For as long as I can remember, my dad has always told me that “people tell you exactly who they are and it is your choice to either believe them or not.” As I’m getting older and am almost finished with college, I am beginning to realize how true this really is.

Friendship changes all the time – people grow up and then grow apart as they start to change. This took me a long time to understand and even longer to be okay with. For a while, I thought that if a friendship fizzled and the two grew apart, it wasn’t real or that the people in the friendship were fake. This made me so bitter towards people I had grown apart with.

I began to think that friends were either in it for the long haul with you, or they weren’t a true friend. I took this mindset with me away to college under the assumption that I would always talk to my high school best friends – that there wouldn’t be a day we didn’t talk because that’s how it had been for the past four years.

College was a rude awakening. Looking back, I can’t wrap my head around how I didn’t think we would grow apart. I still love and adore my high school friends, but I have learned to take friendship for what is offered. We each went our separate ways as we began to make our mark on the world. I learned that friendships change as we grow up and that is perfectly okay. I still treasure the memories that I made with these people but it is just a simple fact that we aren’t the same people that we used to be. Changing who we are of course has changed our friendships.

I’ve learned to take friendship at face value. Hold onto the memories and cherish them. Appreciate people while they’re in your life and hope that you change together through the next few phases of your life, but if not be grateful for the times that they were in your life. People that were meant to stay in your life will stay and may come back in ways that surprise you.