On Friendship

One of my earliest memories goes like this:

There are, at most, six of us. We're probably all, approximately, four years old. They're, probably, all kids from the church. We're sitting in a circle, in my parents' basement, cutting up those little, paper valentines. There's a girl sitting next to me. I look at her and think, "Why is she here? I bet her mom made her come. She doesn't even like me." I went to the same school as this girl from kindergarten through graduation. Since graduating, my mother has mentioned her to me a time or two. And that entire time, my opinion of her has been colored by this memory. To me, she was and is and will always be, this girl who doesn't really like me.

The thing about memory is... it's super fallible. We have limited understanding of events from the get-go. Then, as we process them, we change details and blend stories. Red sweaters become blue ones. Your aunt becomes your best friend's mom. 2004 becomes 2008. We forget things that don't uphold our pre-existing concepts. We morph events to uphold our worldview. We have biases towards the negative. What I'm saying is: maybe we weren't at my house. Maybe we weren't cutting up valentines. Maybe I didn't even suspect that this girl secretly disliked me. Hey, maybe she wasn't even there. But I often wonder if my friends really, actually want me around and, when I do, I wonder if I've been carrying around this fear for, well, ever.

The whole reason I mention the fallible memory thing, I guess, is because... I've decided to kind of skip over elementary school, middle school, and high school. During that time, I was part of a friend group, and I didn't necessarily doubt that they liked me so much as... I felt like the person who was liked least. You know what I mean? Like... the one who was almost forgettable or unimportant. Like... a thread you could totally pull out of your sweater without unraveling the whole thing.

But, to my friends' credit, at the time I was dealing with adolescent depression so I was kind of twine ball of tears, self-pity, and frustration.

Anyway, let's just skip forward to college, okay?

The cool thing about college is: you're suddenly surrounded by totally new people, almost all of whom are in exactly the same stage of life as you. Nobody knows what's happening, everybody is hopeful and idealistic and force fed a steady diet of interesting information. (Seriously! College taught me that "dysnomia" refers to that moment when a word is on the tip of your tongue but you can't quite recall it, that in the original version of Little Red Riding Hood the wolf feeds the grandmother TO Little Red, and that, one time, a pair of sisters convinced a hoard of people that they could speak to the dead by cracking their foot joints!) So, even though college can be a terrifying and nerve-wracking experience, you just have to show up at the "tie-dye on the quad" event and after .7 seconds you'll find yourself with a whole hoard of new friends.

Let me take a beat to say: some of the best people I know are college friends. There are people that I befriended during college that I fully expect to maintain friendships with throughout the rest of my life. People who are kind, funny, crazy smart, intelligent, interesting, and, (I know I said it before but it's so important I'm going to say it twice) kind.

But I also experienced a cornucopia of the unpleasant. From the generic to the infinitely frustrating.

My freshman year, I befriended a guy. If I'd been able to watch my life as a made-for-tv Hallmark movie, I'd probably groan every time this guy came on screen and then complain to my character and the television set, "How can you be so dummmmmb?" But I wasn't the audience, I was the participant, so I was really, really forgiving of faults. He was loud, disrespectful, and selfish. He would take things that I told him in confidence and reveal them in public settings to embarrass me or force me to pay attention to him. He was controlling, but childish, like an 8 year old trying to force his way, so he somehow seemed harmless.

Like most terrible relationships (of any sort, like I said, this one was a friendship) things eventually imploded. And in, like, a major way. So one night I found myself standing in a pile of broken glass, pointing at different shards, and saying, "Manipulative! Deceptive. Controlling?" (This is metaphorical. There wasn't any broken glass. Though I did, at one point, chuck a lampshade across the room. To my credit I was 19 and everything sucked. It's a pretty good story, so, feel free to ask me about it sometime.) Throughout the spring semester, we tried to be friends, but that was, to be frank, a shitstorm.* He continued to try and manipulate and control me, he was continuously disrespectful and obnoxious, and I no longer had any tolerance for it.

The next year, I retreated a little bit. Or maybe a lot. I remember I kicked the semester off with a bout of about three weeks of depression. I would go to class. Work. Wherever I needed to be. Then I'd go to my room, lay in my bed, and cry. I was a delight. (Shout out to my Australian best friend who put up with me that whole time and would try to cheer me up despite the fact that I was, perpetually, a grump-toad.) By my junior year, I had bounced back a bit. I was living with three friends, I was super active on campus, and I felt like I was getting a genuine college experience.

Oh, man. It's like, I want to be honest about this experience, but... I also feel like I'm stepping on old egg shells. Ahhh. Okay. Regroup.

Okay. So. The most we can hope for, is to build a life where we are mostly happy most of the time. You know what I mean? Well, during this time, I told myself that I was mostly happy most of the time. But in reality, I was still... mostly sad. I just would kind of distract myself from it. I had a friend who I would, at times, try to confide in, but her responses often made me feel like what I was saying and feeling was invalid or unimportant. The frustrating this was that this was one of my closest friends, and she was often presenting herself as, well, the FRIENDS theme song. Slowly, I realized that a lot of how this person treated me made me feel... lesser. And I honestly, honestly-honestly, think that the root of the problem here was personalities. See? She was the sort of person who made jokes at the expense of her friends, and I was the sort of person who has a very low threshold for being taunted. (Except for being made fun of by myself. That's like, my favorite thing. I know, it's complicated.) I was trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do, and she seemed to think she knew how everyone should be and what everyone should be doing. I felt bullied and manipulated all over again.

My senior year, I spent the entire year, perpetually, as a grump-toad. Most of my friendships were surface/classroom friendships. Like... "this is my Linguistics/Semiotics Friend" and "this is my Mother Russia friend." (Actually, I didn't have any friends in Mother Russia. It was way too fascinating of a class for befriending people.) My close friends were, ironically, all kind of far away. The Australian went back to Australia (which is fine but also tragic as this is the only person I've ever felt comfortable calling when I get sad and lonely and cry-y) and my best friend since childhood was at school across the state.

Post-college, I was still pretty reclusive. But then (this is the part where the whole blog post gets happy and idealistic so... be excited)...

I went back to church.

I'd been really active in my church throughout high school, but, then kind of turned into a "Christmas and Easter" Christian throughout college. (Whoops.) The nerve-wracking thing about going back was... these were all going to be people that I simultaneously knew and didn't know. These were the "we kind of knew each other four years ago" and "remember when..." people. But, I sucked it up, and went back.

By myself (THANKS, MOM**).

But people sat by me. And talked to me. And before long, I joined a small group. It's comprised of married couples, and me. So, basically, I'm Joey after all the other friends got paired off. Only boys don't like me nearly as much as girls liked Joey. (FRIENDS references for days.) But what's strange isn't that I'm perpetually fifth-wheeling-it. It's that: there's a group (an entire group) of people that I'm not worried secretly don't want me around. (Actually, one time, I skipped small group to hang out with my friends from Maine and the entire small group bombarded my phone with messages, which is pretty cool, especially considering how few texts I normally get.)

I've always had some friends that I felt confident genuinely liked me. But, throughout most of my college career, I only got to see one of them regularly, and, throughout my senior year on, I didn't get to see any of them that often. But now I have friends who I see regularly, who never make me feel bad about myself or insecure, and have never made me feel like they wanted me to be anyone other than who I actually am. And I think that experience has helped to open me up a bit. Because now I feel like I have friends everywhere. Friends I work with, friends I only get to see every now and then, friends that I've been able to reconnect with, and friends I've definitely just swiped from my brother's friend stash.

I don't know. Part of it might just be growing up. When you're younger, your friend group is usually dictated by age and location. But when you get older, your friend group can easily span from 18 to 73. Maybe part of it has to do with finding friends at work or in coffee shops or at church--places where friendships are built around shared values and interests, rather than in shared complaints about the workload of Chemistry I. Or maybe it's because I'm more comfortable with myself, and the people I'm friends with are more comfortable with themselves, too.

I guess I don't really know.

But the point is, this year? This year I'm hoping for even more friendships that are deep and lasting, friendships that are genuine, kind, supportive, and fun.

*Mandatory apology for the church folk: sorry for the language!
**Just kidding, my mom totally comes to church with me. She just couldn't that day.