I spent five years living in New York and made a lot of friends there, so every time I visit I have difficulty prioritizing who I’m going to see. Usually this is very unpleasant, but on my most recent trip, prioritizing felt easy for the first time.
I have thought endlessly about what “friendship” really means, about who counts as a friend. I wrote a blog post a few years back called Give your friends a chance to abandon you. It was about how my best friend was someone I felt deeply comfortable with because he had seen me at my worst and had chosen to remain friends with me. It dawned on me only a few months ago that this is what my definition of friendship is: your friends are the people who don’t abandon you. A friend is a person who chooses to stick by your side, again and again.
The implication is that friendship is not something you can know ahead of time, it’s only something you can see in retrospect. The inherent unpredictability of life means that you can’t actually know for sure who will or won’t stick around. So as much as you’d want guarantees that the people you’re surrounded by today will continue to be in your life, you will only know for sure once enough time passes. Sometimes you are disappointed by the distance that grows between you and your friends, and other times you are pleasantly surprised, that fifteen years later, you still love getting birthday messages from your high school best friend.
As I was figuring out who to catch up with in New York, it became obvious that the first people to message were the people I’ve known the longest and deepest. I set aside an evening for my old roommates who I’d lived with for several years. Living with friends as an adult is one of the more intimate and challenging things that you can do with a friendship, and my relationship with my old roommates wasn’t always the easiest. But again, we were friends who lived together and cherished each other, and it is important to me to keep investing in those friendships, even if it sometimes feels hard. It feels silly to have ever thought of it in any other way. The people to prioritize are not the people who are always the “easiest” to be around, it’s the people who have seen the most of you, and who have chosen, again and again, to continue to be your friend. These are the people you are bound to by your shared history.
That is, in my view, the essence of who you actually are: the long history of everything that has happened to you up until this day. The decisions you’ve made and the people you’ve gotten to know. This is not to say that you are exclusively defined by your past, or that your past fully determines your future. It’s to say that your past is the foundation upon which you build. There is so much about you that changes—your preferences, your ways of relating to others, your priorities, your dreams, your aspirations—but your past is not one of them. Your past can be built upon, and it is continuously expanding, but it is never rewritten. This can seem burdensome, but I think it’s liberating.
I often hold on to some kind of hope that I can actually erase my past. I want to pretend that all the years that have passed—in particular, all the difficulty and challenge, especially the challenges that didn’t have a “happy” or “palatable” ending—simply never happened. One arena in which this tendency to erase my history takes place is in friendship itself. As in: new friends give me the chance to pretend my past doesn’t exist. And to be clear, there is something relieving about this – each new moment and each new friendship really is an opportunity to begin again. It’s very exciting to connect with new people and give them the most mature, most confident form of me, without having them see my little tucked-away drawer of all the experiences and actions that I’m ashamed of. But over time I’ve found that there is a shallowness to this way of connecting with others. There is a deeper and more honest joy in connecting more deeply with the people who have actually seen my ugly, messy drawer and have chosen to remain with me.