On Friendship

“A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.”
― Lois Wyse

Hi and happy Tuesday! I hope you all had a fantastic weekend! I sure did and I can't wait to fill you in. My life-long best friend's brother got hitched this weekend and I have lots of great photos and stories from the bachelorette party and the wedding. I plan to share all of that with you tomorrow, but in the meantime, I want to talk about friendship.

See, because of the wedding, I was able to spend every waking (and sleeping) moment of my 4-day weekend with my best friend in the whole world, Taryn. We've been friends since we were 5-years-old and while we have had our ups and downs, our friendship has always been a constant in my life. She lives in Atlanta and works in film production, so we go months without seeing each other and when we do see each other, it's usually a quick dinner or coffee date on her way out of town. With loads of family staying at her parents' house, we planned to have her stay with me for the whole weekend and we had lots of fun wedding activities to keep us busy and drunk.

When we are together, we kind of enter our own little world. If I'm causing a scene, she is right next to me doing it, too. If I discover there is a stripper pole at the bar, you bet she is right there with me to give it a try (more on this later...). We can often be seen in public causing a scene because we can't stop laughing about something that nobody else thinks is funny. With me always running late and her always running later, we are usually frantically rushing to wherever we are off to when we are together. For example, on Saturday we had a packed schedule to prepare for the wedding that afternoon. We had errands to run for the bride and hair appointments to get to. Upon waking up and commenting on how we needed to get ready and get on our way, we instead chose to go to brunch and proceeded to get lost in mimosas and conversation until we only had an hour to get to our hair appointments. This is us. We are quirky and wild when we are apart, but when we are together we are a force to be reckoned with.

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If you're like me, you're probably lucky enough to have some great friends. If you're even luckier, you have a few select friends who just get you. And even when they don't get you, they support you. You can be honest with them and trust they won't judge. They are there when other people run away. You can laugh with them (and at them) and when things aren't okay, they are there to listen, cry and sit with you in silence if that's what you need.

They are the friends you can go weeks, even months, without seeing or speaking to, and the moment you are reunited, you pick up right where you left off. These friendships are so rare and so wonderful. They are a constant in a world full of surprises and unexpected changes.

Taryn is one of those friends to me, though I am lucky enough to have a few. It's interesting to see how friendship changes in adulthood. You become totally okay with having a few very close friends and lots of aquaintances. You become a little less tolerant of people you can't rely on and you are okay with letting those friendships fade. You understand that you can't please everyone and not everyone is going to like you and that is okay.

Adulthood has it's challenges...challenges we never could have understood as teenagers. Let's be sure to always be grateful for the friendships we rely on to be with us through the good, blissfully happy, bad, devastating, wild, drunken, silly and crazy times of our lives.