Ending Friendships

My whole life I never really ended friendships before. In elementary school I switched to a new school and just lost contact with my friends. In junior high and high school I didn't really stop being friends with people, I just made new friends that I was closer with. For me, best friends slowly drift to just acquaintances. I'm still Facebook friends with my best friends in elementary school and I like my acquaintance friends pictures on Instagram. There's never been a huge fight and ill words spoken. We just slowly stopped talking and hanging out as much.

Last year, as I was graduating high school, I started wondering how you end friendships as adults. Are adults smarter and more capable of completely cutting ties with high school friends because they're in college now? Or college adults can cut ties with friends because they're off in the real world working real grown up jobs and starting families? I knew as I got older the friends I'd had wouldn't be my friends anymore, I just thought I'd have a lot more time.

As you might have read in other blog posts, I love college and I love my sorority. Two of the best life decisions I've ever made. I'm thriving in college. I have new people in my life that I just connect with and continue to grow with. College also made my friendships with some of my old friends stronger. One of my best friends went to the same school as me where we made sure to have classes together and stay connected. My other friend moved to a school six hours away, but I think that made us closer. We made sure to make the time to talk on the phone and try to visit. I realized our friendship was so solid that we didn't need to be with each other all the time.

Recently, and by recently I mean this whole summer I debated if one of my other friendships needed to come to an end. It started with small things like not wanting to hangout with them. Because when we did hang out, we didn't talk about anything. Our conversations once were filled with laughter and inside jokes, stories of our weeks and so on, but were now just silence. I was scared if I left this friend, they'd feel totally alone and abandoned. Sometimes in our friendship I felt like I was the only thing stopping them from falling apart.

Don't be friends with people you don't want to be friends with. It's not fair to you or them to stick around out of fear or guilt. It's just not worth it. I think some things aren't meant to be fixed and people come and go through your life all the time. This person did change my life for the better and I think we both made each other better people at one point, but we stopped doing that. Surround yourself with people that make you smile, that you can talk to about anything and everything. We change all the time. I know I'm such a different person than over seven years ago when I met this friend. And I'll be someone else another seven years from now and I'll have new people in my life.

So old friend of mine, if you find yourself reading this post, I hope you are doing well. There’s days where grief just hits me and I miss you like crazy. There’s times where I’m scared to run into you, because seeing you makes all this even harder. But I care about you and love you, and that’s why we aren’t friends anymore.