For all of elementary, and most of middle school, I lived in a bubble. It wasn’t so much a bubble forced on me by others, with the goal to shield me from the horrors of the world, but a bubble I was born into and had only just become aware of. I could maneuver in this bubble fine. I could eat and sleep and study, but when it came to making friends, the walls of this bubble seemed to grow thicker and eradicate any chance of connection.
Not to say that I didn’t have friends growing up–I was always an outgoing kid, who at the slightest feeling of boredom would strike up a conversation with the person next to me (whether this was genuine extraversion or undiagnosed ADHD, I couldn’t tell you).
I always had someone to sit with at lunch or invite to birthday parties, yet all of these friendships seemed to lack a genuine connection. I never felt truly comfortable interacting with my so-called friends; every word said was a performance, a desperate attempt at fitting in.
Then, in third grade, I made my first true friend; she was someone I didn’t have to hide my interests from or pretend to be someone I wasn’t around. My days of wishing on stars and eyelashes were over; my fear that I would never be able to make friends without hiding integral parts of myself was proven wrong.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people overlook platonic love in favor of romantic love; it’s easy when you’ve never remembered a time where you didn’t have someone to love platonically. But, in my opinion, I think platonic love is as all-consuming and soul crushing, even more so, than romantic love; at least, I sure felt like it was in that friendship.
To put it simply, she was everything to me; she was my best friend in the entire world and the first school friend I planned to spend my adult life knowing. Nowadays, I can confidently affirm how important she was to me, but that’s only because I was forced to learn what life without her was like.
After Christmas break, she stopped showing up to school. I had no way of contacting or reaching out to her, I was just left to reconcile with the fact that my best friend had vanished into thin air (I found out years later that she had just moved states, but the hurt was still there). To say that I was heartbroken was an understatement; I mourned her as genuinely as a nine-year-old could.
I’m sure I’m making it seem more dramatic than it actually was, but to me it felt like my entire world was crashing down. After years of loneliness, I finally found someone who made me feel like I belonged, only for all of it to fall through.
This was my first introduction to what I consider the most difficult part of growing up: the cycle of losing and gaining friends.
Maybe it’s because of my irrational fear of change or my inability of not being in control, but the realization that relationships are fleeting terrified me to my core.
So, as a result, I decided that the best way to go about life was to treat any kind of friendship like I was a stray dog being reintegrated into domesticity–always on edge, overly attentive to any slight indication of abandonment. It was my way of making sure I didn’t get hurt before anyone could even think of the opportunity.
I was so focused on the possibility that the friendship could turn sour or disintegrate that I never even gave myself the chance of connection; I voluntarily thickened the walls of the bubble I spent so many years trying to break free from.
There’s a novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupery called “The Little Prince,” and within it is one of my favorite quotes of all time,“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.”
Despite being from a children’s book written in 1943, this line changed my entire worldview on relationships. The very essence of connection is a type of vulnerability; you’re letting another person into your heart with no control over what they might do or how it might end. Still, it’s the most integral risk any one person can take.
Relationships are so important not because of their eventual endings, but because of the love and joy that result from it. If relationships never ended, no one would ever truly appreciate the time that the relationship lasted.
Relationships are hard, considering that you’re surrendering yourself to someone without being able to know if it’ll be worth it in the end. In the grand scheme of things, it’s the most necessary part of life; the privilege of knowing and loving someone is more worthwhile than any possible hurt that could result from doing so.