With a little help from my friends

In the era of social media, where people rack up 'friends' in the hundreds and thousands, where click-bate stories want you to believe whatever it takes to get the web traffic, there's an article for everything. Small circles of friends are more meaningful. Large circles of friends will make you more successful. Having friends will extend your life. Shorter friends throw better parties. Taller friends mix better drinks. People who wear turquoise will never be honest with you. People who wear exclusively polka dots will grow food for you in times of famine.

It's all on the internet, so it's gotta be true.

What I know is this:

I have almost always had a hard time making friends. Painfully shy as a child, my first friends in elementary school came to me. Best as I can remember anyway. Those memories, once crystal clear, are getting fuzzier at my age. But as I look back, with all the glory of hindsight coupled with self-analysis, I completely get the quote from Stand By Me:

I moved around the time I was 12, away from friends I'd had what seemed like my whole life. Honest to goodness BFFs. Girls I figured I'd grow old with. Even boys I figured I'd be friends with for ages. And then I was out of the picture. I moved a few more times before I graduated high school, becoming more shy and more socially awkward along the way. But what about the kids who moved a lot and become outgoing and easily make friends? As far from me as a lavender unicorn in sage culottes dancing in Swan Lake.

How cool would that have been though?!

Social media has shown me that my old BFFs ended up as adult BFFs, which has a bittersweet feeling for me. I think it's awesome they've been friends this long. But I wonder what it would be like if I'd managed to stay firmly sandwiched in there. And then I wouldn't have had the life I've had and blah blah blah. I also wonder if I'll ever like mushrooms or beer, not that I intend to ingest either one in the next several decades.

It's funny (to me at least) as I get older and the messages within things I've heard or seen finally sync in my brain. Kind of like listening to a Prince song with a kid for the first time. Or letting a 7 year old watch something from your youth and being scandalized at words that used to make you giggle (and still do when the kids aren't around).

So the bit about the never having friends like you had at 12? Totally. And upon reflection, why would you? Your baggage, best case scenario anyway, is so minimal to non-existent at that age. Chances are you probably haven't been stabbed in the back by a friend yet. You haven't been humiliated by your nearest and dearest. You and your friends haven't played the magical game of silent musical chairs where the loser is shut out of the group with no warning and allowed back in (or not) at random. All that weird psychological warfare people play is generally at the infant stage.

I realized all this over the last few weeks because one of my niblings is going through these friendship growing pains. She's the one left behind when friends moved away. She's trying to figure out how someone can be her best friend one day and the next leave her in the dust. She loves and cares for people who don't always care about her. And it all comes flooding back. It's not just because I was a new kid (not that it helped), or because I felt weird. It's because people start carrying around their own baggage and become affected by it. Then add in hormones, which I firmly believe plays a part in weaponizing baggage.

Teenage anything quite frankly.

Our internal struggles, the things we secretly harbor, they truly are more universal than we realize in our youth. It's perhaps one of the blessings of aging. Wisdom. Distance. Understanding. Perspective. Just about anything you think only happens to you happens to other people, too.

I may never have friends like I did when I was 12, but (and this is the part I get now) who does? While that 12 year old idealist who couldn't understand how adults compromised their standards, how anyone could ever be 'tired' from life, who thought 30 was so old *shudders* still resides within me, I'm not her anymore. And that means, I've grown. I've learned. I've experienced. I've made mistakes. I've triumphed.

The people I click with now? They've all grown and learned and experienced and made mistakes and triumphed. They're weird. They've felt isolated. They laugh at horrible, macabre things and want to fight injustice. They're storytellers and anti-bullshit. That's not to say the friends of my youth are lacking anything. We just don't know each other in that way anymore. When I think of them, I think of the little girls I played Nintendo at sleepovers with, regardless of having seen them since we've become adults.

So here's to the friendships over a lifetime: the ones that made youth feel endless, the ones that carried us through the growing pains, the ones that taught us valuable lessons, the unexpected ones and the ones you can finally appreciate from the word go.