From the time we’re little, we’re always trying to learn how to meet others with the hopes of making new friends.

With the hope in mind that we’ll find cool, like-minded people that will challenge us, inspire us and will become the type of friends that we consider family when we grow older. For everyone, there’s always at least one person that we consider a best friend. Someone who you have hundreds of inside jokes with, someone who will be a total dork with you and will know how to cheer you up when you’re at your worst. While we learn how to make friends and how to treat them with respect, we’re never prepared for what it’s like to lose a friend without warning.

There’s the reality that there will be friends in our lives who we will grow apart from as we grow older and realize we might not have as much in common with as we once thought. This isn’t to say that this will always be presented with a huge blowout fight and an eternal silent treatment for a friendship to dissolve. Sometimes this can happen without warning. While this alternative is certainly less confrontational, this isn’t to say that it’s any less heartbreaking to lose someone who was once such a big part of your life.

For me, I’ve now gone through this experience twice and, to be blunt, it sucks. No one enjoys losing a friend, but it’s even harder when you’re not given a clear reason why the friendship ended the way it did. You start to let your mind become consumed about what went wrong, what you did wrong, how you can fix a problem that you’re not even certain of. Eventually, you realize that you don’t have a magic answer that will make things go back to normal.

Then you realize that it can happen again. That it isn’t a one-shot deal that’s been fulfilled. Oh no! Catastrophe!

Sometimes you might eventually find out years later why your friendship went away. You might have done something, you might realize that your friend was in a different headspace and didn’t know how to tell you they needed space. They might never tell you why. This is frustrating, but it shouldn’t become thought consuming forever on your part.

Now, the takeaway from all of this is that there is no one set answer why friends leave us sometimes. There will be times friends can work their way back together and other times where that chapter of our lives will close. The point in all of this is to value the time you spent with these friends, to appreciate these memories without letting them be taken away from you. It’ll be hard, without a doubt, but it isn’t impossible.