FRIENDS

As a kid, I always found it hard to make close friends. Focus on the word “close” here. Two people were close to me but our friendship was born out of sorrow and sadness rather than naturally forming from mutual interests. I was not able to be completely open with them about what I felt since I thought there was no way they could help me with it. To be very frank, most of the time I spent with them at that time was complaining about our lives and empathizing with each other, or just talking about the “dramas’ that kept happening all around us which we thought we were not a part of. At the time we were “Yes men” to each other and usually agreed on things that were wrong looking back. That was what I thought peak friendship was. 

There were others but I couldn’t be myself with them, I was always judged and criticized for what I was interested in. I was happy to keep many of my interests and emotions to myself and thought that it was just the plain reality of my life. This mindset never made me wish to have more friends or better friends. There was never any sort of jealousy against people who had more friends. I always blamed myself for not being able to make close friends with me thinking that there was just something wrong with me.

After my 10th grade, I was fortunate enough to go to Singapore to study and reinvent myself from scratch in a different environment with different people. I spent 3 years there studying and meeting different people. Initially, it was hard to fit in with the people there but it was much easier to get comfortable around them than with the people around me in India. When I started my degree, I naturally formed bonds with some of my classmates. In the start, I looked at them just as some people I would have to interact with until my degree ends. Unknowingly over time, we started getting closer to each other and forming bonds over a bunch of things. At the time, I still never felt anything about it but once I graduated and came back to India, things changed drastically.

“You never realize the value of something until it’s gone, hence why you should always appreciate the little things in life.”

The statement above hit me hard when I came back in all aspects of my life. I had never felt so sad and empty. I couldn’t understand why this was the case. Luckily, we were still talking but I used to be quite busy with my work at the time. To be honest, it was scary to be alone with my thoughts and I wasn’t ready to accept that I wouldn’t be meeting them anytime soon. This is when the realization hit me that those people had become close to me. 

The people closest to me were out of my reach, it was scary to think about losing them. I remember crying and breaking down with them. This was the first time I had people so close to me other than my family and I understood the value of having such good relationships. I became more and more desperate to go back to Singapore where I gained my confidence, work, and even friends. I remember spending so much of my time applying to jobs in Singapore just to get back. It was very stressful and gave me a lot of anxiety. My mood used to be cranky which would affect the people around me. At a point, it started affecting my existing work performance which made me angry at myself. I wanted to give my best to what I did but I was not doing that. Because finding a job was not working, I thought of doing a master’s just to get back to Singapore. That would affect my career in ways I couldn’t imagine. 

That time I just had a few questions about how “friendships” work. The image above shows the start of the message I sent at the time. It was a long conversation where I was understanding how I should deal with the fear of losing them. That is when one of them said “Don’t worry about your friends here”. A simple line but it affected me and changed my perspective. We ended up talking about friendship and one of my biggest questions was “Is it even worth keeping a friendship if it is going to break someday?”. The answer I got was that it was worth keeping those friendships because you form memories that stay even if the friendship might end. That was a hard pill to swallow. I wasn’t ready to accept that fact but it was nice to get an answer. Slowly but surely I calmed down and accepted that. Since then, I have learned to appreciate any time that I spent with them and am glad that I met them.