Relationships. Everyone in the world can relate because almost everyone, unless you are a hermit or a cat lady, encounters some form of a relationship in every day life. Of course there are different kinds of relationships. The relationships of the marital kind, relationships you build with your co-workers, the one with the local Starbucks drive through… but one relationship I find myself consistently in arms about is that relationship which we label friendships. Friends in my 30’s has me feeling all the feels since I turned 30 a month ago. I successfully (for the most part) survived my 20s. In my twenties I had many friends who in some ways made me invincible. Even though I had children, I always had a posse to hold my hair when I did too many shots of whiskey at the Summit or to bring me four bottles of wine after a shit day. My friends were like my other family, which came to Thanksgiving and knew my momma. But coming into my thirties I realized that my whole damn life is changing. I have started this journey to a new and better career. I have decided to move and start worrying about the future. So in this time of scary uncertainty at least I have all of my friends, my posse……until I realized that I don’t anymore.
Finding friends when you are younger is so simple. You like the same Furby so now you swear your life to the next 8 year old to borrow your LipSmacker. You become “lifelong” friends with every person that you hug at the bar when you have forgotten all your morals and standards. For most people, its easier to be a friend and maintain friendships when you don’t have to do the “real” adult things and with the help of our friends Jim, Jack and Johnny. But once you are thirty… you realize that you have to actually grow up. This isn’t Neverland. Your friends are getting married, they are having babies, they are moving across the country. And then it sets in that friendships just don’t mean what they used to. And maybe that is not as devastating as it sounds.
Once you start to have crazy things called priorities and standards, you start to discover a lot about yourself. You start to really invest in yourself and the type of life that you are going to have. This is a key right of passage of your adult life. This is an opportunity to really direct your story and cut the people in your life that do not benefit your future goals and that no longer emotionally serve you. That neighbor that you have been friends with since your childhood? It is okay to say goodbye. Because growing up is ultimately never ending change. Most change comes with a little bit of heartache. Sitting on your bed talking about trivial things like what outfit to wear to the Los Lonely Boys concert and gossiping about who is dating who just falls out of focus. We have real problems now. Huge life altering events like marriage and divorce, kids, job opportunities, and a long list of other things that set you apart from everyone that you have ever known. Chances are that these challenges are not things that you have in common with those people anymore. You now have less interests in common, less reasons to make time for them in your schedule between five children, work and night classes.
The most important lesson from this epiphany is to be cautious going into your thirties. Discover who is a true friend to you and who is just co-dependent. Don’t be upset that you have made time for someone you thought was your friend and they did not reciprocate. Chalk it up to experience. Chances are if you stop making the effort, so will they. And thats okay. Think of this as your quarter life purge. Giving up people who no longer make you happy, but who are solely a familiar convenience to you. Utilize all of that extra energy and time by making yourself a more confident, luminous and happy woman (or man). Someone free from the baggage of dead end “friendships” that physically and emotionally have drained you.
Insulin On Tap 