As graduation approaches, I’ve begun to reflect on my time during college. A lot has changed since I started as a freshman. I have learned so much during my time here at Oswego (which of course is the point of college), and I have changed and grown a lot as a person over the last few years.
I have also met a lot of new people and made new friends. We’ve created a lot of wonderful memories that I’ll be able to look back on in the future, and I can’t thank these people enough for helping to give me such a great college experience.
While I can think fondly of all these new people in my life, I can’t help but think of all the friendships I’ve lost as well. Friends from high school, or friends from the earlier days of college that I’ve disconnected with. For the most part, I’ve simply drifted apart from people. We’ve grown differently, met new people, and are content to live out our own lives.
A lot of these people are friends that I’m still on good terms with. We even chat every once and a while and say that we’ll get lunch, or hang out and catch up. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. There’s never any hard feelings though, because like I said, we have our own lives now.
Other former friendships are more complicated. Growing apart wasn’t as easy to accept and there’s resentment on both sides, for different reasons.
I hope any past friends I have that may resent me now know that I wish it didn’t have to be this way. It wasn’t easy to let our friendship slip away, and it never is. I still look back on some of our fondest memories and wish things could have ended better, or not at all. I wish we could have stayed friends forever like we always said we were going to.
It’s funny how that works. We swear up and down when we are closest that things will never change between us, that our bond will never break. We talk about the future with no fear, certain that we will be in each other’s weddings, and that our children will grow up to be best friends. But in the end, we turn into strangers.
To be completely honest, it has always been incredibly hard for me to let people go. I have tried very hard to maintain friendships with a few different people, even though they might not believe that. I’m sure they think I didn’t try hard enough, which is terribly upsetting. I think that blindness is a major reason that many friendships may have ended in the first place.
Sometimes I don’t know when to give up, and even when I tell myself I’m done trying, a part of me still yearns to figure out a way to fix things. I’ve been known to lie awake at night, wondering what I could have done differently. It’s unhealthy for me to keep thinking about it and letting it eat me alive. I stress out trying to see what I did wrong. Did I really even do anything wrong? That’s what I’m so unsure of, because I know I tried. I didn’t give up without putting up some sort of a fight.
I can’t continue to live my life stressing over this. I need to move on. I want to truly be content with the life I have today, and the people I have that are standing by my side right now. I’ll continue to look back on memories of the past with fondness, but I need to stop thinking about what went wrong. We took different paths in life, and that is perfectly alright.
It’s OK that we aren’t still best friends forever, as sad as it might seem. Everything happens for a reason, and maybe our friendship just wasn’t meant to last, for whatever reason.
Regardless of how our friendship may have ended, or whatever reason is behind us simply drifting apart, I want all of my former friends to know that I wish them the best. I don’t want to see any of you fail, and often I am here silently rooting for you from afar.