Friendship is a bit of uncharted territory for me. Throughout my childhood and teenage years I never really found “my people” so to speak. Not to say that I didn’t have “friends” in the superficial sense – I laughed, joked, and hung around with them – but I longed for something deeper, something more profound.
After four years of prioritizing academics and extracurricular resume builders, I found myself alone without any truly close friends; I had always kept them at arm’s length, it was just easier that way in my mind. So when the time came to leave home for my first semester of college, my mind was made up – I wanted FRIENDS and not just any kind, but good ones. But let me tell you, I had no idea how life changing true friends can be.
“Friends are the family you choose.” For years, I have looked at that cross-stitch in my grandmother’s house and wondered at its meaning. Until recently, I never fully grasped the depth of wisdom and truth that simple phrase illuminated, but more on that in a moment.
To return to my search for friends as a freshman at BC, the first few months were filled with many new acquaintances met through class, chance encounters in the bathroom(odd, I know but hey it worked), and dining halls. Yet, I was still searching, wondering, and waiting to find “my people.” With certainty I can say it was not until January of freshman year and the Fall semester of sophomore year that I can say God brought them into my life.
In the months leading up to discovering this network of friends, I was watching a lecture in which the speaker said, “you are what you attract,” in contrast to the more common saying “opposites attract.” With this advice in mind and at the urging of one of my early friends, I began to attend Candlelight Mass in Saint Joseph Chapel. It was here by the glow of candlelight that I discovered the kind of people I not only want to be friends with, but who inspired me and encouraged me to grow in faith, truth, and goodness.
It was “the guys,” as I still to this day affectionately refer to them, that sparked a new understanding of what friendship really was. We all spent hours together in the Spring of freshman year discussing philosophy, faith, our families, and dating among other things. Their friendship taught me many things, but most importantly that true friendship requires immense patience; you have to allow one another to grow in a friendship and be willing to stick around to work at it, to grow and cultivate it. Each of their friendships continually opens my eyes to how unique each relationship with another human being is and what true genuine friendship looks like, without which I would not know God anywhere near as deeply and intimately.
I’ll admit their were a few times where it was really difficult to not cut loose, but
thanks be to God that He opened my heart to try again. Being the only girl in the friend group, as you can imagine, presented some challenges in the romance department, but at that point in my life I just really wasn’t open to being someone’s girlfriend. In honesty, I was afraid not only on the romantic level, but also on the friendship level, to let anyone in.
Retrospectively, we all had some growing up to do and so for a time I parted ways with “the guys” and God put in my path the opportunity to make some genuine girl friends. I started attending Gratia Plena, the Catholic Women’s Group at BC, after almost a year of urging from “the guys.” It was there that God brought me into relationship with some of the most beautiful, vibrantly alive, and faithful young women I had ever encountered.
There was so much joy in their hearts that to be in their company brought a freedom that I hadn’t known in friendship before. There was no worry that they were going to talk about me behind my back or try to start drama, as is common with many young women today, but they were kind and welcoming, inspiring me to grow to do likewise. They were and are truly beautiful and genuinely kind hearted young women who have become some of the best friends I have ever had – more often than not they have been saving graces each and every day of my life.
So here we are back in the present again. Living with people who I would consider some of my closest friends and feeling a little miserable. But, why?
I guess it started when one of my friends told me a very painful truth about our friendship– she said “that I just wanted to be listened to,” and “that I kept saying I wanted to know her, but really never gave her the chance to talk.” I had forgotten how to listen. A bitter pill to swallow let me tell you. The more I thought about it the more bitter and mistrusting I became of the friends around and began to allow that fear of letting anyone in slowly creep back into all of my relationships.
It simply reaffirmed my subconscious fear that if you allowed friends totally into your heart that it was much easier for you to disappoint them and them to disappoint you. I was hurt and I thought, “this is close enough, no one is allowed into my heart anymore because I can hurt them and they can hurt me.” So I began to back away from those relationships that made me question everything about all of the friendships I had ever been in throughout my life.
Yet, God opened my eyes to the truth of the matter through that funny little cross-stick I had been staring at for years. “Friends are the family you choose” – a family never breaks up just because things get tough, in actuality it is confronting those tough times and hard truths together that make a family stronger. They tell you these things not to hurt you, but because they love you. So it is with true friends, they become a family in that way, but now I see that the choice rests with us. The only way we may discover truly genuine friendship — a relationship that allows for the growth of grace and virtue in all its members require that you choose to let them all the way in, that you are willing to admit that you were wrong, that is the only way you will ever find friends who can truly become your family. I pray that you have the wisdom to choose wisely, the courage to be truthful, and the grace to persevere in spite of stormy seas.
Julia Danehy is a Sophomore in the William F. Connell School of Nursing a hop, skip, and a jump away from her home town of Fort Myers, FL. With the variety of her interests spanning about a million miles long, in her spare time she can be found exploring history, painting, spending time outdoors, whipping up some form of baked good, or reading anything to do with The Theology of the Body/philosophy in general.
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