It’s about that time, y’all.
Time to talk about friendships!
This is something that I’ve struggled with for most of my life up until recently, so I figured it was time to share how to navigate successfully.
Friendship is one of the most valuable things you can have in this world and is essentially the baseline for any good relationship.
The best romantic partners are friends as well, the best family ties include you liking your family member in addition to loving them, and so on and so forth.
And although you shouldn’t be too dependent on others, we all need people to lean on sometimes, so having a good circle of friends is a necessity.
I can honestly say with a clear conscious that my current friend group is solid, but it definitely wasn’t always this way.
I wasn’t always the boisterous and blunt person that I am today, I was very timid in a lot of ways growing up.
I got bullied as a child and was very fearful of speaking up because I wanted people to like me. (People Pleaser Guilt 101: https://themelaninperspective.com/2020/01/28/people-pleaser-guilt/)
Naturally, I became a doormat for a lot of people, especially certain “friends”.
As I grew older, though, I began to develop more of a voice and a backbone, but I noticed that most of my friendships were still lacking.
For one, I couldn’t understand how I always attracted the crazies.
Now for clarification purposes, I mean those people that are very impulsive and always caught up in some mess.
Despite my thuggish ways, I am a huge empath, so that probably had a lot to do with these friendships.
I was always the “mom” of the group, providing the rational perspective for those in need.
But hardly anyone was providing a rational perspective for me.
God blessed me with a lot of common sense and the ability to think things through (sometimes too much), so I may not have ended up in as many wacky scenarios, but that doesn’t mean I still didn’t need support or guidance.
I often use to wonder when the tables would turn, and I would be the one who could purge my erratic emotions.
It wasn’t until I reconnected with a close childhood friend in high school that I really saw a shift.
She was crazy too, but crazy in the same way that I was in terms of perceptions and aspirations.
But even then, that was the only one who I felt completely in tune with, all my other friendships were still lacking in unidentified areas.
Life went on, and I met someone else my freshman year of college who I felt a similar connection with, but our friendship had its own identity, which was refreshing.
Most friendships still weren’t clicking, though.
Then 2019 hit, and I began elevating throughout the process of creating this blog and making connections to aid my career goals.
Not literally elevating (even though that’d be so dope) or elevating in a way that makes me think I’m better than other people.
I’m talking about elevation in the form of clarity.
It’s something about honing in on a dream that provides laser-sharp vision for all the other areas of your life.
I realized that most of my friendships were lacking because I did not properly assign each friend a purpose in my life.
Now this sounds so conceited, but it is necessary if you want to continue to level up in your life.
The issue with me was, I assigned all my friends as the “all-around” friend.
The all-around friend is someone that you can go to for pretty much anything, and y’all will be in alignment at the core of the matter.
I was setting myself up for disappointment.
I was placing too much responsibility on someone who couldn’t manage all of me.
Let me provide a clear example.
Although there is absolutely nothing wrong with someone not going to college, I can’t expect my friends who’ve never been to school to understand how difficult it is to juggle that with work and everything else life brings on.
For those that aren’t entrepreneurs, I can’t expect them to understand how much work goes into the smallest things like Instagram posts and email transactions.
On the other end, I have a few friends who are mothers.
I haven’t the slightest clue what all goes into being a parent, that’s a full-time job with no contracts and no time off.
Now hear me clear when I say you don’t have to have identical lives with someone for them to be considered a top-tier friend; if you click with someone, you just click.
However, factors such as the ones I listed above play a huge role in the type of individual someone is, i.e. what type of friend they are.
Once I had this epiphany, things became much better for me.
My feelings weren’t hurt as much, I spent less time over-thinking things, and I felt a lot more solid.
I’m a type-A personality, so putting friendships in categories was the perfect solution.
There’s the all-around friend, and then you have these other types.
The Intellectual Friend: someone who provides smart conversation and credible insight
The Party Friend: someone to go out with
The Leisure Friend: someone who has similar hobbies/interests
The Goofy Friend: someone who can make you laugh
The School Friend: a classmate to help keep you up to date with work and keep you sane
The Work Friend: a co-worker who does the same as a school friend, just in the workplace
The Entrepreneurial Friend: a fellow brand owner that can identify with the life of being a CEO
This list can go on and on.
The point is that everyone in your life should serve a specific purpose.
You just have to take the time to identify what that is.
And if you can’t identify something progressive, then they don’t need to be in your life.
But we’ll tackle that next week!
Let me know what you think of this first installment of the Let’s Talk About Friendships Series in the comments below and on our social media pages!
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