The cost of friendship
If family shows us who we are, friends show us who we can become.
Friends keep us real. Honest. True.
They are the people we choose to put in our lives.
They are the people with whom we can be ourselves. We don't have to pretend to be someone else or live up to unwanted expectations.
We like to believe that friends will always be there for us, and us for them.
But we forget that maintaining friendship is not free.
It requires something very scarce these days. Our attention.
I've lost many friends over the years.
Because I didn't nurture our friendships. I didn't give them the attention they deserved, and most importantly, needed.
I realize now that losing these friendships is like losing parts of myself.
We cherish old friends not only because they know us so well. But because they are a reflection of who we were and who we've grown to be. They are our identity anchor.
Harry Potter defeated Voldemort by finding his Horcruxes and destroying them. The moral of the story is that Voldemort lost because he anchored himself onto material artifacts. He didn't understand the value of friendship.
Harry won because his friends were his Horcruxes.
In a way, we tend to do like Voldemort.
We anchor ourselves onto material things. We surround ourselves with stuff in an attempt to give ourselves grounding. I am what I buy. I am what I own.
We forget that what grounds us is the people around us.
Friends are our identity.
And they need our attention, as we need theirs.
Overwhelmed by our busy lives, we excel at finding reasons why we can’t give them the leftovers of our mostly depleted attention.
Life is not simple. But we probably make it more complicated than it needs to be.
Call a friend. Reach out.
They may need you as much as you need them.
They’ll remind you of who you are. And you, who they are.
General Manager at Rogue Factor
4 个月On se voit bient?t mon pote!
ex-Microsoft, Yahoo! Data Analyst. - Product Lead for the creation of ideas.LEGO.com - Avid reader
4 个月Is this your way of reaching out to old friends? Instead of reaching out to old friends? :D
Ecosystem Growth Monad
4 个月I was happy we got to catch up during this year's GDC! :)
Director of Content Marketing at Flippa | Online M&A
4 个月Guillaume, thanks for sharing. How to reconnect?
Bring Out The Best In Others
4 个月While some friendships are hard to maintain, others never dies. Friendship between men, especially between neurodivergents, is the most fascinating. While it is true it's good to keep contact, it's important to learn not to blame yourself when you are not doing it. I told myself for too many years that I was a bad friend because I was not reaching out. But I learned this was far from reality. Did I lose the opportunity to be close to some people? Most definitely. Am I alone? Not at all. I'm closer than ever to some people I know now we care deeply about each others. Even if we rarely meet or communicate. Everybody is different and that includes the bridges we build between us. We cannot simply look at others relationship and build something similar. We need to understand ourselves to know what kind of bridge we are capable to build and look for people with compatibilities.