12. Friendships

You're allowed to let go and not everything has to be deep and meaningful.

I’ve been trying to write about this for two weeks, it’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot recently and it’s also something I wanted to share but it’s difficult. The main reason why I think it’s resulting complicated is because “friendship” isn’t usually spoken about or at least, it hasn’t been common for me to hear. Everyone has something to say regarding affectionate relationships but we never speak about friends.

When we’re little we’re told that you don’t have to only have one best friend and that everyone can be your best friend because we don’t want children to close off other possible friendships. As we get older and are teenagers, we mix with just about everyone and anyone and have very intense but short friendships. Then, we all end up going our separate ways whilst we head into this weird “young-adult” period of our lives where we’re too young to be seen as proper adults but technically we are adults and we’re like: where are my friends and how do I make friends? Surely I’m too old (lol) to go up to someone and say “hey, you seem cool, wanna go for coffee?”

I don’t know about other people in their twenties (or any other age) but I’ve been a very philosophical, questioning life, existence, spirituality, meaning… sort of being lately and friendship is something I’ve been reflecting on and I think that at 24 years old, I’m starting to understand how this game works, which as a result, is making my brain feel more relaxed and less anxious. Because let’s face it, my brain loves things to get anxious about :) - we’ll talk about that some other time. For the meanwhile - FRIENDS.

There are many types of friendships and I’ve spent my life classifying everyone as “friend” or “best friend” when that actually doesn’t work. I even did a Google search about types of friendships and this is the b.s I got:

Friendship is categorized into four types: acquaintance, friend, close friend and best friend.

Well, this as you can see, is pretty useless because it, to me, seems like all it does is help you classify people on a friend level from 1-10. Like who even knows the difference between a close friend and a best friend? It’s all pretty ambiguous and not very helpful. So, instead of sticking “friend” labels on everyone in our lives, maybe we can look at it differently.

The first and probably, most difficult part is accepting that sometimes it’s best to let go. There have been moments where I’ve found myself hanging on for dear life to friendships that died a long time ago and are way past the revival point because well, life, time and change. But, I’ve now learned that letting go is okay and it’s a natural part of life. We can care about these people and wish them all the best from a distance. It’s actually probably healthier than clinging onto them and trying to force something to work. Let go and send love their way, you’ll feel a little bit lighter and see things from a new, more positive perspective.

Another thing I’ve learned is something called transactional friendships. When I accepted that this exists I stopped feeling the need to make this type of friendship somehow evolve into a deeper and more meaningful one. You can have friends that you go to class or work with every day, sit down and eat lunch together on your break, chat and feel super comfortable with their company but not feel the need to go into detail about your personal life or meet outside of those contexts.
It’s a non-written and non-discussed transaction that you share. You both like each other’s company, you like sitting together and chatting, you help each other out with the work you share and then you both go home and that’s that. It’s a much more superficial and light-hearted friendship but it’s also necessary and healthy to have in certain environments. You don’t have to feel bad for not wanting to treat them as you’d treat your “best friend” - they’re different relationships.

I hope that the ideas of letting go and transactional friendships may help you in some way, as they’ve done me.

Another thing I wanted to quickly mention is that you may be at a point in your life where you don’t have many friends and being social may seem difficult because you need to sort your own head out before feeling ready to also think about other people - that’s normal too. Sooner or later you’ll naturally feel the desire to socialise and meet new people again, but you don’t need to rush it or force it. The right people will appear at the right time, and if they don’t, the “wrong” people often have a lot to teach us too.

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Thank you for being here for another week

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Sorry for breaking the rules and sending this on Tuesday,
Ejjjjjjhd.