Stop Watering Dead Roots

The hard truth about letting go of friends & and the grief nobody mentions

I texted an old friend last year. Told her I was in her city for the weekend. Hadn’t talked to her in months. Maybe longer.

I did that thing where you pitch the hangout like it’s spontaneous even though you’ve been thinking about it for days. “Hey I’m in Chicago let’s link up.” Casual. Easy. Like I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for a reply.

She said yeah definitely. And then nothing.

I used to do this constantly. Reach out. Initiate. Follow up. Try to make something happen with people who had stopped making anything happen with me. Not because they were bad people. But because I couldn’t sit with the alternative.

The alternative was that the relationship was already over. And I was the only one still holding it.

That realization doesn’t hit you all at once. It comes in pieces. A DM that says “omg I miss you” with no follow-through. A “let’s get coffee” that never lands on the calendar. A friend who tells you your new project is amazing and then never shows up to it.

I started the boardwalk event a while back. Former friends came out of the woodwork. Messages like “this is incredible” and “I’m definitely coming” and “you should be so proud.” And for a second I’d get that hit. That old excitement. They see me. They want to be part of this.

Weeks would go by. They never came. They never followed up. They never checked in.

And that’s when I started to see the difference between signaling and intention.

Signaling is words. Intention is driving 30 minutes back across town on a motorcycle at 8:30pm on a weekday because your friend asked if you wanted tacos.

I have a friend who did exactly that. He’d already left the area. He was home. He saw my text, got back on his bike, and came back. He rode back to southwest Detroit (in 15 mins when it takes him 30 normally…) because he wanted to sit across from me and eat.

That friendship was never forced. It showed up after I stopped forcing the ones that weren’t working.

But here’s the part nobody tells you. Before the new friendships, there’s a grief period. You stop reaching out to someone you’ve known for five years and the silence is deafening. You start wondering if it was you. If you weren’t good enough. If you did something wrong. You feel the loss like it’s a death.

An old version of me would have fought that feeling. I would have texted again. Asked why they hadn’t come. Tried to engineer plans. There is so much energy in the neediness of wanting a relationship to be something it’s not.

I had friendships where if I simply stopped caring, stopped initiating, the whole thing would dissolve. And for a long time I kept initiating anyway because I didn’t want to know the answer.

But the answer was already there. I was just refusing to read it.

Once I stopped, something shifted. Not immediately. But over weeks. I had energy I didn’t recognize. Bandwidth I hadn’t felt in years. I wasn’t drained from carrying relationships that only moved when I moved them.

And then I built something. A community. A real one. People who show up with intention. People who come back. Not because I begged them to, but because the thing itself was worth returning to.

I realized the old friendships weren’t just costing me time. They were costing me the courage to build new ones. Every ounce of energy I spent clinging to people who couldn’t show up was an ounce I couldn’t spend being open to people who would.

So if you have a friendship right now where the energy feels off — where you’re the one initiating, the one following up, the one pretending the silence doesn’t sting — try something. Don’t respond. Don’t initiate. Just sit with what comes up.

There will be grief. That’s real. Honor it.

But on the other side of it is a kind of freedom you can’t access while your hands are full of people who already let go.

— Izzy

P.S. Thank you for reading this far. You are clearly cool.

P.S.S. If you’ve seen my athletic work before, don’t worry that is going away and something much more aligned is taking it’s place.