Thursday, May 19, 2016

Friends.


I'm one of those quality over quantity types. I have 4-5 really close friends. Recently, being an adult and trying to be a functional human being has made being a friend kind of hard. 

"But Jasmine," Jasmine from a year ago scoffs, "Being a friend isn't hard! What are you talking about?"

Well, past Jasmine, you are naive and idealistic. And have an inordinate amount of free time. 


This past year, one of my best friends moved to Colorado to spend a year working with underprivileged kids in Denver through AmeriCorps. My other best friend got a job working in a coffee shop in the hopes of one day opening her own. And our other best friend got a second job with plans of moving out and getting a new (and greatly needed) car. And while we all dealt with distance during college and handled it fine, I've discovered that it apparently isn't physical distance that makes friendship - or at least mine - difficult. 

It's really easy to make your relationships a priority in your head. There's a movie coming out we all want to see. There's a night we are all free and we should get dinner. They'll be in town for a weekend and want to get brunch. But it is so much harder to actually do all those things. Hard to motivate yourself when you're tired. Hard to motivate yourself to travel the 45 minutes to an hour when you commute that long for work and you get a day off. Hard to change your plans to accommodate their visit.


And it seems so weird, right? Because I appreciate and treasure my friendships more than a lot of things in my life. And it seems like it would be intuitive to just make them a priority. But trying to navigate multiple people with incredibly busy schedules is hard. And lately, I've been taking the easy route and just settling for the easy way out.

I don't feel like a bad friend. I don't feel like a bad person. But I do feel frustrated. At myself. And my friends. I'm frustrated that it's not high school anymore, or even college, when it just seemed so easy. But I guess that's why people don't usually have a thousand close friends. Because it is hard. And like most things in my life, I need to work on it. Because, like most things in my life, not many things have been hard for me.


I've always been the friend that you can text after 6 months of no contact whatsoever and have nothing be different. But just because it can be that way doesn't mean that I shouldn't strive to change that. Doesn't mean that I shouldn't try being the one who does the texting instead of the responding.

Friendships are easy. Friendships are, apparently, hard. And they are important. The ones I have are so important I felt the need to just get my thoughts out and write this post. And they're worth it, because I can't imagine the person I'd be, or the person I'll become, without them. 

Because who wouldn't want to be friends with this picture of classiness and poise.

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