Post Friendship

There’s a special grief in losing our friendships. That birthday text you stop expecting. The drives by the restaurant with the special memories from dinners long gone. The empty Friday plans that for so long had their spot secured. The pang of stepping on that empty space once filled with love and laughter, is so very dear.

I have a special place in my heart for the clients who grieve the loss of the friendship, and on top of that, heap shame on top of themselves for the dissolution. 

My early twenties were truly one of the most confusing and life-changing times in my life. I was in grad school. I was single. Then I was not single. Then I was single again. I was dependent. I was codependent. I was independent. I was an adult. I was a child. I was beginning to start counseling people. I was in counseling. I had friendships. I lost friendships; and these were not flimsy friendships. These were deep friendships that I truly never would have seen ending. 

It feels dramatic to say but these lost friendships felt like breakups. I recently finished David Brooks’ beautiful work, How to Know a Person. He writes about the early twenties as being this interpersonal phase of development where “friendships and social status become the central obsession in our lives.” In other words, our twenties are marked by an intense need for interpersonal belonging. To have is heaven, to have not is hell. He goes on to write, “To lose a friend, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, or a spouse is to lose your very self; the source of your approval and value.”

I grieved these relational losses for a long time. Years. It took a while of being angry and working through grief to accept the loss. It took even longer to accept and grieve the fact that I contributed at times.

Brooks goes on to write, “Thrown back onto herself by a breakup, she becomes aware of the limitations of this level of consciousness. She realizes that while she treasures relationships, she can’t be embedded and controlled by them. She has to embark on another life task.”

My next task, as Brooks laid out, in grieving these friendships was to understand how my grief could be transformational. In listening to my grief, and sitting with my grief, I learned invaluable life lessons in post friendship.

I have a friend who I no longer speak to that taught me how to be an adult. I’ll carry that lesson forever.

I have a friend who I no longer see that taught me how to be a thoughtful friend. I carry her friendship with me into all the times I send a message, a card, or a meal, to a hurting friend. 

I have a friend who I no longer know that showed me that sometimes the best way to love them is from afar. I learned that it is safer to have a friendship with boundaries than one without. 

I have a friend who I think of often that taught me that good things don’t come from trying to control.

To be a good friend, I have to be a healthy person myself, and lowered expectations is a kindness to myself and my friends. 

I’m embarrassed to say that it took me the majority of my twenties to figure out friendships. And even in my thirties, I know I will never fully arrive. All I can do is show up in my friendships now, transformed by the lessons that life post friendship taught me. I will also still grieve some of these friends for a long time, maybe forever. 

To also be completely fair to myself, there’s also friends that I won’t grieve. I see the blessing in the ending and can live in complete peace that I no longer see their name pop up on my phone. Friendships will always be something I value and hold extremely dear, and I will also continue to hold them in balance.

So yes. The grief is still there. The grief is a reminder. It’s a reminder for me to be healthy. It’s a reminder for me to choose my values. It’s also a reminder that friendship is a gift, and it’s also okay for it to be for a season, and things held too tightly are meant to be released. It’s a reminder that I have the friends that will have the conflict, and we will be closer because of it, not despite it. 

They say that you can only meet people as far as you’ve met yourself. I want to meet my grief well. I want to be transformed by it. Because after all the role of a therapist is not to help guide people away from their pain, but to accept their pain. In accepting in, they can learn that they do have the strength to face the grief, welcome it in, and in doing so, transform themselves.