An evening walk can produce the strangest insights. Something ordinary and easily forgotten can suddenly reveal just how much life has changed you.

Change is not something I have ever handled particularly well. My neurodivergent mind seems to feel its weight more than many people I know. Perhaps that is because change carries a quiet reminder that everything eventually comes to an end: a way of life, a friendship, a season, even the person we once were.

For me, much of that change came after prison. My experience there, and what it taught me about narrative, belonging, and groupthink, left me aware that I was no longer entirely comfortable in the world I had once occupied.

In many ways, I could honestly say:

“It’s not you, it’s me.”

I had many ‘friends’ — people who were ‘loyal’ and ‘had my back’. At least, they were when they saw something of value that I could offer them. The person I was had felt comfortable there; maybe even validated. But now, I find other people’s validation rather weak, almost as if there is a question mark over it all. Now I often find myself wondering what game people are actually playing.

In the midst of deep pain and soul-drenched brokenness, how we measure things changes — actually, it must change.

A classic example was a friendship I had with a couple who had children about the same age as my daughter. Before I went to prison, they visited and stressed how they were going to be there for my family. And, you know, they were.

Time came for me to come home, and I was excited to catch up with this friend and thank them for their support. When I contacted them, he said that he was sorry, but he did not want to confuse his children with the complexity of my story, and so he felt they could no longer be our friends.

This was sad, but I accepted it. I did wonder whether the issue was that my baggage, or my perceived sins, might influence how others saw him. That can be a legitimate concern for many people.

As sad as I was to see this relationship end, in another way I was at peace. At least it was upfront and surgical. As I have learnt over the past several years: someone else’s emotions are not my concern; they belong to them alone. Just as someone’s personal choices belong to each of us alone. These were his feelings and his choice, and that was enough.

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The encounter that really sparked this writing is a much more interesting friendship — one with many more years and life deeply interconnected with my family.

Last night, I went to pick up my wife, Tania, from her job in the courtrooms here. She had to stay a little later to set up the courtroom and tidy up things related to her work.

I often use this time to walk around the block of the city area near her workplace.

Just down the road from her work is the office of my old friend.

I helped him establish his business in his specialist field, and he was part of the fellowship where I taught. We had shared years together. Our children grew up around one another. I was there when their second son was born, and his wife once baked me a wonderful fiftieth birthday cake decorated like a farm, complete with pigs swimming through the icing.

We were not casual acquaintances. We had done life together, sharing family moments, struggles, health issues, and all the ordinary things that make friendships real.

As I walked past his office and turned the corner, I spotted him with his dog — I think the same one I had spent time with six years earlier. He was bent over, holding the lead, and giving the dog a good rub. There was a warmth and love flowing from both directions — and I felt it within myself as well. It made me smile seeing him enjoying his pet.

As I walked past, he looked up to see who was passing by. I know he did not recognise me straight away. With my ageing and heavy-set beard, now greyer than I would like to admit, he simply acknowledged me as one man to another.

I gently smiled, waved in a gentle salute, and carried on walking. Happy to have seen him, but happy not to relive the past. In fact, I experienced a freedom that was now becoming a normal part of my life.

Our relationship had started to change well before it collapsed. I felt that his expectations of me were beyond my ability to achieve. My awkwardness and “weirdness” at times made him uncomfortable. He once told me that he would like me to act in a way that I simply did not understand. It was a request foreign to my nature — and that ought to have been a clue that estrangement was developing.

There was a mutual growing apart regarding our worldviews and certain doctrinal beliefs. You might as well say, we just were no longer on the same page, and the books we were writing about our lives belonged to different genres.

A dramatic change had begun to make itself impossible to ignore. I had grown tired of being in church leadership roles. I really was not, and am not, made for it. Way too much politics, insecurity, and existential crisis within it — at least from my perspective. Game playing, reading between the lines, and working out what people actually mean in coded language is not my forte.

I had changed, and not a little. My understanding of faith had shifted profoundly. Old certainties had given way to a deeper and, in many ways, more ancient form of Christianity. The further I travelled, the more I realised that the life I had built no longer fitted the person I was becoming.

All these changes were inevitably going to bring a rupture within this friendship. Once we choose the difficult work of becoming more authentically ourselves, some relationships simply cannot survive the journey.

I no longer wanted to live in phantom shadows, but with substance. I did not want to pretend anymore about my autism, nor about the way my mind delights in study, ideas, and creativity.

I wanted to become the Malcolm that, inside, I knew was more honourable before God. The one who can only be ‘me’, standing authentically before His eyes. And, you know, God does not seem fazed by authenticity — every other pretence results in fallacy and a lack of true fellowship. Growth can only come with a real awareness of who we are.

What he wanted to be was, and is, his business. And I have no issues with the direction he wanted to take in faith and worldview. That is why I smiled; it was good to see him living his best life. If I demand authenticity, why should he not also?

I now hunger for a simpler life, one where approval is not purchased through pretence. I do not want to live in the shadows, or conform for a crowd’s adoration — this is thin ground, and the abyss sits below it.

I want to know that my mistakes are truly my own, and not the result of me following a crowd to wherever that mysterious place may be. At least, not the whole of my existence. Some degree of crowd living is inevitable as social creatures.

As I walked on, I acknowledged and celebrated what once was significant. But now, holding onto it would be toxic to us both. I want my past friend to be free from the burden of the discomfort I bring him. And I certainly do not want to go back to the Malcolm of pre-prison days.

I did not like my role back then, nor the person I had tried to be. I often felt exhausted from masking, and tired of friends telling me to “fake it till you make it.” It drove me to desperate places.

I simply want to live the life that feels like wearing the right clothes for me.

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So goodbye, my old friend.

Thank you for the years we shared. Thank you for the laughter, the conversations, the kindness, and even the disagreements that helped shape me. I hope your road is a good one.

Mine simply leads somewhere else.

If we meet again, I suspect it will be much the same as it was that evening outside your office. I will smile, raise a quiet hand in greeting, and keep walking.

Not because I carry bitterness.

But because some friendships are not meant to be recovered. They are meant to be honoured, laid gently to rest, and remembered with gratitude for what they once were.

This article is not AI-generated. It’s my story and my article.