The death knell of my social relevance

What a going-away party taught me about letting go

Given I’m moving back to India soon, a friend asked me a few weeks ago if I was throwing a going-away party. For someone who last had a birthday party back in middle school, the instinctive answer was no. Even when I celebrated my big 3-0 last year, the people I spent the day with numbered a grand total of three.

But I’m away long enough that a farewell felt justified, so I thought, why not?

After all, I’ve always liked the idea of a celebration. I like the symbolism, the send-off, the sense of closure it promises, and so I decided to give it a go. But when it came down to it I hesitated, not because I didn’t know who I’d invite but because I couldn’t stop wondering about the intersections within the guest lists.

For many years, I’ve built my life through a series of one-on-one friendships. A lattice of carefully tended connections, most of which live in separate folders. I’m in many three-person group chats, but very few overlapping circles. I have writer friends, consultant friends, … mates I’ve met at work, through a yoga class, through a friend of a friend at a dinner I almost didn’t attend. Each of these friendships carries a different tempo, a different emotional register, and a slightly different version of me. Some have known me for years; others only ever see the curated present. And most have never met each other.

So the idea of putting them all in the same room — of letting my various selves brush up against each other in real time — made me strangely anxious.

It’s that vigilance, that internal monitoring, that makes you scan for social friction, for stilted conversations, for someone hovering by the bar just a little too long. And beneath that mild party anxiety sat a more intimate fear: the worry that these different people — these different mirrors of me — might not see the same reflection. That my sarcasm with one friend might come off as coldness to another. That my emotional vulnerability, safe in a particular container, might feel misplaced elsewhere. That the softest version of me might wilt in the presence of the sharpest, and the harmless flirting with one might be read as a sign of interest by another.

It reminds me of a line from T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, where he suggests that even our most intimate selves are constructed; that we “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” But what happens when you’ve prepared different faces for different people, and they all show up in the same room?

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A visual representation of what it felt like: Romulus needed divine intervention to join Olympus; I needed mine just to combine my group chats.

This anxiety isn’t just mine. I’ve spoken to enough friends to know it’s almost endemic to our times — the soft panic of overlapping worlds, the instinctive resistance to mixing groups, the oddly competitive insecurity that your friends might start liking each other too much. That last bit almost feels the worst of it: the almost primal fear that they might build a rapport that doesn’t involve you at all.

This dread — of being outgrown by your own network, of becoming the outdated node in a system you created — is sharpest, of course, when you’re the one leaving. When you’re packing up the city that held all those relationships, and in trying to bring everyone together for one last hurrah, you might just be sounding the death knell for your own social relevance. So I’d be forgiven, I thought, for not wanting to host a gathering of my near and dear.

But for me, alongside that possessiveness sat a kind of dissonance. Because I see every friendship as a co-authored narrative; a specific, self-contained mythology.

There’s the activist friend who might look at some of my more corporate-inclined friends and wonder if they’re part of the problem. There’s the one I’ve shared face masks and pyjamas with and another who’s only ever encountered me on a conference stage, making pithy remarks about AI regulation in a navy suit. Some friends have known me only through voice notes and others via eye-rolls and last-minute river walks. A few know the younger versions of me and hold memories I’ve half-forgotten, while some have read me more than they’ve heard me, and at least one who has heard me — even at my most unfiltered — but has never read a word I write.

They all hold real versions of me, but not all simultaneous ones. And when they gather in one room, I can’t help but wonder what kind of Frankenstein version of me they’ll construct from all those shards.

And yet, the party happened. And it was good … great, even. The kind that only happens when you stop micromanaging the outcome. There were the usual flickers of doubt: wondering whether someone felt left out, or whether a conversation had trailed off awkwardly, or whether it was too late to get another drink. But there was also overlap. There were shared jokes, there were new connections, and there were moments when people from opposite ends of my life realized they were reading the same thing, living on the same street, or equally frustrated at my dad jokes.

There was something deeply freeing in that. In surrendering the impulse to control the flow, the narrative, the sequencing of who meets whom and in what order, because I’ve realized that part of what makes these moments so uncomfortable for me — and maybe this is the writer in me — is the deep urge to curate. To structure the room like a sentence, to arrange the conversations like chapters, and to write the night so that it arcs the way it should into a perfect conclusion.

But real life doesn’t arc. It stumbles, it zigzags. It skips beats and hiccups. It doubles back and forgets where it left off.

And when you’re someone who’s spent years trying to make sense of experience by shaping it into prose — when you’ve trained yourself to look for meaning, to hold moments up to the light until they glint with metaphor or analogy or something resembling an epiphany — it’s hard to watch your life unfold in ways you can’t edit. It’s hard to let people see the rough draft.

Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? A party like this is essentially seeing someone else hold a rough draft of a chapter of yourself, read aloud in a room full of people who each think they’ve seen the final copy.

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The Pakistani-American singer Ali Sethi once said that one of the hardest things about being a multicultural kid — someone whose identity is split across borders and timezones — is that we find it difficult to be simultaneous. But we need to embrace the ambidexterity of a life lived in fragments and subtexts, and understand that part of emotionally growing up is learning to live with that simultaneity, not despite it.

I don’t think this feeling is uniquely multicultural, although those of us who grew up between worlds feel it in a particularly sharp, plural way. But I also think it’s a deeply Western, millennial affliction.

In atomised, individualistic societies, we’re told we get to design our lives: choose your friends, be the architect of your relationships, build your chosen family. You get to select which parts of yourself you lead with — softness, ambition, humour, politics, love — and you’re told you can design the ecosystems around you to match. That level of creative agency is powerful, but also exhausting. Because when you’re the architect of every room in your life, you also carry the pressure of designing exactly how those rooms connect.

To stretch the metaphor, you’re also in charge of the plumbing, the decorating, the gardening, the lighting, and — before I bore you to death with more verbs — basically everything.

In short, with the privilege of boundaries and narrative sovereignty comes the weight of decision fatigue. But sometimes, there’s beauty in the blur. In the chaos. In the kind of mess that reminds you that not everything needs to be legible to be meaningful.

Because at that pub by Trafalgar Square, what I realized was that when you let go of the script — when you stop trying to be the narrator and simply become part of the scene — what unfolds is messier, richer, more alive.

I don’t mean to say that one party magically conjured a perfectly merged version of my life. Far from it. But it was a step, however tentative, towards simultaneous being. A small, flickering act of reconciliation between the many selves I’ve spent years trying to manage, contain, and curate. Not every version of me was present in every conversation — that would be asking too much — but many of them, in some latent, overlapping way, were allowed to exist in the same room. And for all its unfamiliarity, it felt, dare I say, a little bit closer to the whole.

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