notes in English class or even all of them. Witnesses bear the pieces of memory that we ourselves don't necessarily remember.

As a child, you rarely move through the world unnoticed, with parents at home, teachers at school, neighbors, relatives, the parents of friends, babysitters and more. It takes a village to raise a child, as they say and our childhoods are witnessed by an entire community. We grow up surrounded by people who know who we are and know who we have been.

Adulthood changes that.

You move cities, change jobs, make friends, lose friends, date, break up, get married, get divorced, have a baby and through the motions, relationships fade into reminders from social media notifications. The new people we meet know us only at the stage of life we meet them at, the edited and what we often convince ourselves to be the curated ‘final version’ of the self. They can imagine surely but they will never truly know the child who cried over losing her favorite pencil or the teenager who dreamed of living the Vampire Diaries life.

One can argue that social media is our modern version of an archive – from birth announcements, birthday posts, wedding photos. Every memory is curated and posted on a feed. Yet, I would contend, documentation cannot replace witnessing. A post can show the celebration of my 21st birthday but it will not tell you how there was a point in time where I thought I wouldn’t be here. It will not tell you how I had to learn to see growing older as a privilege rather than thinking I’m running out of time. A photograph can capture a moment in time but only a witness can tell you about the person in the photograph.

This could be why reunions feel so alien to a lot of us. You may hear nicknames and anecdotes that feel entirely unlike the person you are now, people might assume you have the same interests and habits you had at 16. For a couple of hours, you are forced to face the version of yourself that existed in a place you have long moved on from and people you do not talk to anymore.

As adults, we give reinvention so much importance that we forget, a past version of us will always exist in someone else’s memory. We cannot always change other’s perceptions of us therefore we are never entirely the authors of our own stories. Pieces of our past selves live on in the minds of people who once knew us.

Perhaps, one can say, growing up comes with losing witnesses but that does not mean you cannot gain new ones. Growing up does not stop at 25 – people see us change careers, survive heartbreak, lose friendships, survive the darker days and even become the person the wide eyed child once dreamed of becoming. Those witnesses are equally as important as the witnesses who watched said child grow, and are not permanent. Home is not only found, it is built; through the people that once knew us to the people who are willing to see who we are becoming.