Forever Friends

So this is a widely known fact about me. I love people. I pretend that I hate them but really I love them. Which is probably why I can be so awkward. I'm just really excited to meet everyone and be friends with them. Like a puppy. I'm an extremely open person and I genuinely enjoy spending time with people and forming close bonds with them. I think where I have boundary issues is that I decide that I am going to be friends with them almost immediately after meeting them. And I decide that we are going to be friends forever.

For example, on my first day of staff training at camp this year, I met a bunch of people. Then I proceeded to invite all of them to stay with me in NYC after camp was over. Even though I had met them maybe an hour before that. I had decided that we were going to be forever friends. I'm only writing this example because that mostly came true. I had a ton of people staying with me in the city when camp ended, which was awesome. But sometimes my decision to be forever friends with everyone I meet doesn't end that way.

I first learned this in high school. In the town I grew up in there are three middle schools and they all feed into one high school. The middle school that I went to was really small and by eighth grade we were all pretty good friends. Almost immediately after going to high school, what I had thought was my tightly knit crew of weirdos disintegrated. I don't think I noticed it too much because I was making my own new friends and falling in with my people, which is what we were all doing I guess. But it was definitely weird to see these people whom I had thought I knew so well change so drastically in such a short amount of time.

Fast-forward to college. I think within the first month of college I stopped talking to half of the people I considered to be good friends in high school. And within the first two years of college, I could count the high school people I remained in touch with on one hand. I've now been to three different colleges and made friends at each place but as the years have gone by that multitude of friends has dwindled down to maybe two or three from each chapter of life.

That isn't a bad thing though. I look back on people that I have fallen out with or just lost touch with and sometimes I think about what they are up to right now. But mostly I focus on the people in front of me. The people that I have remained in touch with and kept in my life are in my life for a reason. Theres a mutual sort of caring between us, and its hard in the busy lives that we all live to stay in touch with people that you don't consciously care about. I do get disappointed sometimes because I love forever friends and I try to make everyone I meet fit into that category. But the fact is they don't and that's all right. It's ok to have ten friends. It's ok to have two friends. As long as they are people that want you to be in their lives as much as you want them to be in yours. And as long as they make you happy. Because that's the most important.