Friendship Feels Like Coming Home
Friendship Feels Like Coming Home
after a long treacherous day, beaconing me towards safety, shielding me from the rest of the world.
“Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honoured by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Let me preface this newsletter by saying that this is the most important love letter I’ll ever write.
Unlike some of life’s other pleasures and novelties, friendship is not something I can touch— I cannot wake up on a chilly morning and drape it over my neck like my favourite scarf, nor can I reach across the dinner table for it in the same way I search for butter. It is something entirely different than the rest of life’s sweet joys.
I am not a religious person but I have grown accustomed to thanking someone, something, somewhere, for the blessings that are my friendships. My friendships are my refuge, my sacred space in a world otherwise designed to invoke fear and uncertainty. My friends do not waver, ever-present like a constant ray of light, comparable to a lighthouse. However far I wander they are always there, beaconing me home, even amidst the worst storms.
I have spent 4 years being a 20-something and I have decided that being in your 20s feels like being stuck on a rollercoaster; the constant ups and downs are scary enough to make me want to hop off the ride altogether. However, I know once I finally make it off I’ll remember these days with unmatched vivacity— together we will recount our 20s with unrivalled saudade, the tough moments forgotten through our romanticisation of the time.
You spend the majority of your 20s making mistakes and learning from them. My friends watch the mistakes I make without judgment, welcoming me home each night with open arms once the day's battle is over. I watch as they make the same mistakes I have, never ridiculing them, instead reminding them I am here, always.
I’ll watch over them in this lifetime and the next. That is a promise, my most vital promise.
We stand side-by-side, watching as each of us fall in and out of love like the seasons, trying on boys and girls for size and sobbing uncontrollably in the bathtub together when the season changes and we realise they never really fit us to begin with.
Here we are, always on the search for love in other people, so often forgetting that the love we seek is right here, laughing beside us on the couch while we re-watch Sex and the City for the fourth time, sitting across from us at the wine bar, or holding our hair back after a night out. The love we’ve— I’ve spent so much of my life searching for is so profoundly embedded between the fabrics of our friendships that sometimes we forget it’s there.
My friends know me better than I know myself; they know when to remind me to look both ways when crossing the street, they remember how I like my coffee on warm days vs. cold, and they always know what to say to me when I’m unsure of what to say to myself. However, as time keeps moving forward, I’ve found that friendships, which used to be the easiest, simplest thing in the world, have become a much harder pursuit. Not in the sense that it’s hard to remain friends, that is the easiest part of it all; it’s easy to wake up every day and love them, it’s the rest of it that’s hard. Because as life goes on, it continues to push us all in different directions. It’s become difficult to stay in touch. Weekends that were once reserved for blurry nights in dimly lit bars with the girls (all 8 or 9 or 10 of us) have been replaced by late-night shifts, dinner with our boyfriends’s parents, or even just spent catching up on the sleep our jobs stole from us throughout the week.
Before we would experience life together, side-by-side. Now, the precious time we do have together is spent catching each other up on all the life that’s happened to us between the time we last saw one another.
As someone who considers herself inherently lonely (I think it’s quite literally wired into my DNA), I hold my friendships close to my heart, sometimes so tightly that by the time I loosen up my grip a little, they are already halfway across the world. I’ve found that as we continue to crave the intensity of romantic love, our platonic bonds can end up slipping through the cracks. It is a delicate dance to learn. However, I believe our friendships are the most important love of all; it is the love that will be with us until the bitter end.
Every morning I wake up and choose to love my friends - I love them on purpose every single day. I choose to accompany them through the mundaneness of everyday life, I choose to hold them as they sob, I choose to pop the champagne and celebrate their wins. And they do the same for me. Getting to wake up every morning and choose them is the greatest privilege I’ve ever been given.
All of this rambling can perhaps be summed up like this: we are all lost and afraid, none of us have any clue where we are going or who we are becoming, but it is our friendships that help to lead us. They help to guide us towards some sort of light.
Navigating my 20s has proven to be a daunting task, but, sometimes when I am laughing in the dark with my friends, holding hands as we polish off another glass of cheap red wine, it doesn’t feel so scary anymore, it feels like coming home.
Although language has its own unique set of limitations and will never be able to fully capture the love that manifests between friends, sometimes poetry gets pretty close.
At least I think it does.
“She peels an orange, separates it in perfect halves, and gives one of them to me. If I could wear it like a friendship bracelet, I would. Instead I swallow it section by section and tell myself it means even more this way. To chew and to swallow in silence with her. To taste the same thing in the same moment.”
- We Are Okay, Nina Lacour
“I’ve learnt that the most important part of life is loving my friends; getting to sit across from them at old wooden tables in tiny towns around the globe, drinking wine and laughing. Everything that happens in between is lovely and beautiful but it will never come close to the magic of being slightly tipsy with my friends in the middle of nowhere as we laugh so hard we fall out of our chairs.”
- 07/03/2023, Sierra Madison
I share with you now some wisdom I’ve acquired throughout the years, some learned, some passed down by friends and strangers alike:
i. collect dusty knick-knacks from the vintage store across from your favourite ice cream shop - they won’t give you purpose but when strangers enter your home they’ll ask you about them
ii. laugh, a lot - preferably with friends over wine
iii. eat your greens, even on the days you don’t want to
iv. wear colour when you’re sad
v. write, especially when you feel like you have nothing to say
vi. try your best to be good, often to others, but always to yourself
vii. let your past guide you, but don’t stay choking on mistakes you made out of the need to survive
viii. don’t make a lifeline out of people, they don’t deserve that kind of pressure
ix. hold on to good people and always remind them of their kindness
x. have a cool party trick
Like any other girl who spent the majority of their youth chronically online, Lana Del Rey holds a special place in my heart, and this song in particular. This Is What Makes Us Girls is not only an ode to Lana’s own experience of shedding the skin of girlhood, but it is also a testament to the momentousness of young friendship.
The prettiest in-crowd that you had ever seen
Ribbons in our hair, and our eyes gleamed mean
A freshmen generation of degenerate beauty queens
And you know somethin'?
They were the only friends I ever had
Like I said earlier, so often we — women — place the journey of romantic love above our platonic friendships, and this song reminds me of this fact. The pursuit of love, although a worthy venture, should never come at the expense of your friends. If it does, I don’t think that is a love worth having.
I wanted to capture the feeling of friendship through images, and I’m a sucker for a good mood board, aren’t you?
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the first edition of Confessions of a 20-Something. I encourage you to share this with your close friends to let them know you’re thinking of them, you love them, and that their friendship is the greatest privilege of all.
If you’ve received this from a friend and want to join me on the adventure that is navigating your 20s, subscribe to the newsletter below.
If you want to read more of my writing or just want to see what’s going on in my life, you can find me on Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok.
Until next month …