Life Lessons | This Happened To Me
How To Be a Good Friend
What I’ve learned as an adult about friendship
This week, I stumbled on old photos from my times at various summer camps in my teens, and as I went through them, I found myself feeling something unexpected. I kept looking at the faces of all of these girls I’d met years ago and thinking, “She was probably pretty cool. I wish I’d known enough to become friends with her.”
Let me preface all of this by saying that I came into potential friendships with a bit of baggage. I had a strange relationship with my mother that left me feeling like girls weren’t totally “safe,” and on top of that, my mother never failed to remind me that preteen and teen girls are “the worst.” I generally expected girls not to like me.
What this meant in a practical sense was that friends had to come to me. They had to do the initial work because I both didn’t know how and was afraid to try. I’m sure no one likes rejection, but I really couldn’t handle it, especially not from girls and women. And so I found myself as friends only with the people who seemed to innately know these secrets of friendship that I am just now becoming conscious of as a woman approaching thirty.
