Sophia says …
Navigating friendships in adulthood wasn’t something I ever thought would be particularly difficult. I got very lucky and had a pretty tight friend group my last few years of high school, something I definitely took for granted at that moment. My first year of college, I really struggled with the change to my childhood friendships that the distance caused. Especially because I grew up in a small town, never having moved, my friends pretty much remained the same.
Graduation day marked a change in our relationships, a change that would’ve happened no matter where we all ended up for college. About two months after the initial excitement of freshman orientation and meeting so many new people, I began to really miss those friendships that I had nurtured over the past decade. I found myself yearning for that shared history, those niche references and inside jokes.
It was difficult to find the time to keep up with everyone back home while also trying my best to make new friendships, especially when my life was unfolding seven hours in the future and thousands of miles from Minnesota. But that was last year.
The phrase “all good things take time” frequently circulates in my mind, because that is simply what cured my longing for true friendship. Closeness isn’t something you can speak into existence. It takes time to get to know new people, especially when those people share none of the same childhood experiences as you.
Of course, my high school best friends and I are not going to have the same relationship now as we did when we spent eight hours a day together for seven months of the year. It’s a blessing that we can now listen to each other’s insane stories about those annoying neighbors, or about the amazing professor whose office hours are always booked.
While I have been feeling especially lucky recently because of how many incredible friendships I have here in Prague and also back home, that’s not the reason I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship. That’s all thanks to an experience I had when I was home this winter.
Over break, I spent a day with my grandma and was invited to be a part of her Wednesday morning tradition: coffee with her former coworkers. The group of six all worked together at the hospital, and shared so much of their lives with one another.
They experienced being newlyweds together, their first pregnancies, motherhood, and everything in between. Now their conversations include mention of grandchildren rather than children, and instead of a story about the field trip they volunteered to chaperone, there are tales from a recent cruise around Alaska.
And it isn’t the clinic walls that bounce their sound back, but the wood-paneled coffee shop where they meet, but the bonds of friendship are still there. Seeing my grandma and her friends, still making the time for one another over four decades later, calmed my worries about changing friendship dynamics in my own life.
Hopefully one day I’ll be laughing over coffee with my friends from previous decades, in awe of just how much life we’ve lived.
