Friendship is showing someone themselves as many times as it takes them to see.
If you were to ask me 10 years ago what a friend is, I would have said something like “someone who you hang out with.”
At that point, my best examples of friends were really a bunch of people, just like me, who cared more about themselves than others. I had a few gems hidden among the rest but I couldn’t see them for who they were then.
It took several years to become fully self-aware. But those years yielded exponential growth. I came to realize that true friendship, true love, was best represented by the person who birthed me.
But from the example of that beautiful woman, I slowly began to see that all kinds of relationships were actually important to living a full life.
During my growing years I had cocooned myself--not a bad thing at all, but not a permanent thing either.
And it took me a long time--years--to let a very small group of people come around me and actually begin to pull me out of the metaphorical “home” I’d made to better myself in. The resounding concept was “you are done there.” But not just that, it was an exclamation…”look what you’ve become!”
Their eyes stared at me in astonishment but I couldn’t accept it, I wouldn’t accept it, and I tried to crawl back in to “grow more.” But it turns out that you do, eventually, outgrow the cocoon. And once you’ve outgrown it, you must move on. You must BE the thing that you were cocooned to become.
It is then completely and solely past-tense. It’s already happened. And these people so kindly pulled me out, acknowledged my change, and continually dragged me away from the old and now decaying cocoon.
“You can’t go back, but you GET to go forward.”
When I look back, their words echo… “look how beautiful you are.”
And I realized this is friendship.
Friendship is showing someone themselves as many times as it takes them to see.
And when they inevitably forget, you show them again.
Together we shine the light on the path forward. Alone, we remain in the dark.
And, oh, there is so much forward. So much to see. So much yet to birth.
To be continued.
