Hello lovely humans,

This is the first post on “My thoughts” that I’d like to introduce to Life of Lia, as someone who thinks a lot about everything I sometimes (very often) get clouded with thoughts that are clawing to be let out into the world. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of this sooner, but my blog is a wonderful place to document these random thoughts and whatnot, so I’m going to take different topics every few weeks and unpick what they mean to me. Within these posts you might find something useful and thought-provoking, you also might think “what planet is she on?”, you’ll have to let me know.

Friendship

If you search the internet for the definition of friendship you get many ambiguous meanings which offer no help, one example I found was “a relationship between two or more people”, and from a young age the word friendship is thrown around all the time that as young children you think everyone is your friend. I think to some extent that is the case, I don’t remember having issues with people in primary school (minus the one girl who banged my head against some big gates one lunchtime, she was a delight) and maybe that’s why I look back on primary school days with such fondness. Obviously, I don’t speak for everyone’s experience, but I think of my days in primary school as the best out of my school experience, the work wasn’t too difficult, golden time symbolised the weekend, and everyone got along with everyone. Maybe that wasn’t the case all the time, but arguments were often fixed within the lunch break and then you were best friends again.

It’s currently the middle of September and all the memories coming up on my social media are from 9 years ago when I had just started secondary school and this is particularly baffling me because I was tagging people who I had known for probably two weeks as being my “MVB” (unfortunately this was a cool way of saying my very best, even cooler if you use it alongside BFFL – best friend for life), and I’m looking at it now and thinking “Lia, you barely knew these people?”. Ironically, I don’t think many of these friendships made it to the end of year 7 but my innocence and naivety astound me. This makes me question when I lost that innocence and when I decided that it took time to establish a friendship instead of just looking at someone and deciding they were going to be your best friend. There’s a stark difference between the nature of primary school and secondary school and that is bitchiness, I feel like hormones probably come into play there but I’m not sure when it stops being an issue.

Within secondary school I found that friendship circles change so much and looking back I often think “well how did I go from being friends with them and then the week after friends with them who didn’t like them?” and it’s so weird, I think at that age you’re so concerned with being “liked” and having as many friends as possible, even though half the time they weren’t really friends and were just people you saw everyday because you were in the same classes. It’s easy to fall into the bitchiness cycle, and unfortunately I sometimes find myself falling back into it and then I have some sudden realisation and think, “this isn’t the type of person I am”, and maybe that’s because I’m probably easily influenced and go along with a lot because I’m terrible at standing up for myself and voicing my own opinions in those situations. Since all these thoughts have been dwelling in my head, I’ve once again decided to work on not going along with other people’s views of others, in some hope of praise and instead focus on the type of person and friend I’d like to be.

Another thing I’d like to work on is the fact that I’m not brilliant at being able to tell when people are taking the mick, I’m willing to be there for people whenever they need a friend or whenever they just need to talk to distract themselves or anything like that. But I’ve found that that isn’t always reciprocated and then I’m left thinking “oh…right…okay” and I’ve decided I no longer want people like that in my life and am very much taking the stance of friendship is a two-way thing, so if the other party aren’t putting the effort in then why should I? These are things that I’ve always thought I’ve been good at, but that isn’t the case. I’ve always feared “cutting” people off, and dislike the terminology of doing such thing, but I feel like if there’s no effort it isn’t particularly cutting people off. I like to think of it more as, well the friendship isn’t strong anymore (if it ever was) and I’m not benefitting from it so maybe it has come to a natural end. It’s important to consider how the situation makes you feel because the other party aren’t necessarily going to be doing that, you are the only person that spends every minute with you so you have to make sure that you are making decisions to make you happy.

Personally, I feel as though this fear of cutting people off stems from childhood where terms such as “best friends forever” are thrown around, or my personal favourite from my primary school days “best friends for ever and ever until we die” which I have to say is a bit extreme. But “forever” and “until we die” symbolise eternity and although as a child you possibly don’t understand that time frame, you’re still taught that friendships should last. And yes, a good friendship will last, but not every friendship is a good friendship or remains a good friendship. It’s important to teach children the importance of friendship but I personally think it is just as important to teach children that not every friendship is going to last and that isn’t a bad thing and there shouldn’t be guilt attached to it. We should also teach children that spending time alone and doing activities alone, like going to a coffee shop or the cinema, is not something to be ashamed of. My experience is that as you get older (I speak as though I’m 104, I’m aware), it is more common and accepted to spend time with yourself, but often in school days to do this would make you “a loner”, and it was something to be terrified of. Now, I don’t view it as something negative, as much as I love seeing my friends and I’m so grateful for them, I love being a homebody and having myself as company. It isn’t a bad thing and sometimes it’s needed.

I have all these thoughts surrounding friendship and maybe they don’t come across positively, but I would like to state here that I have some amazing friends. I am so incredibly grateful for the support I get from my friends; I feel so lucky to have a select few people to turn to whenever I need them. As I have experienced so many events of friendship fall outs and sitting there feeling uncomfortable or maybe out of place; I choose my friends based on quality over quantity. I want friendships that are valuable and I can talk about life and plans and experiences with, I no longer want friendships where people are the topic. That isn’t fulfilling.

Please let me know your thoughts on friendship and what’s important to you, I’d love to hear them and start opening the conversation up on all these different matters.

Thank you for reading!

Until next time,

Lia x