A friend in need…

So, it all star­ted on Friday, I think, a con­ver­sa­tion with Daniel-of-the-West­ern-Shores (as opposed to subtle_eye) about friend­ship and where we stood in each oth­er’s lives. We expan­ded on that on Sat­urday morn­ing as I walked from brunch in Surry Hills with hyper­people to New­town, hoping to catch agwat…

Then I ended up rehash­ing it with xammy in the after­noon and have just had vari­ous remind­ers of it tonight…

Friend­ship is one of those dif­fi­cult things, a pre­cari­ous bal­ance of needs and care and love and harsh­ness-for-one’s-own-good. I want the sort of friend­ships where phone calls in the middle of the night are okay if there’s a need for it and I’ve been the person on both ends of that phone call. I have some incred­ible friends, some people I value intensely for vari­ous reas­ons. I value dai­syn­erd and sleazemon­key so very highly because they tell me I’m awe­some when I need to hear it and they tell me to pull my head in when I’m over­do­ing things, without insult­ing me or belittling me. 

I have a ton of acquaint­ances and a fist­ful of good friends. I’m incred­ibly lucky for that and I some­times forget it. I get incred­ibly busy. I’m head­ing into one of those times now. But I will drop everything when a friend ser­i­ously needs me, as a couple have tonight.

So, this ques­tion of wel­com­ing new friends into my life is intense. Shar­ing a friend­ship means shar­ing someone’s pain too. I have, in the past, eased my way out of people’s lives and they out of mine, due to lack of time or – let’s be honest – interest. 

I’m find­ing friend­ships change as I get older. Not just the friend­ships them­selves, the ones that have lasted, but what I want out of new friend­ships. And this, to some extent, was what Daniel and Max and I have been talk­ing about. How the idea of the peer group has shif­ted; how our ideas of mould­ing ourselves to fit others’ needs have shif­ted; how we move to build our own com­munit­ies around us and how we start to glance around and see these new and old con­nec­tions, strengthened in their ways and start to smile at the resi­li­ence of these links we have forged.

Often these friend­ships are not the ones I expec­ted to last. Or they are new and del­ic­ate and I worry whether I can lean on them in par­tic­u­lar ways. And I do mourn the losses of friend­ships I thought would last that didn’t, ones I sab­ot­aged unin­ten­tion­ally or which fell by the way­side through no fault of mine (a photo razorgirl_au showed me tonight of “Fodge” at Ruth and Dav­id’s wed­ding rein­forced that one tonight; I am so glad I spoke to him there and recon­ciled that).

I’m leav­ing this fairly per­sonal post public so that Daniel N. can see it (hurry up and get an LJ, boy! How can you be my new friend if I can’t add you to my LJ friends list?) but also to say pub­licly to my new and old friends: thank you. You mean the world to me.

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return”