As you get older, you grow. It is a natural and completely healthy thing to do. However, one thing that you may begin to see is that not everybody that is in your life is now aligning with you or your values. It is only natural as we grow and develop into the people that we are.
For a long time, I tried to resist the change. I was looking at some of the people in my life and as the years had passed by, we had changed in exponential ways. Perhaps you could even say that we developed to be very opposite of one another. At the time it was a very hard realisation to come to terms with.
For a little history, I don’t have many friends. I chose to keep my circle small, and I do believe that I have had a very calm, drama free life for doing so. The few of my friends were people that I had met when I was rather young at school. As the years passed by, we worked hard to stay in touch and ensured that we made time for one another. For a long time, it worked because we all put in effort with one another to make it work.
A big part of my personality is that I work hard at my friendships. Generally speaking, I bend over backwards for the people in my life that I care about. That is how I’ve always been and how I am sure I will continue to be in the future. I love to be a nurturing kind of person and I do want others to think of me as a person that cares.
But the older I got and the more I grew, the more I began to see what I was growing apart from some of the friends that I had worked hard to support. In essence, I was maintaining negative friendships and after an eye-opening moment, I realised that I wasn’t just propping them up in order to be a bad friend, I was also giving them scope to do it.
I reached a period of internal conflict. There was still a huge part of me that was a people pleaser that wanted to make people happy. Plus, there was a small part of me that realised that the friends I had were thin on the ground, did I really want to cause an issue with the few that I had? However, I realised that for my own wellbeing, I had to make a change. Confrontation was not on the cards, instead I decided to stop being that friend that propped everybody else up and instead I decided to take a backseat.
Some people instantly began to reach out. They were worried about me because I hadn’t reached out recently. They knew my routines and that I liked to reach out to them first and when they realised that I wasn’t there, they flipped the table and got in touch with me without question.
Then there were a few others. A few individuals that regardless of my lack of contact didn’t reach out to me. These are people that I have been friends with for almost two decades and all of a sudden because I wasn’t contacting them, they didn’t think to check in on me. And don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want people fawning at my feet. But it was the individuals that I was having mixed feelings about that were the people that proved themselves as one-sided friends.
Throughout the entire process, I found it hard. As I have mentioned, I work hard at my relationships. I like to think that I have a fantastic network of people around me. But with age comes clarity and I knew that the best thing for me and moving forward was to accept that friendships end and then channel my energy into those that truly matter.
Sometimes I really think people need to look at those closes to them and consider their relationships. Don’t use your energy maintaining negativity in your life. Move onto the people that truly matter.
