The Companion 017: Home for Christmas

Navigating nostalgia and long-distance friendships with the poet Shannon Haly.

Movie still via CBS from A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

Happy Holidays folks! I hope you’ve had a chilled and peaceful few days.

Heading home for Christmas in Scotland used to be one of the highlights of my year. It was a sweet combination of familial comfort (tea-littered surfaces, muffled vinyls, the sunken patchwork couch), and, of course, getting to see all of my friends from home all at once.

Even though I struggled with the idea that I no longer knew my friends from home as well as I once did, and was hesitant to dwell on how our relationships were shifting away from each other, I would, conversely, be excited to proudly show off my personal growth, my London-inspired confidence glittering, I hoped, like a badge of honour. I would convince myself, just briefly, that perhaps I wasn’t quite the girl that they remembered. No, I was different, better, more mature, more fashionable. It was like returning to school after the musty stretch of the summer holidays, pretending like six weeks was enough for a personality transplant alongside a brand new second-hand wardrobe.

Sometimes, at Christmas, the lack of real change would be thrust into your face, old wounds reopened as pints were downed and truths slipped out. Some of your friendships, you realised, no longer made sense. It wasn’t that either of you had changed, actually, it was because you had stayed the same, and that wasn’t enough. Often, though, it was a comforting, anchoring time period in a rough storm, as long as I didn’t argue too much with my parents. The nostalgia that would flood me as we flitted through old haunts, saw people who we once loved, kissed, were best friends with, was in its own way a delight.

My parents moved away from Edinburgh five years ago and I no longer get to go home for Christmas. This year has been the first year I have hosted them, as a big 30-year-old grownup, and it’s been fun! We ate well, we played games, we went on a walk. It’s still unbelievably comforting and grounding to be around my family. But I haven’t got to see any of my friends over Christmas thus far, and that does make me sad. When stable, regular things that are supposed to hold you together also start fraying at the seams, where do you find your comfort?

Earlier this month, I had the delight of speaking with the brilliant poet, playwright and actor Shannon Haly, whose viral poem about a friend she desperately misses tugged at my heartstrings. A 25-year-old who grew up in Cork but now lives in New York, with friends from home dispersed around the world, she too recognises the particular affliction of friendship nostalgia, the desperate yearning for what once was and will never be again. We spoke about friendship in relation to growing up, coming out and why it’s important to tell your friends that you miss them.

Shannon Haly: ‘The night before I left for New York we were both hysterically crying’

shannonhaly

A post shared by @shannonhaly

Has friendship always held an important place in your formation of self?

Shannon: Yes, always. My best friends from school are probably some of the most important people in my life. And also, I grew up queer in Ireland but didn't realise it until later on. Because I wasn’t dating, I held my friendships very close. I would say to myself that I just don't need to be dating because I have such good friends. They were everything. When I moved away from Ireland, my friendships were different. In Ireland, everyone came from the same place, we were in a little bubble. Then I left and everyone was from all these different places and spoke different languages. Your world opens up a bit.

I read a stat somewhere that said that a lot of young people in Ireland end up moving away. How does it feel to not have that base?

Almost everybody's gone. There’s been a mass exodus. It's in part the economy and the quality of life; to live decently in Ireland is almost impossible. Finding jobs is almost impossible. But also, Ireland feels so tiny, and you do feel like you are in this bubble. It's strange because it just makes going home really different. But at the same time, usually everybody's home at Christmas. That's what's amazing. You can see everybody and it's like, oh my god, back in time. It feels like you're back in school.

Was there ever a sense when you moved away for the first time that you were able to tap into a new part of yourself because you weren’t confined by other people's expectations?

Definitely. Especially at the start, when I first moved away. It wasn't any fault of our own. It was just because we only knew what we knew. You can just figure yourself out so much more when you're by yourself in a new place. At home, it's so easy just to think the common thought everybody's thinking, feeling, and reacting to.

Was the beautiful poem you wrote about missing a friend aimed at anyone in particular?

Yes, my friend Juliet. It was about her because we have been apart, living in different countries, for seven years. We went from spending every single moment together to seeing each other maybe once a year for a coffee, or we’ll somehow find a way to overlap being home. There’s a gradual decline in the amount of information you know about each other, which I find sad. You go from knowing all these tiny details to just the highlight reels of somebody's life.

I’d love to hear more about your friendship.

She is that person where everything just feels like home with them. It's so comfortable. We’re very similar to each other in that neither of us likes to be the loudest person in the room. We would always just throw on some weird songs and dance around her kitchen. Now, if either of us has been going through a shitty time over the past few years, we will send each other a video of us dancing to some weird song. She is still the first person I call if anything big happens.

“There’s a gradual decline in the amount of information you know about each other. You go from knowing all these tiny details to just the highlight reels of somebody's life” — Shannon Haly

There’s something I do think that's heartbreaking with our home friends, about the fact that we will probably never go home and be together again. Not permanently, not full-time. That always hurts my heart a little bit.

I think it’s devastating. I remember the night before I left for New York. Juliet drove to my house. We were both hysterically crying. When we were saying goodbye, we just couldn't stop looking at each other. We said, ‘It's fine. Because nothing's going to change.’ But everything has changed.

We just have to hold that and just be like, yes, everything has changed. But it's okay. And beauty can come out of that change, even if it's very different.

And we’re so lucky to have friendships like this in the first place. So many people don't have that. So many people commented on the poem being like, ‘I wish somebody had something like this to say about me’. You forget that so many people don't have those really close friendships.

There's a lot of loneliness out there.

Sometimes it's important to tell your friends that you miss them. Especially when you're apart. With social media you can project and be like, I'm missing them so much more than they miss me. They’re living their life and everything’s fine. But that’s rarely the case.

I noticed a lot of the comments on the poem are people just being like, this has made me so sad and I miss my friends so much. You wrote a follow-up piece for people whose friends had died. Why did you decide that was important to do?

Some of the comments are devastating. It was unfathomable. I can't even imagine if I lost one of my really good friends. I thought about where you put all of that love that you have for somebody. I read something that went: ‘Grief is love with nowhere to go’. You have to hold it somewhere.

What do you think you've learned about yourself from some of the new friendships that you've made in recent years?

When I first moved to New York, I met a woman and her girlfriend. They literally opened the door to me. I had genuinely never met another queer woman before. She’s now one of my best friends. They’re like my family here. That was a whole other world. I don't even know if I would have discovered that about myself had I not been friends with them at that time.

When did you feel comfortable speaking to that friend and being like, ‘Look, maybe this is part of my story, as well’?

We had like a housewarming party with my other roommates, and we were drunk and smoking on the roof and then I was like… ‘Hey’. That would have been my second week there. Then it was gradual. It was about two years later that I was like, ‘This is me.’

When a big life event happens when you're so far from home, how does one then communicate that to friends who perhaps don't know that side of you?

I was terrified. I avoided saying anything for a very long time. We went to an all-girls Catholic school. You'd hear all sorts of swear words and chat about girls who they thought were gay. Just horrible stuff. I projected that onto my friends, that they would have felt the same if I told them, which was not the case at all. They were amazing.

Movie still from A24, Close (2022)

What is the best thing you've read, listened to, or watched on friendship recently? Close, which is a Belgian film about two young boys and their friendship. It is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

How do you sort of think the culture of friendship is changing or will change? With the culture of social media, everything is so transient. I feel like we're losing our sense of giving that time and space for friendships or community. We're less inclined to go to somebody's house and help them out. That's what we should do.

What has been your biggest personal learning about friendship? Change is going to happen and I think so much of the pain that I experienced within friendships was the fact that I was struggling with that. I saw that change as me not knowing the person as much anymore, or vice versa. But I think that's not the case. It's just that, especially in your 20s, you grow so much at such a fast pace that if you've known somebody since childhood, you have to just let them unfold.

Thank you, Shannon!