The Evolution of Friendships

I've had a surprising number of conversations recently about the evolution of friendships.  Mainly, about how sometimes it seems like we remain friends with those we met during childhood or high school in spite of the fact that we've grown up and changed.  Whereas we seem to be friends with those we met during college and after because we've grown up and changed.

I don't know if this is true for everyone, but it seems to be true for a lot of the people in my life right now and, to a certain extent, it's also true for me.  It's amazing how the seasons of our lives are marked by the friendships we made as well as the friendships we ended.

When I was a child, one of my best friends taught me to love books.  She was/is so incredibly smart and, though I didn't realize it at the time (and therefore balked at it when my 10 year old brain took any notice), she held me to a higher standard than I held myself.  She moved away when we were in the fifth grade but we somehow managed to check in with one another once or twice every five years or so.  We evolved.  We aren't best friends anymore, but we are definitely friends.  We've changed, but I still love her so dearly.  There are no strings attached to our friendship, no roles we claimed for ourselves as children that we've been unable to get out of as adults.  We are accepting of our individuality, our growth.  And I've come to recognize that the person I would be had we never been childhood friends is so very different from the person I am and the person I want to be.

There were also friendships made during my childhood that were never meant to grow up with me.  They were meant to teach me lessons, and then to fade away.  From these friendships, I learned about the kind of friend I'd been, and that I didn't want to be that anymore.  I didn't want to be judgmental or mean (as tween girls can so be).  I didn't want to be clique-y and exclusive.  Making fun of other girls, putting myself in a place of grade-school power just so I wasn't the one being made fun of was way to grow up.  It made me a lousy person.  These friendships taught me these lessons when they turned on me, when rumors flew and the catty stares I'd once given were now aimed my way.  It was a hard way to learn it, but I'm so grateful for it.  I'm not sure it could have been taught any other way.

At a certain point, our friendships can seem like rocky love affairs.  We are co-dependent and jealous, selfish and self-absorbed.  These relationships can burn bright and then burn out, and it's a painful struggle as you learn to let go.  I met a girl in middle school and we just clicked immediately.  She was, I now recognize, everything I wanted to be but wasn't.  We were opposites and we filled gaps in each other that needed to be filled for a time.  Where she was reckless, I was cautious; where she was in-your-face, I was mild-mannered.  My other friends tried to warn me off our friendship but I didn't listen.  We stopped being friends, the way high school girls do, more times than I can count before patching things up and being inseparable for another few months.  There was a final straw involving her and a boy I'd liked for 2 years.  I knew after that that this wasn't the kind of friendship I needed in my life.  I slowly started to back out of it.  After graduation, we lost touch almost completely.  Our lives have taken vastly different roads headed in almost opposite directions.  I see things now about her, about who I was then, about our friendship, that I wasn't able to see at 15.  We fed each others insecurities and were in constant competition for I don't know what.  But I'm still thankful that we were friends at all.  She allowed me to be a bit wild with her, and that's not something I was able to do elsewhere.  This was a friendship characterized by fun and freedom, even while we held one another down.

But not all high school friendships are like that one.  There are women in my life right now that have been with me forever.  We dealt with homesickness together during the first few weeks of boarding school.  We were fans of NSYNC together.  We obsessed about boys and wrote fan fiction together.  We got ready for school dances and got drunk off of Smirnoff Ice on beaches together.  We fell in love with Coldplay and screamed at football games together.  We cried at graduation together because we worried things would never be the same.  And now we're going to each other's weddings, texting one another from across the country, talking about jobs and babies and "Ohmygod, did you see that so-and-so from high school has five kids already?!"  These friendships are not always easy because we became friends with certain versions of ourselves -- so it can be hard to find commonalities between us as adults.  But we work at that.  And we try to give each other space to grow.  Because these friendships still bring something to my life; these women are familiar and funny and they know my story without me having to tell them.  They are the ones that I am 100% sure will be there for me in the darkest of times because they have been in the past, no matter what.  That bond is difficult to break.

And then there are the friendships we make as adults.  These friendships can seem the closest, the most immediate, because these are the friends you see or talk to all the time, the friends that the You you are now has chosen.  My current circle includes friends that were Nate's and are now mine, friends we've made together as a couple, and the friends I've made on my own either during or after law school.  I don't know how to explain these relationships other than to say that they are so engaging, so supportive and encouraging.  These are the friends I see at "Family Dinner" on Fridays and Saturdays.  These are the friends who come over to bring me wine and movies when I have a slipped disk.  These are my Girls Night and my camping crew.  They know my drink preferences and the fact that I want to become a long-distance hiker.  Our conversations are most often about issues like politics and greed and socialism and nutrition and poverty and education (and friendships...this blog post came from one of those conversations) because that's just what's important to us.  We are friendships built on ideas, on who we want to become, on who we are at the moment, and the things that drive us.  My life would be so much less without them right now.

This is all to say that I think the best friendships are the ones we choose to keep because they enrich us, they bring something to us and we know we can bring something to these friends.  Friendships, like all relationships, require work and acceptance and space and commitment.  But they are worth it.  Regardless of whether certain friendships have lasted or have faded, they have all been worth it.

A Place To Be

Ten years ago, I graduated from high school.

Ten.  Years.

It probably seems like a long time to some people, and no time at all for others.  It seems like both to me.

I've been thinking a lot about the space, the distance (both literal and figurative), between who I was at 18 and who I am now, mostly because last week was my high school reunion and I missed it.  I didn't want to go for a number of reasons: I already see most of the people I really want to see from high school; a plane ticket back to Hawaii ain't cheap and, if I'm gonna spend the cash, I'd rather spend the time with my family; I honestly felt like I had better things to do last week (turns out I was right). 

Does that sound harsh?  I don't mean it to.  It really would have been amazing to get back on campus, that place that I literally lived for 7 years (I boarded there since the seventh grade...it did not take me that long to graduate from high school!  What am I, dumb?).  And it would have probably been equally great to see some of those people that I don't actively think about, but who were such a part of the canvas of my life when I was a teenager.  I'd like to know how they're doing, what they're up to, how they're making their mark on the world.

But I'm also a place in my life where I'm trying to figure out who I am right now, who I want to be, and putting myself into a situation where I'm surrounded not only by people who know me as a certain person, but also a place where I was a certain person, well, it just didn't seem like the thing to do. 

I think Emil Blunt said it best in The Jane Austen Book Club: High school is never over.

Don't get me wrong, I love Hawaii.  I love my family and my friends, my culture and heritage, my hometown, my history.  I love that I know the rhythms of that place, the sing-song of the voices, the trajectory of most stories and jokes.  I know Hawaii, you know?  That's comforting.

But I also know that it's not where I belong right now.  Maybe not ever.  It's not where I'm going to be the best version of me I can be.  I can't go there and surround myself with the kind of people I want to surround myself with (other than my family).  And I'm able to do that where I am now.  I'm able to be around friends who constantly push me to go for whatever it is I want, who inspire me to take that next step, who enjoy talking about that next step. I'm able to say, "Hey, next week I want to go on a road trip...how about Yellowstone?" and actually do that.  I have a freedom here I don't think I would have back home.  I'm able to be ambitious, to have that be realistic, and to know that I have the support I need to be successful too.

I know this all makes me sound a little selfish.  It does.  I'm aware.

But I'm okay with that.  Isn't it the time in my life when I should be selfish?

A Look Back on Intentions

I've been thinking a lot lately about how far I've come in the past year or so.  I've decided to re-start Stratejoy's Joy Juice journal prompts from the beginning and, one of the first questions I'm journaling about asks me to examine the ways in which I'm spending my time.  I already know that the answer to this question is so telling -- how we choose/agree to spend our time says so much about our intentions in our lives and our commitments.  Do we choose to work 24/7, perhaps because we intend to have a very comfortable lifestyle that requires wealth and privilege?  Do we choose to surround ourselves with the great outdoors, maybe because we intend to live as organically and in-tune with the natural world as we can?  There are so many variations of these answers, each as revealing as the next.

A year ago, I was drowning.  I was drowning in my own lack of self-worth, my need for approval, my fear of disappointing the people I cared about.  I was desperate for something, anything, that would get me out of the situation I found myself in and, though I knew it, I was too afraid to act on the fact that all I needed was some courage.  I was spending my time doing something that made a toxic mess of my days.  I was zoning out on TV whenever I could just so I could sit and stare off into space and not have to actively participate in my own life.  I was pulling away from people, going inward, and wondering how I got there in the first place.

When I go back to those first Joy Juice prompts from a year ago, my intention was clear: I intended to suffer through every hour as the responsible, stable, dutiful girlfriend/daughter/sister/employee rather than step up and take charge of my life.

This is one of the reasons I love Stratejoy so much.  Because at the near-lowest I thought I could go, this positive corner of the internet helped me to realize that I wasn't alone, that this wasn't a new feeling, that other young women were experiencing exactly what I was experiencing, and they were making changes.  I realized that it was possible to change without my family, my relationship, my reputation, the world falling apart all around me.

Fast-forward to today.  I can barely think of a single toxic thing in my life right now.  True, I don't have a job, but my days are filled with so much, and that so much is so right, that I find it hard to complain sometimes.  I've found a passion I didn't know I had, made wonderful new friends when I thought I had no idea how to even make friends, and I'm exploring creativity in ways I've always wanted to.  I'm concentrating on my health -- all aspects of it -- and I'm giving attention to Nate and the community we've built together.  What's even better is seeing how my choices have changed, how the primary questions I ask myself now when faced with difficult decisions (like whether or not to apply for a job or take an unpaid internship or invest my time and energy into something) aren't, "How will this look?  What will so-and-so think of me?" but rather, "Is this right for me?  Is this who I am or want to be?  Will this make me happy?"

My intention in this new year was to live a fearlessly authentic life, and I think I'm living up to that well so far.

But I think there's an even greater lesson I've learned from this year of change and reacquainting myself with authenticity, and that's to accept where I've been.  I was ashamed for a long time about the person I was and the choices I made in the past few years.  I thought it showed how weak or flighty or foolish or stubborn (yes, I realize flighty and stubborn are somewhat contradictory) I was.  But I'm just not sure I think that anymore.  Without those moments, those choices, would I have ever gotten to where I am now?  Would I be moving in the right direction today if I hadn't gotten so turned around back then?  Who can really say?

Isn't it just better to acknowledge -- and maybe even celebrate -- the path that lead you to where you are?  Who are we to question the universe?


[Photo source: quote from http://www.tut.com/resources/notes/]

Nutshelled: September

Can you believe it's practically October already?  October.  As in, the 10th month of 2011.  We'd might as well be in the new year.

September has definitely been a good, but hectic, month for me.  I began job hunting in earnest, I re-started my Awesome Internship, I began re-hauling my health through major diet and fitness changes, I began this blog, I started volunteering with Stratejoy, I joined a small group at my local church, my best friend got married and I spent a weekend in Hawaii with my family, and for the first time in maybe ever, I don't have a plan for my future and I'm sort of okay with that.

All things considered, these past 30 days have been pretty big for me!

Coming into this month, I didn't realize all the changes that were going to happen.  I knew that there were changes I wanted to happen, but I'd been wanting these things to happen for a while now and they just never turned out (or, a more accurate way of putting it would be that I just never stuck with it long enough to make them turn out).  For example, I'd been wanting to "get healthy" -- whatever that meant in all its vagueness -- for as long as I can remember.  I've tried so many diets its stupid to even think about it.  I've started working out for periods of time, but it's always just fallen to the wayside in the end.  So many things always just fell to the wayside in the end.

But there was something in the water this September.  I mean, shit got done.  Maybe not everything -- e.g. I don't have a job yet -- but even my whole mentality about those still as-yet-to-be-done things has shifted a little and I find myself less crazed by it all.  I wish I had a job, yes, because the money is important for you know, things like rent and food and all, but it's okay that it's taking some time.  Because maybe that means that I'm going about it the right way this time.  And until such a time as I get that "right job," I'm filling my days like it's nobody's business with other things I really care about.  Like health and fitness and Stratejoy and friends and my dog and reading and [hopefully soon] writing.

And if October does happen to bring even more big things for me (like said job), then I hope that this all proves sustainable, because it finally feels like I'm reintroducing things into my life that I've been missing without even knowing it.

I feel like I'm starting to be me again.