Change Edition – An Optimistic Look at How Friendships and Friend Groups Evolve: A Memoir

As of right now, I am in an excellent headspace regarding all of my friendships both past and present, and I’m excited to take this opportunity to brag about the people who contribute to everything that is good about my life and to boast just a little bit about my ability to disconnect from people who did the opposite yet still called themselves my friends. 

I was an antisocial small child who always gravitated more towards adults rather than towards people in my own age range, so my experience with friendship prior to attending Tom McCall was somewhat limited. However, from what I remember the few kids with whom I connected always treated me well, and some of them I still consider to be my honorary siblings in the present day. The two kids who lived next door to me until I was in middle school, one of whom is now a freshman in college and the other of whom is a sophomore in high school, are still two of my most beloved friends, and I love that I get to see them every weekend and every weekday, respectively. 

There are plenty of people who I met in kindergarten or in first grade with whom I still share classes by virtue of remaining in the same school district for 13 years, some of whom I’m closer to than others. One of them is also an editor for The Advocate, one of them is in my choir and a couple of my AP classes, and one of them I sometimes exchange rants with at our lunch table. Although we don’t spend too much time together outside of school, their friendships still bring me a lot of happiness. Yet another old friend moved into the house next door to mine in the middle of one summer or another and I absolutely love that she and her brother are now my daily carpooling buddies.

It was while I was in 5th and 6th grade that I belonged to a large group of friends for the first time where I would consistently spend my recesses playing games and breaking rules with my friends who I absolutely adored. We played tag either on the field that was supposed to be reserved for the boys who wanted to play an organized sport or wherever was just out of sight of the recess monitors. As I recall, though, we never got into too much trouble because it was also my friends and I who were trusted to learn the most complex vocabulary words and to do it outside of the classroom at that. When I would attend sleepovers with the friends I met in 5th and 6th grade we would actually enjoy each other’s company instead of getting caught up in our technology, which was a drastic change in my experiences with sleepovers and one of the reasons why I started feeling motivated to spend time with my friends outside of school. There were ten of us, myself included, in that friend group, and only two of them I have never grown apart from.

Middle school was the truly tumultuous time in my life in terms of friendships. For much of my 7th-grade year, I spent too much of my time with someone I had a crush on who would turn out to be a pretty awful person when I should’ve been maximizing my time with my real friends. I consider myself extremely fortunate that my friends were more forgiving than I would have been if in their shoes. In 8th grade, two friends of mine who’d been friends with each other for a long time put an end to their relationship which made me, their collateral damage, quite cynical for quite a while. Once again I was very fortunate to have the rest of my friends by my side in our geometry class and our newspaper club throughout that time. Between 7th and 8th grade there was a lot of turnover in terms of who I spent my time with, for there were five of us among whom geometry formed a strangely strong bond while some of my friends from Tom McCall were moving away and others were just developing interests drastically different from mine. 

I entered high school alongside those four other geometry lovers who would continue to keep me afloat throughout all the less glamorous elements of high school, including multiple toxic friendships which the pandemic of all things would give me the opportunity to put an end to once and for all. The fact that those toxic friendships are no more has made my senior year the best school year I’ve experienced so far. I also have more classes with my closest friends this year than I did during any previous year of high school, in fact, only one of my eight classes doesn’t contain a single person I feel close to, and even in that class, there are half a dozen people who I do like very much. 

Nowadays I consider myself to be a genuine extrovert with many true friends and many more acquaintances who I refer to as friends when I tell stories about our limited interactions with my parents or other people who’ve never met them. However, there are only so many people who I can talk to about literally anything, and those are the people to whom I’d like to dedicate this article.