Clearing out old messages is always a trip.
It’s literally a portal to another place in space and time.
If you’re growing any where near the rate you should, even 6 to 12 months ago should feel like an eternity.
That’s exactly how I felt when I was doing some iMessage cleansing the other night.
At first, it’s funny.
There’s mini-nostalgia.
The “where is everybody?! texts from nights out, unhinged requests from old colleagues, coulda shoulda woulda logistical texts from app girls you never actually met up with while traveling, and of course…the whitepaper from the L2 competitor spawned by a group of new tech grads that was shilled to you at 2AM on the rooftop of some Nashville bar back in 2024.
It’s amusing, it’s funny.
Sometimes a little scary.
You can run the gamut of human emotion pretty quickly via an inbox cleanse.
However, on my last particular run of this exercise?
Something stuck in my side, in my brain.
I couldn’t get it out.
In fact, I’d say I’ve been damn near obsessed with it:
Who has access to you, now?
I reread that above headline and I hear “Action League, Now!” which simultaneously makes me laugh and totally dates me.
Anyway, access.
A lot of people had access to John.
Not in some sinister way.
Just…access.
The ability to text me whenever they felt like it.
They got timely responses.
They knew what I was doing that night, who I was with, what I was thinking about, what I was worried about, the overall direction my life was headed.
And as I read through it all, I kept thinking: some of these people do not have that access anymore.
A lot was just the usually passing by in life.
But some were more emphatic.
There were a couple blowups, a couple of instances of looking in the mirror and asking myself why the hell are you even entertaining this person anymore?
Lessons learned the hard way.
That’s what got me obsessed with this topic enough to write about it.
Access to you is not nothing!!
That is the part that stuck with me and got the gears in my brain turning that can’t stop until I get whatever it is out of there.
It is not just a call, or a DM, or knowing what you’re up to this weekend.
It is a piece of your attention…and with that comes a transference of your energy, of your emotional bandwidth.
If you are really moving upward, trying to build a bigger, calmer, healthier, more intentional life, that access becomes more valuable.
Maybe that is the uncomfortable part of growth: realizing that history is not a lifetime pass.
Someone knowing you during one era of your life does not automatically entitle them to a front-row seat for the next one.
This is a harder realization if you’re a “Node”.
I’ve always been a guy people come to with stuff.
Took a lot of pride in that, too.
Advice, a shoulder to cry on, a favor, a reality check, a “what do you think?”, outfit help….the list goes on.
I like that about myself, can’t even lie.
I wanna be useful.
Being there for people feels good.
But I’m starting to understand the difference between being a good person and being available by default.
Those are not the same thing.
Honestly, I think most of us could benefit from taking inventory:
Who has access to us now?
Who gets our immediate attention?
Who gets the real version of us?
Who gets to influence our mood, our direction, or the way we see ourselves?
Not everyone deserves the same level, not even close!
Listicles and Pugilism
So here’s what I’m going to do.
Let’s take the gloves off a little bit, feel like it’s been awhile since that’s happened and I’m feeling a bit fiery lately.
I’ll break it down into a couple of listicles into these next couple weeks.
Field reports on my epiphanies of access.
We’ll do The Three People That Absolutely Should Not Have Access to You, and of course, The Three People That Should.
Idk which one comes first.
The negative one will get more clicks, ik enough about reader habits and copy to know that, but we gotta play fair.
So until next time…and in the interim, be mindful of who you let through the gates.
We’ll lock down that criteria the next couple of times out.
Btw- you can have all the access you want if you subscribe 😆
<3
-John Abbate
8.31.2026
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. As I've grown on social media I've come up with a list of qualities that I have to see before I let someone get too much time/attention. Discernment is the newest one I've added.
The teaser!