We graduated, and college began. The moment we had all been waiting for since the first day of freshman year of high school swiftly came upon us, and we then realized that we would be leaving dear friends, friends who were years in the making.

We would be leaving behind people we’d barely taken the time to know. We would be leaving behind people we only knew by association. We were leaving behind everything, going off in separate directions.

Bittersweet, sure. But doesn’t it make you contemplate the importance of friends? And not just of the friends you knew better than yourself, but the friends you wouldn’t make and the friends who waited in the near future at the end of the summer.

Old friends will always be great. Friends who grew up with you will always have a special, irreplaceable place. New friends are wonderful people to grow with further and people to learn with. Leaving high school doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting your old friends for your new ones. They can exist in the same world.

Cliche as it is, it is much better to have a few valuable, sincere friends than it is to have a plethora of insincere, self-interested friends. Having those people there who will have your back no matter what is important for an individual’s self esteem, but those few valuable friends in your life should also know when to call you out on your shit.

And it is much better to realize the truth about your friendships than it is to go on, for months or even years, allowing a toxic friendship to consume your life. Nonetheless, bad friends are just as important as good friends, bizarre as that may sound.

Let’s start with the good friends... the ones who hold a special place in our hearts. Good friends never let you down, and when they do, they make it up to you regardless of how you feel about it.

Good friends are there, even when you fuck up. They’ll be there to forgive your fuck ups no matter what. They’ll have your back when you go to fix those problems.

Good friends understand life is hard, and are there to give you a shoulder to cry on or the necessary space one might need in a tough situation.

Good friends treat you like a person, with real emotions and feelings, rather than just a sort of metaphorical gumball machine -- they put a quarter in, and you give them something. Sometimes you give them two gumballs, and they only put one quarter in. They leave you alone unless they want something from you.

Good friends NEVER invalidate your feelings.

Good friends tell you when you’re wrong, but never stop loving you.

Good friends respect your ideas while still being able to discuss their ideas with you (again without invalidating them).

Good friends don’t give up.

And then there are the bad friends, who are arguably almost as important as the great people in your life. These bad friends start out like one of the good ones, and almost always end up making you feel like less of a person until you can speak up or until you’re fed up.

Bad friends ALWAYS invalidate your opinions or feelings, but later justify what they were doing to invalidate them with some lame excuse.

Lame excuses are a bad friend’s BFF. Sure, we all make excuses now and again, but a bad friend gives an excuse in a dire time of need. A bad friend will give you an excuse when you 100% know that excuse is just because he/she is busy and doesn’t want to deal with you.

Bad friends never treat you like a person. You are a gumball machine to this friend. They’ll use you until you’re all out of gumballs and move on to the next helpless machine, working it to death until its friendship is worthless. And it’s sad, because you’d do anything for this friend, but they might just blow you off without consideration.

Bad friends judge you. Period. And you would never judge them the way they ceaselessly judge you. Is judgment healthy sometimes? Sure. A handful of times, we find ourselves in situations we need a little bit of brute judgment on, especially from an outside party. More often than not, though, these bad friends do it because they can.

Bad friends make you feel like a bad friend.

So in making good friends and bad friends, we learn how to be better people. We learn, through friendship, how to live and to love. We learn, through friendship, how to be ourselves and how to be better people. So definitely appreciate the good ones you’ve made -- fight for those friends, overcome with them. And when you start to realize someone is a bad friend, let them go. Maybe he/she will be a good friend to someone else, but he/she will only continue to hurt you.