Over winter break I found myself catching up with friends I went to highschool with. I am lucky because I formed a good group of girlfriends in high school that I honestly feel I will have for a long time. Maybe that is optimistic though. Afterall, I am only a college freshman.
I was talking to one of my high school friends and she mentioned that we don’t talk on the phone a lot while we are at school, and she is worried that we are going to grow apart. I never felt that way, but I understood where she was coming from. It’s not that I didn’t also see that we talked less and less, but to me I felt like our friendship was strong. I always thought we would be able to not talk for a long time, then eventually we would see each other again and it would be like nothing has changed.
When you’re in high school, your priorities tend to be your friends. Your best friend is your number one person, and your group of friends are the people that you are generally around the most. When we all got to college, some of the first things we probably did were put up pictures of our high school friends. Then as life continued, those pictures started to be replaced by new ones, new memories, and new people. Ultimately, our people and our priorities will always change.
Maybe you meet a significant other, and they turn into your priority. Maybe you start working for a difficult boss, and that job becomes your priority. Maybe you discover something new about yourself, and all of a sudden you become your own priority. The truth is that we can’t keep everyone forever. We go through waves of change and seasons of life, and not everyone you meet can go through them with you.
As much as we wish they did, people don’t last forever, and your life doesn’t have room to hold onto everyone you’ve ever met. It’s okay if you want to make different friends, get into a relationship and work hard to make it good, or throw yourself into your career and not think about anything else. It’s about what makes you happy.
When I was in high school, I lost touch with a friend for a whole year. Yet, we managed to come back to each other and now she is one of my best friends again. We went through a period of time where we didn’t quite fit into each others lives, but that’s okay.
You have to choose what phone numbers you remember, who you give your time to, and who you keep in touch with. If they are meant to, the people that fade out of your life will fade back in when they need to.