The Friendship Dragon

Ask the people closest to me and they will tell you that I am good at making friends.

I consider myself a friendship dragon; I hoard my treasures, I hold on to them. I catalogue each one in my heart and I am loathe to let them go.

Which makes the ones I have lost all the more painful. 

I wasn’t always good at making friends, but you’d be forgiven for not noticing that. Everyone I have ever said that to has disagreed with me. 

But it isn’t something that came easily; it is something that I worked hard at.

Being a military brat meant that for the first 7 years of my life, we moved a lot. And if we weren’t moving, our neighbours were. My social community was in constant flux. 

So being friendly was a natural adaptation; learning how to pull people in to my group so they wouldn’t feel left out, gaining the confidence to approach a formed group so I wouldn’t feel left out. That one is much harder.

But as I got older, as friendships became deeper and more intimate, I started to struggle. 

I couldn’t find the natural rhythm of the group; my jokes fell short, or my mouth hadn’t kept up with my brain and they didn’t make sense to anyone else. 

I was around 10 years old when I first clearly remember studying people to work out what I needed to do to fit in; what level of vulnerability did I need to show, what level of strength, how funny did I need to be, how did my intelligence affect my odds.

You would not have known it. 

I was constantly surrounded by friends at school; part of a “crew” in secondary school, had a tight group at college, even at university I was relatively popular within my crowds.

Yet I always felt like an imposter; in studying people and acting accordingly, I presumed they were only my friends because I had fooled them well enough, I had played my part, the consummate actor. 

And, as all imposters do, I studied my failures especially hard. 

It is, in fact, one of my brains favourite ways to torture me. 

To go over the friends I have lost, and try to work out what I did wrong. How I must be a terrible person, an awful friend. 

The friends I was close with at university, that stopped inviting me to join them when they met up post graduation. 

Maybe I wasn’t fun enough, maybe ‘group politics’ were at play and I was judged for being close to others… or maybe it was just a natural separation of the group. 

The people I walked away from to protect my own mental health, only to spend years wondering if I had done the right thing. If I was the villain in their story. If I deserved that title.

The hardest ones to emotionally reconcile are the ones who have drifted away; the ones who were my whole world, until I left their geographical location. 

When you have an argument, or a disagreement, when there is an EVENT that marks the end of a friendship, you can come to terms with it. 

But drifting apart is death by a thousands cuts. 

The attempts to revive the WhatsApp group, checking in, trying to remember important anniversaries. 

The sharp pain of going on instagram to see their stories, their posts - they are together and you weren’t invited. They didn’t even think to include you; why would they, you are hundreds of miles away. 

The slow decline where you start to give up, only to be plagued by thoughts of “am I the problem?”. 

Maybe I didn’t try hard enough.

Maybe I should have visited more.

Maybe I should have said something. 

But feeling unwanted is the worst curse for a friendship dragon, so I curl up around the treasures I do have, none of whom are loved any less to those I have lost.

It is common, as adults, to see commentary about how as we get older our circles get smaller. 

There are a lot of posts I see by people that come across, to an overly sensitive dragon, as judgey - “I would much prefer to have one or two really close friends”. 

Sometimes I feel an embarrassment of riches; who am I to have collected so many incredible people around me, who am I to try to keep them in my world. 

I have friendships from every formative era of my life; from childhood, from my teenage years, from university, from work. 

I have made friends in my mid 30s that I cannot imagine living without, for me the length of our friendship is not the deciding factor of its quality.

It is the depths I seek now; gone is the feeling that I am fooling people into being friends with me. I know that I am a good friend, despite the ones I have lost. 

And I see great people around me, I find them and I witness them. 

Studying people is a habit that you cannot break free of, and now that I no longer need to decipher how to make people like me, I find myself watching for new reasons. 

I find myself noticing their insecurities and loving them all the more for them. 

I find myself glimpsing the depths of their love, like the most brilliant of jewels.

I find myself bearing witness to their brilliance and their foibles, and loving them for the duality, for their humanity. 

A jewels’ uniqueness and character is made through its imperfections; what makes them flawed, makes them valuable. 

Humans are the same, and much like a mythical dragon collecting diamonds and rubies and emeralds, I collect human jewels, I cherish their friendship and I am loathe to let them go.