For most of my life, it’s been impossible for me to write about my friendships. I always thought this was extremely odd, considering I write every aspect of my life down somewhere. My notes app has so many scattered poetry and short story prompts, my google docs holds every emotion I’ve ever had, and my notebooks have fragmented parts that wouldn’t really make sense if you put them in a calendar. But my friendships have never been an aspect of my writing until very recently, so I guess this is my little self-analysis of why.
I know that I’m nineteen which means I know very little, but I have experienced the oddly beautiful feeling of growing out of friendships. I say outgrowing in this blog post to mean that it was mutual; we never decided to stop talking nor did our fondness decrease. We just weren’t as close. I have so many people that I love dearly – from elementary school to high school – that I don’t necessarily keep up with. And neither do they. And I don’t believe it’s because we don’t care, because when we see each other at Sonic or run into each other in some weird public place, it feels like we could never stop talking. I have so much to tell you! Oh wait, remember that time freshman year? Yeah, we broke up. This year has been really hard for me. What’s he up to now? I haven’t talked to him since sophomore year and I think he blocked me on Instagram a while back.
Maybe it’s silly to reference Olivia Rodrigo here, but really, truly, it’s exactly what she says in the final track of SOUR “hope ur ok”. I remember when that album dropped, I was extremely sad about a boy (as was most of the world). But I asked my youth minister at church what his favorite song on the album was, and I don’t know what I expected him to say (because mine were “happier” and “traitor” obviously) but his answer was “hope ur ok”. He told me that there were so many people in his life that nothing necessarily happened, there was no falling out, they just stopped talking because “Life got in the way.”
This is not to discount my sadness regarding a boy nor to belittle teenage girl relationship emotions. I believe in their severity. I just hadn’t necessarily grown out of too many friendships at the time when that album dropped, and I don’t think I necessarily understood how sad that is. Or how lovely and beautiful it is to love someone the same but not talk to them everyday.
This is to say that GOOD GRIEF I am terrified of outgrowing any more of my friendships because I absolutely adore everyone in my life right now. I spent the summer at home this year because I love my friends at home and wanted to spend as much time as I could with them. It’s a very Mississippi thing to say you don’t want to forget your roots or whatever, but that’s really what it is. I don’t want to forget the nights I’ve never felt more loved than when seven people were driving around in someone’s truck and we were all fighting over the aux cord. But more than not wanting to forget that, I’m scared of never feeling that again.
So something I haven’t been doing well this summer is looking at my friends for who they are right now. I’ve had the recurring thought of if we’ll be in each other's weddings. Will we even talk then? What happens when I get a summer internship, when I study abroad, or when I don’t come home as often?
pic creds in this post to bestie bae Laura Grace Hardy
I don’t want this blog post to sound like I’ve figured it out, because I absolutely haven’t figured out how to stop thinking about them like that. But the progress I have made, and that I will share, is that I’ve realized I have a tendency to falsely attend to my close relationships when I feel like they’re failing or growing up. I’ve realized that none of the friendships I’ve “outgrown” have any less love than they ever did. I’ve met more people in the last year than I ever have before, and there are just so many people to update. I know that I want the people in my life to be genuine, to be ones that I choose because we just get each other, to not be fondness of forced proximity. I have realized that it’s extremely unhelpful to think about where my friendships will be in the future because I have no idea what will happen in five years.
Quite honestly, I’m writing this in a blog because it’s much easier to throw a bunch of vulnerable thoughts on the internet instead of having a difficult conversation about my friendship insecurity with the people I care a lot about.
I guess this is an extremely word-vomit way to say that I’ve started writing about my friendships more recently because I realize how important they are to me and also the ways that I am failing in them. I do want to emphasize that – that I get in my head about it and act completely different for no reason. I don’t really understand how my anxiety works in that regard, no matter how many journal entries, poems, or blog posts I can write. It’s easiest for me to write about things that hurt me, things that I’m anxious about, and things that are just generally sad. I do hate to come to the temporal reality of most friendships, even if I’ve been warned of it before. My response to that, I suppose, is to whip up a silly little poem, blog post, or journal entry specifically about my friendships.
I do think I can confidently say that I’m trying to navigate it. That doesn’t mean I do it right nor does it mean my anxieties are rooted in truth, but I’m trying to navigate it. I don’t even really know what that means, to be completely honest. I don’t quite know how to show my love and appreciation for someone when I’m afraid it won’t be there in the same way in four years.