New friends. You don't know if you'll keep them. You don't know who they really are. You like them for the version of theirselves that they represent right now. More especially for the version they decide to show you.
Are they consistent? Are they opportunists? Are they psychopaths? Are they loyal? Are they going to stick around or are they going to vanish?
One of the dearest friends I have, wrote me once that up to this point, friends had always been variables in his life. But some just should not be. Apart from being one of the nicest things someone has ever said to me, this quote is meaningful in general, too.
It's true: We change constantly and with our personality changes, friends come and go. We move, we start a new job, we change subjects in University, we go to a different gym or try a new hobby - BAM! So many new friends!
As new people with interesting thoughts and conversations, with great humour or the same taste in shitty 90s music come in our lives, they take up our time and space in our minds. Their problems become important, their worries, their enchantments, their love lives, their everythings. I don't know about you, but I feel like I'm always taking part in people's lives and I do it really fast. I get invested.
For example last night, in the hallway of our neighbour's house I talked to a new friend. His love interest rejected him recently, because "her head is not in the right place" and despite all my (already existing) loyalty, I get it. Nobody is to blame - it's just this unrequited love thing that happens way too often, but does not actually when you look at propabilities.
She is confused, she likes him as a person, she misses to be around him, she's afraid that his friends and house mates don't like her anymore (I get it). So she texts him. And instead of keeping his distance and trying to get over this shit, he comes running to her. He knows that it's shit. We know it's shit. So as a friend (even as a recent one) I felt the urge of keeping him from doing that. From hurting himself even more by not letting go of someone that doesn't like you as much as they do. While doingt that, I realized that I already cared.
I cared so much for a person that I've barely known for a month. I couldn't stand his sadness and his disappointment and his eyes as he told me he can't help but doing it although he knows it's not good to do it.
Participation, sharing and being invested in someone's life are precious features of a friendship. Although they can weigh you down. As your friend shares a problem or a worry, a sad story with you, you can't ignore it, it affects you, makes you a witness, a confidant. Not that every worry they share with you is how to bury a body, but some things are not easy to process for you. Friendships sometimes get mistaken for therapy, people might tell you things that aren't harmless - there has to be a line.
Another problem is that some people mistake you not only for therapists or problem-solvers but also for a rubbish tip where they can dump all their shit so that they don't need to process it themselves. If you feel like you're becoming this kind of pain relief for them that is unhealthy for both of you, try to make it stop.
Some friends are just slowly pushed off screen by others, because you have only limited time and capacities to keep in touch with everyone.
And all my friends have gone to find another place to let their hearts collide. Just promise me you'll never leave again. - Ed Sheeran
Others, like the ones that use you as a dumping place for anything, you should actively push off screen yourself. In the movie that is your life, in which you are the protagonist, there shouldn't be people treating you like that. Remember that! (getting all self-help-book-life-advice-ish over here)
Some people may say I care too much, I get too invested - but what would life and friendships be without that? If everyone only cares about themselves (we all are narcissist assholes in a way) where do we get? We already live in a world that is cruel and egoistic, where human nature is too often seen in a pessimist way: "it's a dog eat dog life". (Learned that saying from a not so good movie I saw recently).
We don't need friendships to just mirror ourselves and confirm how good we are, to support our egos and sometimes dump or worries-
We need friendships to develop our identities, to share our thoughts, our feelings, our lives with others, making small moments and achievements and feelings meaningful.
I get the unsettling feeling of not being able to keep all the people around that I really like to have around. Not only in the obvious literal way, me being in Wales at the moment and them all over the place (Freiburg, Paris, Tessaloniki, Hamburg, Halle, Tübingen, Potsdam, Heidelberg, Erlangen, Edinburgh, Konstanz...), but also in a sense that I might lose them because other things become more important and we're slowly drifting apart, even virtually.
What still makes me hopeful for the future is on the one hand, the endless possibilities of meeting best friends that I haven't met yet. On the other hand, what my aunt said on her 50th birthday last year when she explained how she knew all the people that were there at the party - It was like a puzzle, a mosaic of people that were once or still are important in her life, she told us about how she got to know them and how she lost and found them again.
Someone recently said to me that he does not believe in randomness, he rather believes in patterns. So if this one pattern makes me meet a person, maybe it makes me find them again when we lost each other? I put the question mark there because I don't know if this is possible. I lost friends, that's true - But by now I never managed to become friends with them again.
Making new friends can be tough (I'm trying really hard at the moment, you know), but at the same time, like I said in the beginning, it can also be very easy. You can define yourself differently, be a different version of yourself and they'll still like you for who you are or show them to be. But I think if you're always choosing new friends over old friends because you're changing that might not be the best idea. The friends that have stuck around for a longer time, they really know who you were, where you have gone wrong, how you changed, and maybe even who you want to be later. Do not dispense of these people. You need them. As a mirror. Not a mirror that always reflects how cool you are, but a mirror to show you the real you, that is not always funny and beautiful and stunning and creative. It's sometimes mean, ugly, desperately sad, hopeless, an asshole, an arrogant prick, a stupid irrational depressive person. They see who you really are. They know you - and they decided to stay. You know them. You both committed. That is something special and the trust and work you put into this relationship pays off. You sometimes have to let your friends go, but don't let them go easily.
So what about me? I let my new friends feed me with cheese cake and try not to put their faces on the internet (too much) without their knowledge. All the pictures you saw are potential new friends. Will they stay around? God knows.
PS: The hat is back.
