It took over 20 years for me to learn how to end a friendship. It didn’t matter how toxic the person was, or how badly they treated me, I just wouldn’t give up on them. I couldn’t let go of the good memories and times we had together, which meant I couldn’t stop caring about them. Not letting go of the friendship we used to have, caused me to fool myself into thinking that they’d realize how they were treating me and change. I let them drain me dry. Even now, I’ll still fight for a friendship until it takes everything out of me. I just can’t seem to give up on people.

I know part of this comes from misplaced guilt. I feel like I’m being a bad person or a bad friend if I just end a friendship. This reasoning isn’t healthy because staying in that toxic friendship doesn’t help me, and it just continues the other person’s bad behavior because if they did care, the friendship wouldn’t be toxic to begin with. Despite this logic, it took me way too long to learn how to end a friendship.

I think why I had such a hard time letting people go is because for a big part of my life, I didn’t really know what real friendship was. I knew what I had wasn’t exactly right, but I didn’t know any different. From junior high through part of college, I had what I liked to call the half friendships. The ones where I would always text other people to hang out, but they’d never text me. The ones where we only spent time together if I made the plans. I was only ever used to people hanging out with me when they had no one else. Granted I did have a couple good friends during this time, but we were all so busy with school that we never really had to hand out, which made it hard to be close.

While I have had some friendships end, it wasn’t until recently that I actually figured out how to end them myself. This is actually one of the biggest things my college friends have helped me with. Their being a constant reminder of what real friendship is is what keeps me from going back to people who will only hurt me. They’re a constant reminder that true friendship is loyal. It’s honest. It’s genuine. It’s hilarious. It’s trustworthy. It’s kind. It’s beautiful.

Because of my college friends, I’ve learned that friendship isn’t a constant battle. It’s not ignoring your problems together hoping they’ll go away. It isn’t a game of tug of war seeing which friend will come out on top in the end. It isn’t one person trying harder than the other. It’s not only being there for the other person when things are good and leaving when things are bad.

I’m so thankful to my friends now. Some of them I’ve known my whole life, while others I’ve only been close to for a few months, but I can’t imagine how they’ve only been in my life such a short time, since it feels like they’ve always been there. These people aren’t just like my sisters or my best friends. They are my kindred spirits, and I hope that one day when we’re all old we’ll still be texting each other in our group messages, ranting about things that stress us out, and reminding each other how much we love each other at two in the morning.