Every year on her birthday my mom closes her eyes and wishes for the exact same thing: complete health for my family, my friends, and me. It's really a great wish. The most essential. The least superfluous. I can't quite say that if you have your health you have everything, but if you don't have your health you really have nothing.
Well, yesterday I was similarly reminded of an irreplaceable source of happiness. Friends. Not people or acquaintances or frenemies but honest to god friends. People who are interested in your well being and invested in your happiness and looking out for you when you don't even realize it. There are a million ways to notice a good friend, to realize that they're there for you, but what I've found to be the most effective is to go out and spend a night with perfectly nice, well-intentioned people and discover the absence of any comfort, humor, or conversational spark.
It's really wonderful how easy and effortless your friendships seem afterwards. How easy it is to convey a thought with an eye roll, or know someone well enough to know what they need before they do, or to have someone know what you need and to help you figure it out. And also there's just the comfort of conversation. What better way to spend an evening then nestled in a couch with a glass of wine learning about someone else and learning about yourself. And usually the more people the better, but there is something really lovely about the type of relationship where you can sustain a 4 hour conversation with one person. And there's something even more wonderful about those friendships where silence is truly, genuinely comfortable.
I've been the agnostic equivalent of blessed with the people I have in my life. Both of my parents are only children, so I don't have any aunts, uncles, or cousins, but they valued their friends as their family. It was one of the most important lessons that they didn't consciously teach me: If you love someone, hold on. And I have. I'm still very close with friends from childhood, adolescence, and the teenage years. And that's definitely one of the reasons that I want to spend the next year at home. It's hard being away from them.
Maybe that's part of my discontent with yesterday evening. I don't have a ton of friends from college that I'm dying to hold on to, but I have a small, strong group. And I don't have a blue print for that. I'm afraid that by choosing NY i'll lose everything LA. The friends, the diversity, the food, the person I've become. How do I prevent that? And how do I prevent the worst case scenario, which is Friday nights spent with meaningless relationships for the rest of my life.
I suspect that it's a set of fears that I just have to live irrelevant, prove that it will work and I can have everything I want. Because really, why can't I have everything I want? I have my health. Check. I have friends. Check. Now I just just have to trust the system.
Deep Breath. It's all going to be OK.
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