In today’s vernacular, I’ve been ghosted!

Across the Christmas period, I reflected on two instances where my last contact with 2 individuals ended with “I’ll call you soon”.

Of course, they haven’t!

One was a consulting client with whom I’d built what I considered a good relationship. The other was a longstanding friend who had lived interstate for many years.

The first was when my client had gone on leave and asked me to follow up on several matters. On her return, I was keen to update her on what I had done and to move these matters forward. I called a couple of times and then messaged her, to which her response was, “Call you soon”. I suspected she wouldn’t and was correct.

The second was my follow-up to a missed call from an old school friend. His call came quite out of the blue. We usually spoke once or twice a year to catch up on our respective worlds. It turned out he’d miss dialled. When I called back, I could tell he wasn’t interested in chatting for long, and he signed off with, “I’ll call you soon”. He hasn’t.

In the following months, I wondered why I was brushed off or, to use a more modern term, “ghosted”. I can’t deny that both have caused me concern. In my client’s case, not because of the lost client and revenue, as my consulting with her had never really been about the money but more about enjoying seeing her business grow. In my friend’s case, it was a sense of disappointment that I was brushed off after the best part of 50 years of friendship.

I’d like to understand what caused the “brush off”? Was it something I’d done, or was it, as Headspace suggests, the old adage “it’s not you, it’s me”? Was it something else? I suspect I will never know.

My favourite person has repeatedly said I shouldn’t spend time thinking about it or them. She’s right. It’s time to move on and accept that neither of these people is part of my life anymore. It’s as if they are ghosts!

Note: edited from original post.