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From The Girl Who Is Terrible At Keeping Friends

I'm finally OK with it.

4
From The Girl Who Is Terrible At Keeping Friends
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"This is so-and-so, we've been friends since we were in diapers."

It's a phrase I'm sure all of us have heard.

Social media sites will have group selfies with the caption "Still friends after all these years" or #TransformationTuesday with the same group in kindergarten and then as high schoolers or as college students reuniting. Sometimes you even see some friendships blossom long into adulthood.

I guess it is possible to find one group of people you instantly connect with, and maybe it is possible to keep that connection for the rest of your lives. Maybe it is possible to keep the same best friend from preschool all the way until death.

I am not one of those girls. I can't remember a single time in my life, at least past elementary school, where I had the same group of friends from year to year. I definitely haven't had one definite best friend through it all. I don't know if it was personal insecurities, a change in personality or another reason, but it always seemed that I drifted to a new group of friends at the beginning of every school year.

Most of the time, I would stop talking to people from an old group completely, maybe with the occasional "hello how are you what have you been up to" with one or two of them. There have been a couple instances where I've remained close with a member of a particular friend group - and I am beyond grateful for those friendships.

I used to get jealous when I saw posts about forever friendships online. I used to wonder what was wrong with me and why I couldn't figure out how to keep the same friends for over a year. Freshman year I left my middle school clique and tried hanging out with older kids. The following year, they had graduated so I spent my lunch hour hanging out with the cross country team (which I was a member of). Junior year I settled in with a group of younger band kids (in which I was also a member). I was able to retain most of these friends going into senior year, but I also spent more of my time with newer cross members and slowly left my old band crew.

Was I boring people? Was I too dramatic? Did I get bored? These were all questions I asked myself when I actually sat back and analyzed all the friend groups I had been a part of during my first eighteen years of life.

But then I started college. That's when I learned that some of those people were only my friends because they saw me five days a week. Four years later, I barely talk to any of them except for a select few. And every year I've been in college, I've found myself spending a majority of my time with a different group of friends than in the previous year. Although now the reasons are easier to pinpoint: Different living arrangements, different jobs, different relationships. Sometimes I stop communicating with someone for various reasons. And even though friend circles and circumstances keep changing, I have found that as I'm getting older it is easier to retain old friendships even as I branch out and form new ones than back when I was in high school.

And that is why I am no longer envious when I see people boasting about their long-lasting friendships. I've discovered that even if I'm bad at keeping in touch with old friends, I'm really great at making new ones. And because of sites such as Facebook, I don't ever have to completely lose touch with anyone that I was once close to. I can stay up-to-date on their fast-changing lives and they can keep up with mine.

I'm almost finished with college, and who knows which of the friends I have in this moment will stay my good friends once I'm done. Even if none of them do, at least I know I won't have to worry about finding a new circle.

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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