It's 2017, Do You Know Who Your Friends Are?

Some people say your lifelong besties are met in college. Take a moment and think about every single person you have encountered since your college career began - whether it was one year ago or three years ago.

Are you able to say all of the people you have befriended will be your friends for life?

When I was in high school, I never truly understood what a real friend was or what it meant to have and be a best friend. Sure, I would call people my best friends, but looking back I always question how good of a friend each one of those people were. I have pictures that hang on my wall of friends that I haven’t talked to since the day we graduated High School. Then I have photos with friends from college that I haven’t talked to in months. At the end of the day, despite all that has happened I look at all the people photoed in those pictures and surpass any of the bad blood or fights that have led our relationship to where it is today, and think of the memories I made with them at that very moment in time.

Just because two people can’t be friends anymore doesn’t mean that at one point in time that friendship never happened and those memories were never made. It is not the memories you are erasing but rather it is the toxic person you made it with. We say all good things come to an end, but sometimes the fun things come to an end too. Generality grows up and we move on and realize who people really are. Whether we have found the ugly to withstand the good, or we turn into a completely different person we must always stay true to ourselves. As King of Thrones Jorah Mormont says, it’s tempting to see your enemies as evil, but there’s good and evil on both sides of every war ever fought.

We should eliminate the finger pointing and the name blaming and see the fault within our sides of the stories. Forget and let go, while always learning from our mistakes. Millennials live to take friends sides and back up the best story or put shame on someone they have no issue with for the faults that took place among their acquaintances. We have forgotten to weigh every side of the story and have outgrown confrontation. We hide behind the lies and the ‘he said/she said’ anecdotes. At the end of the day the only person we are truly deceiving is ourselves - not those we are asking and telling.

The next time you get into a scruff with a friend, take a moment to think about the fuel you added to that fire, if that friendship comes to an end, leave all others out of it. Take the time to say hello when you make eye contact, or hold the door open if you run into them. When you put the faults into perspective, the problem has nothing to do with the acquaintances of you or your past friend but rather lies between the originators - the two of you.

Today is promised, but tomorrow is not.