Lately I have been thinking about what it means for
someone to be your ‘friend’. How do you decide which people in your life are
friends and who are well, just other
people?
From our first day at primary school we are brought
up to believe that those we call friends will be there every day for the rest
of your life. When you are at school you are lucky enough to see your friends
every single day and feel like they are the only people you will ever spend any time with. The majority of people then go to high school with the same group of
friends and then your group of friends make friends with another group of
friends and you are now a big group of inseparable people who actually believe
you will never find friends better than yours. You turn 13 and boys come into
the equation but you still believe that your little clique will be forever and
you will even have boyfriends who are best friends and you will all be in that
same little group until you are old and wrinkly.
Supposedly, your friends are people you share a lot
in common with but looking back and thinking about how I feel and think today,
those people who I really thought were my best friends actually are not really
like me at all. I am not sure whether I just think in this way from my own
experience and it has taken until I am 22 years old to realise. Back in
sixth form I soon started to realise I was a bit different, I wanted to show
who I was in different ways than the rest of the group, I cut my hair off
short, I wore different clothes and had a boyfriend outside of the friendship group. Sometimes I
felt like I had made the wrong decisions and I was a bad person for being who I
wanted to be and doing things I wanted to do. And honestly it has taken until
very recently for me to realise I am much better off and a happier person for
making those decisions. For a long time I have blamed myself and thought I was
weird/not normal because I wasn’t the same as the rest of the group.
Going to university was a massive step for me, I
thought I wouldn’t be able to make friends because I felt like I didn’t fit
into my own friendship group ,who I had spent the past 7 years with, so why
would new people like me. But I soon realised that everyone in my class were in
the same boat. We were all in the class as individuals each of us feeling
exactly the same and it was the first time in ages I didn’t feel like I had to
pretend, I could be myself and start fresh because these people didn’t know
anything about me before that day. I soon made friends who were all completely
different and had their own personalities and identities but actually felt like
friends. These people who were strangers only a few months before were all
there for me and genuinely cared when something was wrong.
The same year I started working in a hotel as a
waitress and that summer after my first year of university was spent doing five
weddings a week and twelve hour shifts. Me and the other girls working there soon
realised that we needed to become very good friends otherwise we would have had
some terribly long days/nights. It didn’t take long for us all to click and we
became like each other’s agony aunts and again this is how I recognised what it
feels like to have proper friends. I had the best and worst times during those
two years working in that hotel; we laughed a lot and cried a lot but I
wouldn’t have been able to do any of it without those five other girls. And all
the time I didn’t have to be anyone else except myself.
Now, after graduating from university and leaving my
job at the hotel over a year ago, I don’t see all those people very often but I
still know that they are all a text or a phone call away. I personally don’t believe in having one or two
best friends because like I have, we all go through different stages of our
lives and different people will be there to help at different times. I don’t
think it is fair to classify one person as being the ‘BEST’ friend because all
the people I have met over the past four years have equally been a best friend
to me at some point regardless of how long
I have known them or how many times I have seen them.
The length of time you have known really does not
make any difference to how good a friend a certain person can be or has been.
After going through the worst bout of my anxiety last year, a person who I had
known no more than three months was one of the only people I felt like I could
talk to.
Meeting people in different places and seeing
everyone as individuals it doesn’t make sense for me to say one person/ or
group of people are my best friend, because everyone is good at helping you
with all different parts of your life.
What really made me think to write this post was
after completing three days of training to become a volunteer for a charity
with a very worthy cause. Walking into a room full of strangers is always a bit
scary but my nerves soon went away when I was greeted with the most down to
earth lovely people and within an hour of being there I felt like I had known
them for years. No one was left out and everyone was made to
feel part of the group. It made me feel like volunteering for this charity
was even more valuable than I had originally thought and my passion for going
into this area of work was even stronger. At the end of the training we were all asked to write a nice comment about everyone who was there and fold it over
and then pass it on round the table until each person had written about
everyone else. I didn’t read mine until I came home and it was hard for me to read because I find it very difficult to accept compliments. But I was actually
overwhelmed at how kind these people had been who I had only met for the first
time three days before. How could these people think the things I wished my friends thought about me back when I was at school. It really has made me
think differently, and realise that being myself is not a bad thing and that there
will always be people who don’t like you but why should that stop you from being
the person you want to be and feel happy being.
Everyone in my family and my boyfriend has always
said ‘just be you and believe in yourself’ so it might have taken a while for
me to actually listen…. But that is what I am going to try and do. Don’t waste
your time caring what other people think of you and believing you have to act a
certain way to be accepted.
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