Friends are amazing. This is especially true when you can't be near your family, or when your family let's you down.

Friends can lift you up. When you're having a bad day, a good friend listens to you and empathizes with you. They remind you of hope for the future, and give you a shoulder to cry on.

Friends can keep secrets. All of us have secrets, and some of them become so intense that they start to tear us up on the inside. Even telling just one trustworthy friend can help make a secret more manageable until you're ready to deal with it.

Friends can make you laugh. I feel like if you have an inside joke with someone, you're automatically friends. If laughter is the best medicine, friends are the best doctors.

Friends make you feel important and valued. We rely on our friends, but they rely on us too. The idea that these cool people would just hang out with us of their own volition blows our minds sometimes. We mean something to other people? What??

But friends can hurt you.

Sometimes they don't realize it. Sometimes it's a burn that hits just a little too close to home. Or it's a side comment that makes our insecurities come rushing back.

Sometimes they just don't care. We're all broken, and sometimes our friends lash out at us. Sometimes they hurt so bad inside themselves that they have no choice but to hurt us.

We all know that heartbreaking moment when our friends decide they like someone more than us. It's not always that we've become worse. Sometimes they just find someone they click with more.

So should we even make friends? Sure there are good things, but the threat of the bad is ever looming. What if we were to just live in isolation, shutting out everyone from our “personal” life? No chance of hurt; no chance of betrayal.

I think about this a lot. I love my friends. I truly do. But I also worry like no one's business and try to build up walls where there is even a slightest hint of a threat. But I read a jarring quote recently.

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable…” -C.S. Lewis

Some consider love and friendship to be separate things, but that's not always the case. It is true that friends let us down sometimes. But I think in the end, we could not live and thrive without their support.