This is a true story.
It was the 15th of November at 5:55 AM when I realized that I should let my friendships finally die. What was I doing up this early?
Well — that was my routine — getting up at 5:50 so I can start getting ready to go to the hospital where we were having our anesthesiology lessons, it was an hour’s drive from my house.
No, I’m not saying this to earn empathy points or to flex in any way possible, it was my reality and I enjoyed it a lot.
At 5:55 AM, I opened my phone to text my friend that I got up and was getting ready to go meet him so we can go together to lesson.
The Text That Changed My Life
It was a video that my high-school friends had sent to our group chat, of them being away and partying. It was Tuesday.
My first reaction was to reply to that message, asking them why the fuck were they up this early partying? So I did.
To my surprise, they replied — half-drunk — saying that they were just enjoying life. This is when I knew I had to let my friends go…
Enough With This Pessimism
I hope that last sentence, touched you because I tried to make it extra dramatic.
The reality of the situation is that, at that moment, our entire dynamic changed. It was finally clear to me that even though we’ve created experiences that are worth telling to our grandchildren, we had finally chosen a different path in life.
AND THAT’S OKAY!
Before you continue reading, do me a favor and re-read that last sentence that I intentionally used caps for. Okay?
I know you didn’t do it so let me continue by saying…
IT’S OKAY to choose a different path and move on.
IT’S OKAY to be alone
IT’S OKAY to move on to new things and find new friends while having respect and love for your past friends.
Life is supposed to be a complete shit show.
As my favorite superhero Deadpool once said:
Life is an endless series of trainwrecks with only brief, commercial-like breaks of happiness.
Why Is That Even Necessary?
Thank you for asking kind stranger. Get ready to be amazed… here’s a little wisdom my mom shared with me after that texting incident.
Are you ready?
Letting your friends go and moving on means that you’re evolving into something better.
Are you evolving in a positive way or a negative way? Nobody knows, but the important part is that you’re evolving. Evolving means change and change brings us closer to our true selves. One way or another whichever choice you’ve made in your life, led you here, reading this article, wondering why a random stranger online is making you feel funny down there.
I mean in your heart man come on.
The more we learn to accept change, the easier we’ll be able to move forward and find our true selves.
Allow Me to Paint You a Picture With My Imagination Brush.
You’re walking through a forest without knowing where you actually want to end up. Let’s think of this forest like I don’t know — Hm… — your life.
After a couple of hours, you find some random people that are also walking through this forest. For no reason whatsoever, you think they’re cool and you decide to walk together — again without any clear destination.
Another hour of walking, talking, and laughing passes and you end up getting your face smacked by a big branch of leaves. Since those leaves are also part of the forest — let’s just say you just got smacked in the face by life.
You grab your big machete (yes you were carrying one the entire time), you cut those leaves like you’re starring in an Indiana Jones film and you get blinded by the light.
Damn the sun is bright… After you stop being blind you see that the path you were walking is splitting into two other paths.
Those people you were having so much fun with decide to go left, but you get this inside feeling that you should go right.
Yeah, you’ll be by yourself and yeah, it’ll be scary at first — even though you’re carrying a big ass machete — but your intuition says otherwise.
It says that you’ll be able to get through.
So… What Do You Do?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Jamie Street on Unsplash