Why I Want to Talk About Friendship

Have you ever been through a friend breakup? Have you ever clocked a friend being more distant than usual and felt kind of alienated because of it? Do you ever wonder if your friends really like you? I suspect most people can relate to one of these examples if not all. Speaking for myself, some of my worst break-ups were with 100% platonic friends. I also get very triggered if I feel anyone pull away from me- not just romantic partners- and when friends do it it consumes my mind the way it would a partner. I’ve also definitely had times where I get left out of a situation and have to contemplate if in fact my friends do even like me. When my friendships are amiss a lot of my mental and emotional energy gets drained. Friends are the ones we turn to when our families or partners are being crazy, so much so that calling friends the phrase “chosen family” has become pretty popular. But there’s not really any friend break-up songs the way there are romantic break-up songs. Most movies and television shows have an A plot line around romance and the friendship arcs and bonds get a C or below plot line- even if the friendship is the most instrumental part of the project. And when media (tv shows in particular) are about friends, it’s usually part mythological as most people know way more than a handful of people and don’t hang out with those same handful of people every day for a decade. Friendship is so important to us as humans and yet the actual dynamics of friendship lacks having true representation in most places.

I have a unique and alienating perspective on this as most of my immediate family is dead. My extended family has been consistently flaky and inconsistent with me, meaning sometimes I hear from some relatives at a random time of year but I mostly get forgotten on major holidays (not even a text for several years in a row and counting!) including the 2020 Thanksgiving where a bunch of them hung out on Zoom and posted photos of this Zoom hang all over social media…and I wasn’t invited. ::sigh:: I have a very hard and very enduring line of not posting my current romantic life on the Internet (I’ll better expand on why another time), but I can speak to both being single and being partnered: being single ultimately sucks the worst with the above circumstances but it’s also not a cake walk a partner in my shoes as it by default puts more pressure on them because having less people in my court organically. In short, I need my effing friends arguably more than the next person because I’m very short on social resources.

Because of how lonely my life is by default, I have heavily relied on my friends. Hell, my trauma response when I was younger was to be a social butterfly so I either wouldn’t have to deal with myself, always had a place to go so I never felt alone, and because I felt so unlovable due to my circumstances I think on a subconscious level I believed that having a high number of friends validated me in a way that made me feel lovable. In many ways I do not regret being a former social butterfly as it taught me so many lessons about people, social dynamics, myself, and so much more. On the other hand I cringe a little because I can now see in retrospect that many friendships were forced and many people didn’t need to know such vulnerable details about me. Yikes. But this is good news for you because I feel oddly qualified to speak about friendship dynamics, mythologies, and how to be more discerning about what a real friend truly is.

This past year my discernment and analytical skills got upgraded because in early 2022 I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD. That’s a whole other corner of the blog, but for the purposes of this post my CPTSD diagnosis meant that I was forced to grapple with some bad wirings and negative internal messaging that was informing all of my decision making, including how I bond with people and react to social situations. I subconsciously tore everything down last year and have recently been rebuilding it back up in a way that isn’t letting trauma inform my decision making skills. Honestly speaking, friendship was possibly one of the biggest ways I had to do that. I could no longer tolerate tone deaf advice or friends being dismissive over being curious about where I was coming from. I was forced to reckon with the fact that many of the friends I considered myself to be close with in Los Angeles were really just people I was familiar over actually being truly closely bonded to (which will be a whole other post for a whole other time). I also realized my expectations weren’t always fair, or obvious, and at best sometimes they were misguided.

I look forward to sharing my lessons learned. I’m annoyed that not enough people do deep dives into friendship because it’s such an underrated topic we all need to better understand. I’m not the only one doing this, but I’m happy to contribute to the small pool of people trying to normalize this dialogue who came before me. Some of the topics and micro zoom ins I’m planning on sharing here is the myth of chosen family (it’s a beautiful thought…until someone dies or is in the hospital. You guys know you can’t claim a friend in the morgue usually, right? It’s a whole legal thing). While I respect everyone has busy lives they have to live, I think it’s also weird to expect friends to be 100% cool with you ignoring them while you go off living your cool life. I think we can find a constructive middle ground with that one. Also, have you ever noticed how so few people have the same definitions about what a friend is? Some will say a real friend is someone who talks to you daily while the next person will say if you can go months without talking and pick up where you left off then you’ve found yourself a friend. I don’t believe in monoliths, but even with that being said make it make sense! And the only way we can make sense of it is to talk about it.

Thanks so much for reading and please come back. My social media is on the top of the page if you want to follow because I’ll be updating there as new posts come out!