Full disclosure, I post here every week because it is an assignment for a digital communications class (which I adore). That doesn’t mean that I don’t love writing, or don’t thrive off of letting my creativity go free, but sometimes I struggle to find something to write about. This week, I struggled harder than I had before. I was scrolling all of my social profiles looking for something that might inspire me. I even googled “news” to see what came up, I was that out of ideas.
That’s when I stumbled upon an NPR interview with science writer Lydia Denworth on the second results page from Google. The interview was titled, “Survival of the Friendliest: How Our Close Friendships Help Us Thrive.” The first line reads, “Lydia Denworth wants you to make more time for your friends.” Wow.
When I read this line, I sat back and reflected for a few minutes about what I had been doing all weekend while trying to come up with ideas for this piece. I am a classic procrastinator, and whenever I am longing for ideas, I text, facetime, snapchat a handful of my friends. They’re all wonderful and are used to me reaching out with my writer’s block. But what I realized is just how lucky I am to be in these friendships, and how each of them is so different and special to me, especially now.
The last year, and in particular the last few months of my life have been full of rapid transition for my brain. This change came as I learned about and worked to accept the fact that I have an anxiety disorder, which was slowly but surely eating up me and my personal life.
I have always been deemed the mom friend of my various groups, checking in on everyone and offering love and advice like a confetti canon. But when dealing with my own things, I felt like a failure. I felt that I wasn’t nourishing my friendships enough. Of course, my friends understood. They came to my rescue, checking in, offering an abundance of support. I am incredibly lucky.
My career is completely built off of communicating and teaching others how to communicate effectively through various channels to build relationships. Until now, I haven’t thought about the fact that this deeply connects into my personal relationships with my friends. You know your friends, you’re available to them, open with them, all things that I would advise a brand to do with their audience or publics. Don’t worry, I’m not here to try and compare meaningful friendships to money making partnerships in the corporate world. I just mean that communication and understanding key into every single aspect of our lives. There is no avoiding it. I have never been happier than I am right now, while connected with people who love me and build me up while I work to do the same for myself.
Lydia Denworth tells NPR that friendships are actually vital to our health, something I have noticed recently. She says, “… there’s this evolutionary drive to connect. People think all the time about competition and survival of the fittest, but really it’s survival of the friendliest.” My friendships have become form of survival for me. When I began treating my anxiety, I knew I needed to make an effort to be a “person” again and leave my house. I leaned on my friends and slowly but surely got to a point where my days were filled with good, happy moments and much less worry.
Finding a core group of supporters takes time and it isn’t always something that you find instantly upon arriving to college. I met some people my first year who I never spoke to again, it happens.
The students I work with always tell me that this is a struggle for them, finding their place. Finding your friends is always the goal that people come to college with, that’s one of the biggest selling points of the whole thing. We often feel like failures when we don’t find that group right away, or when it changes.
You make friends and keep them by allowing yourself to prioritize them, and therefore prioritizing yourself, to Denworth’s point. You find those people slowly but surely, and then work to keep them. I am so guilty of not slowing down and making time for other people, and my friends are the same sometimes. These last couple months, I have made a strong effort to reach out to my people, and I am the happiest and healthiest I have been because of it! I’ve reconnected with old friends, made new efforts to spend time with others. My personal connections have made me really start living life again, not just surviving it.
Like Denworth and NPR said, I’m thriving, and it truly is thanks to my friendships.
Read the interview here.
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