My introduction

 

My friends are all leaving... 

The time has come. As we have established by now; I am in my early twenties. I'm at the point in my life where my friends are moving away and it is SCARY! Some go traveling, some go live in another country and some go elsewhere. It's hard and I feel selfish but it's inevitable. 

I have friends that I still speak to from when I was 10 years old. In 2020 when I was 16 I started attending a higher level of education school which is very common where I'm from. After 3 years you graduate from this school. So for 3 years, I made even more friends. I saw friends come and go. Most for the better, some for the worse. But ultimately I graduated in 2023 with many great friends that are my closest friends today. 

During school, it was easy to talk to each other. We all related to each other in a way that's hard to replicate in an adult friendship. We all pretty much had the same everyday experience, knew the same people, and lived in the same area. We naturally talked every day and our conversations felt easy and instinctive. In many ways, I took school for granted. I can only imagine now as a 20-year-old who is taking a few gap years, getting to go to a place filled with all my friends at the same time. Getting to eat lunch with them every day, knowing all the same people, and sharing memories together every single day. It is something I would love to experience again. Most likely I will go to uni and experience this again but as of right now, it feels like a pastime.  

Having to make plans with my friends now, can sometimes feel like a chore. There's this friendship to nurture and there's that friendship to nurture. It feels like an effort whereas in school it came more naturally. Don't get me wrong I love my friends... but sometimes I'm out of the routine of seeing them and it makes it harder for me to bounce back and fall into place. Developing and working on yourself apart from your friends is healthy and can lead you to grow and change and sometimes this can make you reminiscent of a stranger to your friends because you're not all moving at the same pace. I have experienced feeling like my friends are holding me back. Like I cannot possibly grow because they won't let me. Because we no longer share the same everyday life we don't necessarily know which experiences we experience in our day-to-day life that lead us to develop. And I'm not saying all my friendships are like this, in fact only a very small handful are like this but it really gets me thinking about how sad it can be to only see each other a few times a month when you have been used to seeing each other 5 days a week. 

For just over a year now I have been getting used to not being in school and having to put in the effort to remain friends with the people I want to remain friends with in my adult life. It took me just about a year to fully adjust to this and it's only truly within the past two or three months that I've gotten good at it. I've gotten good at reaching out to my friends and putting in the effort. I've gotten good at becoming creative with the types of plans I make with my friends and most importantly (for myself mostly) I have gotten out of the mindset that I should be nonchalant and not put in effort to reach out. For a year I've been really bad at this because it has been what I have been used to. Not making the effort. But finally, now I feel like I have (close to) mastered this and I am no longer afraid to put in the effort and reach out. At some point, I would like to write about the whole one-sided friendship issue because that is something I feel like I could write a thing or two about. 

During my first gap year, I didn't really have a steady and well-scheduled job so sometimes I would work Saturdays and the next 4 days in a row, and then I would have no work for 6 days. This did not work well for me. I was very lonely and bored on the days when I would be home but all my friends would be at work (or away somewhere) and I would become almost unhealthily dependent on my short meetings with friends. The one-or-two hour-long meetings would be the highlight of my day because I hadn't spent the day doing anything, and it would inevitably really affect me when I could tell that I wasn't the main event of their day. If a friend canceled on me I would panic. Another day with absolutely zero plans I would think to myself. Now I have a job where I work Monday through Friday which gives me stability and a life outside of my friendships. people often talk about having a life outside of your work life but it's also very important to have a life and to be occupied outside of your social life. Now I see various friends roughly 3-4 times a week and I love it. I feel balanced. 

At this time when I am becoming good at reaching out and nurturing my friendships, my friends have started moving away. During my first gap year, I had friends that went interrailing for a few weeks which I hardly struggled with. I also had friends that wen't travelling for two months which I thought was a long time. I missed them during that time and I obviously did not have that exact friendship with anyone else so I definitely felt their absence. A friend of mine who I have fairly recently become very close to even moved to Australia for like 8 months. At the time though I wasn't very close with her so I must admit that it didn't have a huge impact on me. 

Now that same friend is leaving to go live in France for an undisclosed amount of time. And this time it feels really tough. Not only do I have one less friend to reach out to but I am also going to miss our unique friendship. I'm always scared that one of us will lose interest in the friendship since we will have been apart for so long. At this point in time, I don't think we will but the fear is always there. She and our other friend left for France today. Next week another of my friends will leave for a month (which is not the worst amount of time but still) and slowly for the next 2 months just around half of my friends will have left to go traveling or living abroad. This terrifies me so much. I am scared that I will fall back into that lonely mindset, especially as winter approaches. 

I don't really have much else to say (which is probably good cause this is already long) as I haven't truly or fully experienced all my friends leaving just yet because it is happening slowly within the next two months. I will write about this experience again when I feel like I have something to add to it. 

For now, all I know is: 

Friendships in your twenties are haaaard!