What makes someone a friend? Is it a person you can count on? A person you enjoy spending time with? Or is a friend merely the result of our environment?
From an early age we are taught to make friends. At school, if you didn’t have friends you were considered weird and if you had too many friends, people envied you. Looking back on what was an incredibly confusing stage of life, having friends was what made life bearable. To have friends who shared in your struggle, to help you out in life and ultimately to enjoy each and every single day with will forever be a cherished commodity, never to be had again.
The transition to adulthood has made friendship more complicated than ever. No longer are we trapped and surrounded by the same people everyday. To sustain a friendship, it now takes genuine effort and commitment, something of which not everyone has. Recounting life with fellow university students, it’s not uncommon to hear that “my friendship group doesn’t hang out with each other anymore.” Truthfully, life becomes busy and overwhelming and we rightly begin to prioritise our own energy levels. As an adult we have more responsibilities, we need to work, study and rest. Therefore it isn’t confusing as to why we begin to pull away from people. Whilst it’s saddening to think that the people we considered our closest friends, we now barely speak to, the beauty is that the friendships we did maintain are the most genuine ones.
During university life, we feel bound by this pressure to make new friends. We hear recountings about how this period of life is so special. We watch TV shows and movies where people make their closest friends and meet the love of their life at college. We spend our entire high school life filled with these ideas and expectations of what adulthood and freedom will be like. So what do we do when the reality does not live up to the expectation? Likely we begin to pull away and detach ourselves from our reality so we escape through the lives of others on social media that we can relate to because we cannot relate to the ones we see around us (but more on that next time).
It is always difficult to adjust to new stages of life, and adulthood certainly has some of the most drastic changes. We must now begin to decide what we do with life, what brings us joy and how we choose to spend our time. We are no longer bound by anything and that is an immense responsibility for someone who has had a systematic structure for the better part of eighteen years. More than ever, we are latching on to the things that make us feel safe, the people that make us feel safe. The rush of life, the craziness of it all halts when we are within the company of true friends.
Personally, I’ve always seen friends as the people you surround yourself with in order to enjoy life. I still believe this to be true, however the challenges of being an adult has meant the meaning of friendship to me has changed. Being an adult facing life means that I am now that main person responsible for my actions and decisions. However, I am fallible and I cannot always trust myself to make the best decisions. Therefore, I need the people around me to call me out and to tell me when I am not the best version of myself.
So what is the point of all this? Why did you spend 5 minutes of your day reading this? I’d like to think that you clicked on this article because the word friendship struck you. Hopefully, you thought of your friendships, the good ones and the bad, and can appreciate what a friend means to you in this phase of your life. Reminisce on all the friends you have had and look forward to the ones you are yet to make, because for me, friendship has and will always be the thing I cherish the most.
P.S. If you have a friend in your life you appreciate, let them know every once in a while. It’s nice to feel appreciated.
Written by Andy Pham
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