friendship

*taking a leap of faith posting this because it is extremely unfiltered and unedited. may be just a bit scattered brained but I wanted to leave most of it pure to how my brain processed these thoughts, so I hope it isn’t super hard to follow along*

The other week I looked up what friendship meant. I’m 19 now, soon to lose the youth that comes with the suffix “teen”. Somewhere over the years we lost the innocence of playing on the monkey bars at recess and jumping rope in the elementary school gym. As you grow older, friendship no longer is a result of close proximity. Friendship becomes much more of a choice. And to make friends, you have to seek out people and get to know them. 

This was different for me. Not to say I was prom queen or exceptionally popular in high school - I wasn’t. I had my share of friendship struggles. Of feeling like I didn’t belong. Of insecurity that riddled my brain. But, from about the age of 11 or 12, I had had the same friends. And being 19 now, these people had known me for pretty much all of my life, or at least the part of my life that I actively remember. We’d never fought over anything, especially after elementary and early middle school when lunchtime seating arrangements and recess activities seemed like a matter of world peace. 

But coming into college, I experienced real conflict with people I was friends with. This didn’t make sense to me. I thought I would get along with these people that I called my friends. And I did get along, for the most part. But the occasional conflict was foreign to me. As I write this, I’m thinking about how I once heard someone say “Your college friends might know who you are, but your childhood friends will know why you are the way you are.” And it was then that I realized that when you grow up with someone over a decade, you watch these friends develop as people. You watch them understand their boundaries, their comfort zone and their preferences as it comes to friendship. There aren’t arguments or fights because you don’t have to have explicit conversations to understand them and their development. This makes getting along a lot easier. You are raised similarly, and therefore become like minded people.

But when you meet someone at 17, 18, or 19, you aren’t friends because you grew up together. You were raised in different cities, neighborhoods and education systems. You become friends when you are placed in each other's lives. Maybe you took first semester calculus together, maybe you met in the dining hall, or maybe you share a community bathroom. And obviously you aren’t befriending every person you cross paths with so those you actively seek out as friends are those who you feel a connection with. But what’s different now is that you are becoming friends after you have all developed, at least to a certain extent. You have different perspectives on life, on relationships, on the world outside, on societal norms, and the list goes on.

You don’t realize this at first. The first couple months the glitz and glamor of freshman year are enough to overlook any potential complications. It’s the first couple months in a new city, with new alleys and rooftops to explore with all the new people in your life. We spent late nights on the lawn, playing music on a speaker as we got to know each other. In those moments, life felt like the movie we’d played over and over in our heads for years as we imagined leaving our hometowns and making it big in the real world. But somehow as time went on, that haze of a new chapter was no longer. 

I’m an overthinker. But I’m also, to put it lightly, a pathological people pleaser. And when relationships in my life start falling apart as arguments and conflict take center stage, I feel all the lights turn to me. 

“What did I do wrong?”

“Did I hurt these people?” 

Questions as such kept me up at night. But upon reflection, I think I look back to something my mom told me as a kid. She always said that your childhood friends will always hold a different kind of simplicity. As you get older and lives get busier, you may only see these people a couple times a year, maybe not even, but they will become your most cherished, long-distance, low-commitment relationships. And when you get the rare chance to all be together again, you’ll laugh about your 3rd period calculus class and you’ll be placed right back into the high school cafeteria, back to a time when life was so simple and everything else will fade away temporarily. 

But in college things were different. Meeting people at this junction of your life meant that you weren’t always going to be together. There was no more high school cafeteria to serve as a common meeting point. Yeah there was the dining hall, yes you still lived close, but you were now young adults taking classes across many acres, working towards various career goals in cities across America, and learning your place in this world. This makes friendship hard. You get to know the good, bad and ugly of the people you meet. The baggage of their past, their hope for change and who they want to be in the future. All of it. And with these deeper relationships, comes a double edged sword. The friendships have more depth to them, but as with all things more serious, there is more room than ever for division. These relationships require more effort, more attention and much more open communication. When time becomes a sparse commodity, what time you do have together must be used wisely in developing relationships. And conflict is inevitable. It doesn’t mean the friendships aren’t worthwhile. It doesn’t mean the relationships aren’t special. You aren’t going to get along with everyone, and not everyone is going to get along with you. But that isn’t a bad thing, because you’ll find your common ground and you’ll form whatever relationship seems best fit. And the most important thing, no one is at fault. As a people pleaser, it’s tempting for me to look inwards and find fault within myself but friendship is a two way street, and not all streets align with each other. 

So as I reflect on freshman year, the new friends I’ve made, the friends I thought would be forever but have parted ways with, my childhood friends, I think I come to this conclusion. Friendship can’t be defined. Not everyone is a ride or die, and not everyone needs to be. No one is at fault if they aren’t someone’s ride or die. Every relationship serves a purpose, and no two people share the same purpose. Some friends exist to dance in frat backyards with, some are there for exploring coffee shops and boutiques, some will be at your bachelorette and wedding, others won’t, and some will be the phone call you make on a long day because you need to hear a voice of familiarity or reason. If you get lucky, you’ll have a friend or two that does it all. They’ll be your person. But not everyone can or will be your person and that's okay. Life is short and each relationship is so special. Casual friends, incredibly important friends, and everything in between. It all deserves to be treasured. Until next time… :)