Grieving the Loss of a Friendship

 If you asked me to identify a few of my most significant friendships over the years, there's a handful that come to mind. My sister was obviously my first best friend, as most of us with older siblings can relate. Siblings are the friends that we never knew we needed, right? My bestie in kindergarten was Natalie, who is also one of the strongest women I know today. Our friendship is one that doesn't need constant attention or nurturing, but whenever one of us needs the other, I know she's got me and vice versa. Our friendship is built on admiration and a lifetime of love. In late elementary school and middle school, I'd say Denise, Sarah and Katie were my closest friends. They are all women I am still in contact with today, even though some of that is from afar, there is always love and admiration for those friendships that help us survive the teenage years. Add Tara, Nikki and Tina in there as a few more amazing and strong women I met in high school and still have much love for today. Our friendships are not ones that need constant get-togethers or phone calls, but they all know that I will always be here for them, and I know that our bond will stand the test of time, no matter how infrequently we may actually see each other face-to-face. During my first marriage, we had a group of couple friends, and some of those women are people I adore to this day. Others have experienced an end to the friendship, and I still mourn the loss of some of those that were very significant through some of the toughest times of my life, but I understand and accept that our life journeys have taken a different route. I'm grateful for those memories and the times that we had together, and I wish those women nothing but the very best. I also have mom friends that I have met over the last 10 years since we moved to our current neighborhood, and a few of them hold a very special place in my heart because of the ups and downs we've experienced together in motherhood. Some have moved away, and I don't talk to them in real life anymore, but I always will hold love and respect for those women too. 

And then there is the friendship that has been a soft place to land for close to two decades, but also a very emotionally-charged friendship almost since the beginning. It's one of those friendships that you know was meant to be a part of your life, but sometimes, the path that we are each on and the things that we hold dear and want to protect and preserve are no longer in alignment with one another. This friendship for me has had a lot of ups and downs, highs and lows. We've had periods of not speaking to each other because one of us misspoke and offended the other, or life happened and we were each going through it in our own way. We've spent long weekends or weeks together on vacation since we live in different states, and we've gone months and even years without speaking. We met through a mutual friend and instantly clicked, and she's been a friend that I can tell anything to over the years, a friend that I can't imagine not having in my life. I know I've been that for her too. 

There are things in this friendship that make me sad. I regret not being there for her as much as I should have when her mom passed away suddenly 13 years ago tomorrow. I had just married Nick a couple of weeks prior to her mom's passing, and there were a lot of hurt feelings around my wedding and her role in that day. She has shut me out for various reasons over the years, and I've done the same. There have been things I've missed out on in her life, and moments she's missed out on in mine. At the end of the day, I will always have love for her, but the past few months have taught me a few things. Sobriety and my immediate family are my number one priorities.  Spending quality time with my grandmother, my parents, my siblings and my nieces and nephews comes next in line. Refocusing on my career and taking care of myself (self-care might look different to some of you, but for me, it's getting a lot of sleep, reading quit lit, walking and moving my body every day, eating well, and getting my nails done regularly) are also at the top of my priority list as I head into the New Year. Creating solid relationships with people who share in my priorities, including sobriety, is also important. My sober community has been huge in helping me along the way these past few months. 

Ultimately, what I've learned over the past few months is that sometimes, we have to let go of friendships in order to be the most authentic version of ourselves. Sometimes, we have to grieve the loss of a friendship, and stop chasing the expectations of what someone else wants us to be. It hurts, and it's painful, but I know that this is the healthiest choice for me and my sobriety. It's funny, I used to think that drinking was my coping mechanism to deal with the stress of parenting, and I made it about surviving versus appreciating the mundane things in the everyday about parenting and marriage and life. I turned to friends and people that would tell me that what I was doing was ok, when really, I was destroying my body, my mental health, my marriage, and my relationship with my kids. One of the newest quit lit books I'm reading currently is How to Eat to Change How You Drink by Dr. Brooke Scheller, and it goes into the science behind why some people have a problem with gray area drinking and how our body chemistry and nutrition play a role in unhealthy drinking habits. As I learn more about the science behind my unhealthy relationship with drinking, I see links in my unhealthy relationships as well. The relationships I tried to destroy because they didn't align with my bad choices (to drink specifically) were the ones I should have been trying to save all along, not the friendships that were adding to my unhealthy life choices. In trying to justify my drinking choices, I was choosing all of the wrong things to focus on in other areas of my life. 

As I look towards a future of being authentically me, pursuing things that uplift me and creating positive side effects in my life rather than hangovers and feelings of guilt, I am not going to continue to chase a friendship that has done more to create negativity and feelings of failure for me. I'm going to honor the friendship and what it has been for me over the past 20 years, but I am not going to prioritize it over my mental health, sobriety, career, marriage, or my relationship with my kids. If the friendship comes back at some point and is a positive addition to the new world of authenticity that I'm creating, awesome. If not, I will let it go and stop holding on to it so tightly that it can't breathe, and therefore, can't survive. I will grieve the loss of that friendship while still being grateful for the beautiful memories that we've created together. I will always think of this friend with love and gratitude, but also with an understanding that maybe sometimes, we grow apart from people as we grow towards becoming our best selves.