I’m a people person and I have made hundreds of friends and acquaintances all over the world. I am always struck by how important it is for the friends I meet outside of the U.S. to feel remembered and cared about. After five months of living in Cuba (legally) in 2004, I was overwhelmed with the prospect of keeping in touch with friends I might never potentially see again. After all, we were separated by a decades-long embargo and low levels of internet access. I basically cut off all ties with everyone I knew there, and have been quite unresponsive to most of my Cuban friends who have managed to reach out to me via Facebook. I think my hesitance to keep in touch is a combination of my wanting to leave behind some very bad experiences I had in Cuba, the nature of my wandering spirit, and then there’s always sheer laziness.

I then repeated this for the most part when I left Ghana after living there for ten months. I’ve been gone for almost two years now, but my friends I met there still call me regularly, chiding me for not being better at keeping in touch. I’m happy to hear from them, but it also makes me feel guilty.

I do the same thing with friends, mentors, and acquaintances here in the U.S. as well. I’ll send an email out of the blue to some old classmate, mentor, or benefactor (of which I have had many since my entire education thus far has been funded by a cobbling of one scholarship or another) and the response I receive is always the same: “So great to hear from you!” which always sounds a little like “Where the h*** have you been!?” Maybe I’m just being overly sensitive.

Keeping in touch is important. It’s important on the emotional level in that people from our past sometimes can ground us when we might be getting lost in the craziness surrounding us. For example, when I start to feel anxious under the academic pressure of Harvard, chatting for just a few minutes with a friend from high school reminds me that I matter outside of what I accomplish–and that even if I failed out of here tomorrow (which is not going to happen)–there are people who loved, respected, and admired me long before I ever contemplated coming here.

I actually got my summer internship as a result of having kept in touch somewhat:

Summer internship recruiting has been particularly difficult for MBAs this year, and I knew that I was going to have to be innovative in my job search if I wanted to land a great internship. I found a great company I wanted to work for, only to realize that they did not recruit at Harvard. However, I remembered that the woman who had interviewed me three years ago when I was applying to Stanford for Business School worked at the company. I sent her an email, asking if she could help me get an interview. She remembered me, helped me get an interview, and now I will be interning there this summer. I hadn’t exactly kept in touch, but I still had the emails she and I had exchanged back and forth before and after my interview to help me remember her–and to remind her of who I was in case she had forgotten.

Thank God for Google unlimited storage. And for nice people who appreciate being remembered.

Related posts:

1. Listen to Your Intuition