At the end of last week, I wrote about the anime Frieren and walked right up to discussing why stories about immortals learning to deal with losing the people who were an important part of their life is of particular interest to me. I actually wrote a couple paragraphs about that, but it didn’t really fit in with talking about the anime in general or the specific parts of it that I found the most engaging while watching it, so I cut them out and morphed them into this blog post. After all, that idea, the core of why those kinds of stories are interesting to me, is what prompted me to write about Frieren and I want to explore the space a bit more than I could while discussing the show itself.

Part of the show’s appeal to me is definitely the grief of living a life full of connections to people that eventually break for one reason or another–which is the sort of human experience that only gets more and more relatable the longer you live–but also because my life can be pretty cleanly cut into a few different segments where, for the most part, I haven’t really carried anyone over from one part to another. My progress through life, my growth and development as a person, has been marked by multiple significant changes or important choices that left me with almost no one from the prior parts of my life (for a variety of reasons), meaning my entire existence has involved leaving people behind that I have never seen again in a way that is difficult to relate to anything but stories about immortals who lost everyone due to the passage of time. Not because I am an emotional or feel a tie to that kind of emotional beat specifically, but because I don’t know anyone who has so cleanly separated their life as I have and have never encountered any stories about the repetition of this severing process beyond the ones involving immortals. Any time something like this comes up in other stories, it tends to reference a single instance of drastic separation involving a single instance (starting over somewhere new, drastic societal change, etc).

This isn’t to say that I relate to the experience of an immortal losing everyone they care about again and again due to the passage of time, but it does make that kind of experience an applicable metaphor for my own. I was homeschooled through all my gradeschool years, which meant all the friend I’d made during and before kindergarten that were no longer available to me. Then, unlike all my homeschooled friends (my family belonged to a couple homeschooling co-operatives for a mixture of religious and social reasons), I went back to a “normal” high school, except it was a private religious institution and all those people went to “bigger” colleges or stayed in Chicago while I left the state and wound up never looking back. I effectively moved out of my parents home at eighteen and never returned for more than a week or two, which meant the distance between my high school friends and I stayed insurmountable despite social media. I had mostly unhealthy relationships in college, full of me giving and other people taking, so the instant I wasn’t available to them after I graduated, I never heard from them again. All the relationships I built during my three years at my first job disappeared the instant I left that job because of the horrible environment of that place. And then I finally cut off my family once my grandfather passed away, a decision I struggled with for a long time but have increasingly grown to be at peace with. Every step of the way, at each of these moments, I’ve relentless pushed forward, trying to find what comes next, and I can count on one hand the number of people who are still a significant part of my life from any previous period of my life.

I don’t know if this unflinching march forward has been a good thing or a bad thing. I don’t know that most of my past relationships would be terribly healthy for me, given that my last period of explicitly removing people from my life involved separating myself from long-term unhealthy relationships I’d been clinging to for the sake of having some kind of throughline in my life. I never really like leaving everyone behind and while I did it as a child, teen, and young adult without hesitation or regret, I did feel sad about having no real sense of history of continuity in any of my relationships. I wished I’d been close enough with my any of my pre-college classmates that our friendship had lasted beyond our separation or that I’d have any kind of interest in school/class reunions because it would mean seeing my old crew of friends. But I never even had that, either. I didn’t really get close to people. I was constantly keeping some part of myself distant, at a remove, because I’d been raised to sublimate my entire self in order to be a useful extension of other peoples’ existences, and that meant that I didn’t form deep connections that could have withstood the distance and time our separation created. When I got older and had resolved not to let people go the same way, my experience of this grief changed from that of a missed opportunity to the grief of a one-sided relationship that other people either weren’t willing to spend the effort to maintain or that took from me everything I could give them without giving anything back. When I cut off my family and severed the last of these unhealthy relationships, I also started to really grapple with what this meant for me, for my history, and the relationships I still had. I began to cling even tighter to those and then the past two years have taught me maintaining a relationship isn’t always my decision.

This isn’t to say that I don’t have good friends, valuable relationships, or people with whom I’ve got a deep and rich history. I reconnected with two of my siblings as we bonded over what we’d all gone through when I finally lowered the walls I’d put up to protect them from what I, specifically, had gone through. I’ve grown even closer with one of my friends from college to the point that I consider him and his wife (who is also a friend of some years now) as concretely “family” as my biological siblings. Another friend from college has been a constant, if somewhat distant, part of my life the entire time as we’ve each dealt with the highs and lows of life, sometimes more heavily and sometimes less so, but never in a way that felt like our connection was in danger. I am not without my important, historic connections, which means the metaphor is a loose one. Still, as someone who has always struggled with feeling isolated and tried to do the best I could to maintain the important connections in my life, the exploration of how to move on after people leave your life and how to continue loving and caring despite the loss is something incredibly meaningful to me. After all, it’s an idea I explore most weeks, if not most days. I rarely go long without thinking about it as new relationships grown, old ones fade, and somethings things that I thought would endure unto the end of the universe fall to misscommunication and the difficulties of being imperfect humans. I am familiar with the grief of losing people to death, to distance, to silence, to mistakes, and to my own relentless pursuit of growth or progress, and very little media explores that on the constant, continuous scale I’ve experienced it in.

So I take what I can get. I hunger for this kind of representation and thematic exploration (the same way I hunger for media that doesn’t suggest the important of biological family above everything else, much less that actually explores how cutting off family can be good and healthy) and the only place I’ve found anything even remotely close to what I want is in the stories of (effective) immortals slowly (and then quickly) figuring out how to connect with new people despite them being blips in their incredibly long lifespans and how to feel about the constant loss they experience as the people they’ve grown to care about disappear from their lives. And the only one I’ve found that truly leans into the idea, that explores it from every angle and as deeply as possible, is Frieren, which might forever make it my favorite such story.