Together, Forever

When people tell you that the best things in life are free, you're not always in a position to hear it. If you were a teen in the early 2000's then the best things in life were boys and lip gloss and anything from the Body Shop and mini denim skirts and the movie 'A Walk to Remember' and Napoleon Perdis make up and those weird, thick woven belts we used to wear. Everything you cared about at that time had a price, including boys. Especially, boys. There may not have been money involved but messing around with them always cost us something - our confidence, our hearts, our fragile little minds. It seems like a steep price to pay for an adolescent crush…until you realise that life has always dealt in emotional currency and we have no choice but to spend it.

The question is - how do we get it back?

There isn’t a day that goes by where we aren’t wheeling and dealing in emotional exchanges. Shitty day at work? Anger and resentment through the roof. About to get your period? Everyone needs to die. Your friend just got some dick? Yaaaaaaas Queen. Someone’s birthday? Excitement. Someone’s funeral? Devastation. Throughout our lives we pay a price to feel and if we’re not being attentive, we could soon find the scales tipping against our favour. You might know it as deep sadness and hurt or anger or betrayal or anxiety and stress but I like to refer to it as emotional bankruptcy. It’s that point in time where you simply have nothing more to give. Not even to yourself. You know those unavoidable moments in life where you think it couldn’t possibly get any worse? A string of bad luck, a really shitty year, right place/wrong time, the good guy who turned out to be the worst guy, the loss of a parent, the loss of a spouse, money troubles, relationship woes, separation, divorce, your kids telling you they hate you and the list goes on. In these moments of feeling down and out I just don’t know if self-love can cut it. Is it a major key? Absolutely. But how many times can we pick ourselves up off the ground before we need a helping hand. And how nice is it when that help is only a phone call, a text, a 20-minute drive (or 3-hour plane trip in my case) away from being the lifeline that we need. Even ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ knew that when in doubt, you should phone a friend. I wholeheartedly agree.

Individually and collectively my friends and I have been through some shit, but who hasn’t. There isn’t a single person on this planet who can say they’ve lived a life of uninterrupted joy. And if they do, you can take comfort in the fact that they’re lying.

When a severely unhinged person in high school wasn’t being very nice to me, two of my friends wrote me a card and brought me my favourite snacks to tell me how much they loved me. When my Stepdad died, my girlfriends sat with me on the couch while I spoke about him and cried. When I was cutting a narcissistic psychopath out of my life, my best friend had my back no questions asked. I have the kind of friends who send me ideas for my blog, offer to pay me when I help with wedding speeches and encourage me to write books. They’re the same friends who rally around when someone’s going through a tough time, who’ll hold your baby so you can enjoy your meal and who really mean it when they say “If you need anything, I’m here”. And because of all the ways in which these women come to my literal rescue, there isn’t a thing I wouldn’t do for them in return.

If I know you like something, it may end up on your front doorstep. Whether it be a healthier version of milo (because I’m about that life), some skincare that I think you should try, your favourite donuts while you’re cramming for law exams, a chilli oil brand you haven’t heard of, crocs for your kids or chocolate ‘just because’. Maybe I’ve turned up at your house with your favourite champagne or sent you flowers on your Dad’s anniversary. Maybe I’m the person you messaged at midnight during a panic attack or the one you called when you had a secret nobody else would understand. If you’re my best friend I’m the one who’ll step in front of you when it’s time to fight or almost break my back climbing your fence or piggyback you around Bali or kayak your ass to shore when we made the poor decision to head out before a storm. I’m also the person who will comfort you when you’re grieving, reassure you the other girl really is a 0/10 and tell you the truth about those shoes with that dress. And the only reason I can be all of these things is because I know we’re travelling down a two-way street. One of the fundamental pillars of my friendships is that when it comes to emotional currency, I’m never in a deficit for long. These women are out here paying my debts to get me back to equilibrium. They’re also blowing up the WhatsApp group with thinly veiled threats against moles we don’t like…but we’ve all got that one group chat we wouldn’t want the cops to see. That’s how you know the love is real.  

As you get older your threshold for anything surface level diminishes. To put it simply, you run out of fucks to give. You’re not interested in being a loose change friend who gets treated like a gap filler. You don’t have time for emotional vampires who leave you for dead. Anyone insecure enough to treat you like competition gets put in the bin. Those women who still think they’re on the “popular table” at high school get very boring, very quickly. As a matter of fact, they were always boring. You just didn’t know it at the time. I’m sick of seeing women worship other women who treat them like absolute shit. I’m sick of seeing women who think so little of themselves that they put up with such poor treatment from people purporting to be their friends. I used to be that girl. Enduring toxic friendships simply because they’d existed for so long and it felt like a waste to cut them loose. Spoiler alert – it wasn’t. Take the fucking trash out. Set it on fire. Never look back. Oprah famously said that you simply cannot be friends with someone who is jealous of you and honey, she wasn’t lying.

You’re not a teenager anymore and the best things in life don’t come from the Body Shop nor will you find them in the Canterbury shorts that Johnny insists you put your hand down. They come from those mundane moments on the couch when you and your friends can’t stop laughing about that guy you kissed when you were bored. Or the competition you made up in your head to give the fastest blow jobs ever. They come from reliving the night you had to share a bunk with a severely obese man in Greece. Or the prostitute den moonlighting as a hotel that you stayed at in London. If you play your cards right, every ounce of emotional currency you had no choice but to give away will come back to you tenfold. Because you will have spent the better part of your life cultivating friendships with women who pour into you every chance they get. And they won’t do it with fake smiles and fake invitations to fake events that you don’t want to attend. They’ll do it with dumb memes and funny reels while they text you from the toilet because Indian leftovers were a really bad choice.

To the women who call me from the shitter – you girls keep me young, I love you so much.

With love, always

J