Friendship was something I always sought. As a child I imagined being a teenager with a few friends I could share everything with, having sleepovers all the time, talking on the phone for hours, gossipping about boys and believing that having friends was the key to living happily.

I don’t know when it was, if it was any particular event, that made me extremely independent. It may have been a series of events where I felt betrayed, events where I may not have even trusted myself with information I had, but eventually I came to realize that I lived both a very public and very private life. The privacy of this private side extended to me and only me, and while I wanted to have friends, I did not want any one person to know everything about me. It seemed unsafe. I wanted people I could go out with, but I needed people I could rely on.

I was under the impression for several years that I could live a life of my own, believing that there might not be the right person (in terms of a friend or companion) out there for me. I believed I could be totally independent while still engaging in social activities. I spent (and still do spend, for that matter) most of my time with numerous types of people. Because I was never extremely close to any of them, I never had any issues. My superiors told me to surround myself with good people, and because it had never been personally put to the test, I never knew how important that statement became.

After many trials and errors last year, I learned the value of being around good people. I suddenly found myself desperate for anyone to go out with, and I let people take advantage of it. I’m easy, so as long as they provided good company; I did not care much. But what I eventually learned was that I could not count on these people to always be there for me. Even though I still maintain an extremely private life, the stresses of the sport I was in and the strenuousness of academia combined with a lack of someone my age who really understood me made it especially difficult to thoroughly enjoy other relationships. I recognize that I might have high standards of friendship because I want someone who is completely empathetic, but I also recognize that I should not settle. I found myself at the very end of a one-way street for the majority of my friendships and it felt suffocating, being contacted only when something was needed of me, and not hearing from them for a long time thereafter. I found myself surrounded by people who were exclusive, did not know how to be together as a whole, and were not very perceptive about other individuals’ situations. It was at this point that the value of being around good, well-rounded people became real.

When I started surrounding myself with people who were not so insensitive, I found myself more motivated and willing to include others. I still maintain my private life, but I am more open to giving people the benefit of the doubt. I feel less apathetic in general, and more ambitious about communicating well with others. I still am learning to be more gracious to others and letting little things go, but distancing myself from the things that brought me down has helped me understand the value of healthy relationships. My advice to you would be to invest the majority of your time in people who will invest in you. I still spend some time with those I felt I had one-way friendships with, but I learned that if I wanted to feel I had someone to always count on, I had to invest elsewhere.