I’ve noticed recently that I am the oldest among my friend groups, and that’s okay. I have three best friends. Mara and Jess are two years younger than me and Kat is a least a year or two younger than me. Craig (my boyfriend) is approximately 2 years, 9 months and 1 day younger than me. I am also in an Odyssey related group chat with two girls that are four years younger than me and one of them is 9 years younger at least if not more. I’ve had older friends, but they’ve come and gone. One of them I still talk to a lot, but he lives in a different state, so other than Facebook it’s hard to talk with him. But I used to exclusively have friends that were my age or older, but now that I’ve gotten older this has changed. I feel like having older friends never worked out because I was meant to have younger friends. I’ve grown to accept it and like it a lot.

I feel like I’m more relatable and more prone to give advice. But yet, it makes me tend to bottle up my problems because they’re “too young” to understand, which is not necessarily true. All of these girls (and boy) has had different life experiences that as a 26 year old that I didn’t have because life has just changed so much. I have had a lot of life experience, and I’m like an open book to where I love sharing it with people. I just have a lot of feelings and opinions that I want to share with the world. Some of the immature, petty drama that they go through does make me roll my eyes, but then again, I was a little petty drama queen as well. I’ve grown a lot, but I still have my breakdown moments.

I was lucky to have some of the older adult friends I had in high school/college with my youth pastor’s wives and my church families. They taught me a lot about life at a young age, and I’ll never forget it. I also have the greatest pleasure of having family members, in particular my cousins that are older than me. They have helped shape who I am and have been the greatest friends to me. Even my sister, who is a minute younger than me, constantly shows her wisdom to me and tells me what I need to hear when I need to hear it.

On the other hand, I do get to be the baby at work, which is nice. I’ve had workplaces where it was not so nice. I worked somewhere where my former co-workers would make fun of me for being the office baby and make jokes about still living with my parents. I’m so relieved that at the places I work with now I don’t feel so much like a baby. They don’t question about why I’m not married and why I don’t have kids. They make me feel quite at home, and I’m so happy to have such great co-workers who appreciate who I am.

Having younger friends benefits me, and I treat them as if they are my age. I don’t judge them because that’s not the kind of person I am. Sometimes I feel old, and other times they out-age me. That’s the beauty of friendship; age doesn’t define friendship.