Scattered Pieces: some thoughts on friendship and identity

True friends love you so much that they are willing to forfeit their friendship with you so that you will be better off. True friends don’t come and go with the tides, wash in and wash out. True friends aren’t fair-weather friends, they are all-weather friends standing by you in the storm, holding their arms out above you so that they will get struck by lighting, not you. People sell out their few priceless real friends for an abundance of thrift store friends… you get what you pay for, but that doesn’t always mean you get a refund if you ask for one. True friendships are formed when you are willing to be a true friend before the other person is willing to do so. Stop selling out your one true friend for a dozen that when combined don’t even make up for half of the friend your real friend is.

Now that I’m in college it’s like “Myspace” playing out in real life: people want to add as many people to their “friend’s list” as they can, not really caring how well they know these people. People are thrown out of their normal social environments. They need comradeship, and they seek it out in other people, not caring what the price is that they have to pay. People are willing to assimilate themselves into a world that a few days ago would have been alien to them all for the sake of “fitting in.”

But when people try to fit in, what exactly are they doing? Imagine an enormous jig-saw puzzle with one piece missing. You are a puzzle piece, but your edges just don’t match the space. You cut your edges and sides to fit into the puzzle, thus making it complete. You smile with those around you feeling a warm fuzzy feeling of belonging, when all along you can’t see that the entire puzzle is a picture of the ground, and your piece somehow stands out from the rest of the pieces. Your face, the one you cannot see, is the one missing piece of the cloud jig-saw puzzle lying only three paces to the left of the ground one you are now in. You were supposed to be a bird, but you settled on painting your face brown to be a piece of dirt. But at least you fit in now, right?

So many people go into new social environments with one of two attitudes.

The first is that over-enthusiastic gleeful attitude of benediction:

“I’m going to be the star of the show!” “
“People are just going to be on their hands and knees begging me to sign their autographs.”
“I’m the life of the party and everyone knows it.”
“I set the trends.”
“I’m the one everyone wants to be friends with.”
“I’m always the MVP, the first picked for everything, the last to be made fun of.”

This social giant knows that he will never walk alone down strange alleys at night. He will always have gads of friends circling him, chatting with him, laughing with him, and emulating his every gesture.

The second attitude is that in-the-shadows-of-night-without-a-moon-to-see sort of anxiety that creeps under goosebumped-skin:

“No one likes me.”
“I’ll be alone.”
“Everyone hates me.”
“I’ll be lucky to have one friend… and even he will hate me.”
“I’m the one that is always picked last for everything, the last one asked to go to fun things, the last one noticed, the last one talked to, the last one to be cheered up, the first one to cry inside around a world that shouts at me ‘Get over yourself!’”

I think I hold things inside, the inner monologue of a wounded soldier who never really was brave enough to defend himself from the ceaseless barrage of the jagged daggers of words spoken in whispers, and shouted from across rooms by people who thought I couldn’t hear, or didn’t care if I could. I am that second person, walking around with the emotional baggage of a lifetime, trying to play another deck of colorful emotions. It’s always the slight of hand that fools people, that makes them take three steps back when they see the laughing kid stop laughing, stop talking, stop looking anywhere but down− down to the colorless ground.

Somewhere in the midst of all the drugs and the drinking and the sex that happens here people loose themselves, trying to follow the instruction manuals of pop culture: television, the internet, friends. Friends are the oldest interactive pop culture influencers and imposers. We all try to act like “peer pressure” is something of the past, like we are “better than that” now, like we’re “older” now. People try to find themselves, forgetting that they knew who they were before the music got too loud and the images got too bright. They are looking for something that they already had, but they have cut off their arms and legs to fit into the jig-saw puzzle that called them so alluringly, and now they ask themselves, “Why can’t I move? Why doesn’t this feel right?”

Don’t compromise. Don’t settle. Don’t sell out your true friends. You know who you are, you’re just too afraid to stand up in the crowd of people sitting down, because that would mean you would have to be different, and that people would look at you and they just might judge you. They might laugh at you. They might even despise you. They might all look away from you. But as you stand up, the miraculous happens: someone else across the sea of sitting bodies, sees you, and they slowly rise to their feet too.