No Friends for Me, Only Family

There are thousands of stereotypes about high schoolers, although one of the most prominent ones is that high schoolers think in the short-term. They get into relationships that won’t last and are expected to last, they spend their money the second they get paid, and they put off their homework so that they might enjoy a short-term luxury. For the most part this is true, however, I like to believe that I am an exception to that stereotype for several reasons. First, I will say that I am a victim of the latter, often putting homework aside to hang out with friends, watch a movie, play video games, or just talk with my family. However, I tend to view most other aspects of high school life in the long-term. I save as much money as I can for college, and I don’t make relationships for the hell of it, I intend for them to last long after high school. By high school standards though, friends are lucky to still be friends a couple years after graduation and generally, friends are just there, never really getting too involved or invested in one another. They will deal with surface problems but never get down to the core. This is where I differ the most because I want relationships that last a lot longer than high school friendships do. Most comparably, I want my true friendships to be more than friendships and be more like an entire another family. This family gets pretty deep into subjects to see what the real issue is, and we are there for each other any time one of us needs it. It is such a deep relationship that I joke that I have bromances, basically, guys that I have this deep connection with, although it has been taken in other ways before, to which I just make more jokes about it.

This last year I have had to rely more and more upon my family and less on typical high school friends. Right before the end of the last school year, I had my main relationship shatter in an explosive matter all around me. It left me in a pretty dark place, and I scrambled to pull everyone I thought I was close to even closer to me for much-needed support. To my great pleasure, I did receive support from people just being there while I went through this hard time. And then, as summers tend to do my support got pulled away to leave only the people to could drive and whose work schedule cooperated with my own. This brought the number down to 3 good friends who truly became family over that summer. When we all came back to school and I had to deal with the aftermath of the shattered relationship, I dipped yet again into a dark place. This time, however, all of the “family” that I had before summer became the stereotypical “friends”. The first week or two they did seem to care, but soon grew tired of trying to help me out of the darkness. I fell deeper and deeper into the darkness, and soon I was barely arriving at school on time in the mornings, just early enough to catch the second bell. Surprisingly, my enemy from the year before was the only one who ever asked why I was late to school in the mornings. From there we rebuilt a friendship for her to become family. One of my bromances started texting me every evening for 2-3 weeks after me being late to see how I was doing, even though I always answered; “I’m alive” he kept trying to break through to me. Looking at it now, they did not do anything too complex or too deep, but it meant a lot more than they could ever know, and them just showing that they noticed that I was down was enough to slowly pull me out of the abyss. I am still not the person I was before it went down, but thanks to their help I’m closer than I ever thought I would get.

It just so happens that I was not the only one who had a relationship blow up right in front of them before summer started. They came to me, as most people did back then when they had a problem, and I could tell that they were in the same boat as me. I knew that I had to help them as much as possible so that they wouldn’t feel as bad as I did. Over the summer I tried to keep in contact with them to keep tabs on how they are doing and to see if I could help. I ended up taking them out on my father’s boat several times. My father has a dock on Cobboseecontee so we anchored somewhere and just talked for hours, whenever we got hot we would jump in and then continue the conversation. Sometimes we would invite other people to join us to get their opinion and their life story to help us out. I even carted her, the boat, and another bromance down to Sebago to spend some time in a new place to get away from everything for a while. Things started to get visually better for her until she began to have family issues on top of everything else. I changed my tactics and invited her to play some volleyball with my family during our “Fam Volleyball Tournament” to show her what family can be and, as my family tends to do with everyone they meet, make her a part of my family. Since then, some other things have happened, but I’m glad I could do my part to help her as a friend.

Family has always been and will always be the most important thing to me because I know that I will always be there for my family, and I know that my family will be there for me too. As time goes by there will be more times where I will need help from my family, and each time is another chance to see who my real family is. There will also be plenty of times ahead where someone will need my help, and whether they are family or not I will be happy to help them. Just like my mother, my heart is too big and too open for me to truly close it to non-family members.