"I just don't really want to be friends anymore."

"...OK."

These are the lines of the shortest phone call of my life.

The phone rang one morning when I was 10 years old, and I excitedly grabbed it from my mom — it wasn’t every day I got a real phone call. I don’t recall what I thought the call would be about or if the idea that it had to be about something in particular even crossed my mind, but I wasn’t prepared to be abruptly unfriended.

In fact, the concept of not being friends with someone had never occurred to me. Everyone was friends. Sure, I liked some people more than others, and I spent more time at some people’s houses than others, but I was friends with everyone.

But suddenly and all at once, I realized that not everyone was friends, and more importantly, I was not everyone’s friend. When I heard her voice on the other side of the phone tell me she didn’t want to be my friend, all I could say was “OK.” In many ways, looking back, I see that there was a simplicity and strange childlike wisdom in saying “OK” to rejection.

But there was also a breaking within me.

Somewhere deep inside my young being, something important and fragile cracked.

I have felt the effects of this brokenness with an unwavering intensity over the last nine years, and I still am not sure how to repair the damage. Maybe it seems silly and dramatic, but because of this incident, I have seen every friend as a double-edged sword — waiting for them to flip the blade while my bare feet press into the dull side, catching me by surprise and cutting me down.

In high school, I tried so hard to make friends, and I did. I met people, and I got coffee with them sometimes, and there have been points in my life where I’ve truly held a person’s soul close to my own and felt a sense of hopefulness. Yet, save a few exceptions, I have lacked the kind of friendships that allow me to be myself and to express myself with honesty and transparency — I am always waiting for that phone call, always ready to jump when the blade flips unexpectedly.

This approach to people and friendships has been a self-fulfilling prophecy that has left me nervous, jumpy and desperate to feel some kind of security. Every time a friendship leaves me unfulfilled or broken, I draw farther into myself, becoming less and less accessible and less and less lovable.

I have never known what it’s like to find a home in someone’s presence.

I have never known what it is like to have friends who feel like safety. Friends who feel like rainy afternoons and hot coffee and tight hugs wrapped in blankets — until now.

Until I moved into Beebe 2.

Until I met 15 of the most wonderful people I have ever known.

Until I laughed myself to tears every day for a week and no one minded. Until I told my story and no one walked out. Until I had a bad day and everyone noticed. Until I picked up my phone and didn’t feel like letting it go to voicemail.

Until I let myself stare into the broken framework I built my friendships on and disassembled it piece by painful piece; I didn’t know what friendship was.

I have spent so much time trying to be friends with people and trying to find the best way to not be burdensome or not be a bad friend that I have never allowed myself to have a good friend.

I have faltered all of my life since that phone call saying “OK” to denial. I have lacked the security to say “no” but also lacked the trust to say “yes.”

I have lived a half-life full of half-way friendships and have never been more than half-happy, until now.

I still feel the same fears and the same insecurities at times, but I also feel the genuine happiness that paints the faces of my friends when they see me and the smile that finds its way onto my face without me forcing it to. I truly and deeply love my friends, and I cannot imagine who and where I would be if I hadn’t met them.

I know that the patterns of thought I have entrenched myself in for nearly a decade are not gone, and I am constantly having to check my insecurities at the door, but for the first time I can grab the phone with excitement again, and that’s at least something.