Time to get soppy again! To be completely honest, I have not really been thinking about myself lately at all. I simply had no time to. I have now been off for longer than 24 hours and I'm already feeling how I'm returning to the thinking. Constant thinking! What's been on my mind especially this weekend is friendship. How that ended up there is not surprising, given that my friends were great this week and Thomas, a guy I'd no doubt call my friend as we've been hanging out every day at work for two months, said we're not friends. Bummer! I've also been talking about friendship a lot lately and have, for the first time ever, asked myself what it really means. I make friends easily but they don't really stick around, do they? Maybe it's time for reflection...The most annoying thing is that it's necessary to put tags on people to define friendship. For me a friend is someone I'd rather spend time with than being by myself which applies to a fair few. That's not really friendship, is it? If we define friendship by who really knows me inside out I have zero. So that doesn't sound good either. I suppose my next step would be to imagine who I'd invite to my wedding if it was tomorrow, and I actually found this to be the best one. I'd only want people at my wedding who love me the way I love them, and if I was at a friend's wedding I'd be there to celebrate my friend's happiness, not the free booze at the reception. Because I feel this for people easily but can't expect that back I've often thought friends always screw with me instead of realizing that they were never friends to begin with.
I don't like saying "a friend of mine..." or "my best friend..." but what else do you say? I have friends I regularly spend time with, who know what's going on in my life and who I call when I'm bored. And then there's people who know what I think before I do, who call me out on bullshit and who I organize surprise parties for because it's important to me that they're happy. When the latter happened last year I'm unsure who had the better time, Conor who I organized the party for, or me who saw that Conor was having the time of his life. In the end I felt awesome I was able to give one of my best friends ever a fantastic gift because I also knew that he'd appreciate it and would go out of his way for me, too. And he has many times. For years now that boy's locked in my heart and he ain't going anywhere even if he tries!
I love people all the time and it's ridiculously easy to become my friend. It's when I know that this love comes back that I feel friendship. Obviously, it rarely does. Every friend I have I earned, only few of them happened naturally. I sacrificed things to make people understand that I'm investing in them in the hopes they'd consider giving me friendship. In the end it's just another relationship, I just don't make out with them. Almost everyone I call friend today has once knocked on my door and I didn't feel like doing what was necessary but I did it anyway. Each of them has also shown me the same courtesy. Without these situations we might not be friends today. Because it wasn't easy to make them friends it will consequently be impossible to make them stop being my friend. 90% of my friends live abroad but they'll be at that wedding...
So although I was quite the campus presence while at uni, having this reputation of being the party girl who knows everyone and who people are trying to hang out with I never once liked that role. I like to know many people, having a lot of opportunities to talk and get to know them and potentially build friendships, however, with increasing age I have realized that this takes time, effort and still might not happen. Friendship is a partnership as well, it has to fit but also takes work. There's few people it worked with for me but damn, they're awesome. I must be one hell of a chick to be able to be friends with my friends because they're great people and I'm proud to know them. And it makes me feel super good that they'd say the same about me! And so they should because I'm really freaking great to them...
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