Take everything that I have to say with a pinch of salt. I’m still learning. I have only barely mastered how to breathe.

By 24 you will have experienced many sides of what it means to open your heart to friendship. You will most definitely have felt betrayed and you will in your time have acted in ways that can only be considered less than loyal. 

By now, you may be asking yourself, and not for the first time, what friendship means. Here is what, at 24, it means to me. 

Life is long. Life is hard. Life can be, and has been at many times for me, very lonely. 

In the earlier days I thought friends to be those that make the days feel shorter and the journey a little easier, by filling the silence with a little laughter.

At another stage I thought friends to be those people you readily turn to when your own help is not enough. When you first begin to realise how limited your powers truly are. 

Now, at 24. And again, take this with a pinch of salt as it may only ring true for a few moments early one morning in the first few days of April.

Friendship is a matter of whose pain and suffering you are willing to take on alongside your own. 

Knowing how much your heart has to give and making the difficult decision of where to place it. Deciding who to show up for, who it is finally time to let go of and reminding yourself to in caring for your friends, be kind to yourself. Acknowledging that a kindness afforded to yourself may very well require some degree of apathy and even cruelty towards the plight of another. One who you may in that moment cease to call

“Friend”