Adulting.
I used to love that word back in the day. Fantasizing about how we would do whatever we wanted without adult supervision, no curfew. How we would meet up with friends whenever, however, and wherever we wanted.
Of course, I still love this word. It helps me romanticize all the new responsibilities that adulthood brings. Even though I love the friendships I made in adulthood, some part of me will always miss how things were before.
So how do I deal with this? The constant change and transformation in life and in friendships. Obviously, not by being pessimistic. I try to analyse the transformation and adapt myself to it. Live in the moment. Once, a good friend told me that we can never cherish the moment if we always commemorate the past and obsess about the future. Let me dig a bit deeper. I’m sitting in class with all my friends, talking about our library crushes, yapping about a previous drunk night out, complaining about exams… You have no idea if this is about college or high school right? See, that’s the thing. This description could be applied to any time that you want. What makes an experience an experience is the way you look at it.
In fact, as an international student, I was met with even more transformation in my life. If nothing, I shifted from speaking my native language everyday to speaking English all the time. Yet, it has been psychologically proven that people tend to not use their native language when talking about difficult situations — so I might say this helped me, after all. By leaving my comfort zone, I met amazing people who I never would’ve met if I stayed in my hometown. Back in the day, I would never have imagined sitting in class, as a girl hailing all the way from Istanbul, and casually conversing with a girl from Sydney about how our professor’s hair makes him look like the guy from When Harry Met Sally.
All of this is great. Meeting new people, being exposed to different cultures, conversing in different languages yet laughing at the same jokes: the glory of college. Well, what happens to those people that you used to go to McDonald’s with after school, where you would get some fries, dip them in McFlurries, and talk for hours with about your day?
Nothing, and yet everything. They are still there. Only a phone call, a snap, or a text message away. You may not drop by their house spontaneously during your week anymore, but now you have an apartment in London with a bestie who you can surprise spontaneously. You may not be able to grab a coffee every day, but now you have someone to FaceTime whenever you go to class. It is always hard to adjust to change. But as psychological research shows, the impact of change is strongly correlated with how one feels about said change.
So, we do actually control how we are affected by changes to our friendships. As long as you keep updating your besties about Situationship #13, calling them when you miss them, acknowledging each other’s presence even if you haven’t managed to pick up the phone during finals season — and most importantly, if you keep on loving them, maintaining adult friendships becomes a gift rather than a burden.