The Value of Choice and How it Pertains to Friendship
Photograph by Birdy Francis, featuring Madison Dacklin and Auden Winchester
Friendship is one of the purest things two humans can share. It's a bond that goes beyond blood, straight through borders and right into the soul. It’s divine. It’s beauty.
When we think about friends and the value they bring to our lives, it is essentially incalculable. Someone who genuinely cares about you and the life you live, someone who picks up on your mannerisms and phrases. Someone who knows you inside and out because they love you with no strings attached.
We know that we can’t choose our blood and that is why our friendships are so monumental. Because our friends are the people we choose to love.
Maintaining friendships throughout my adult life has been challenging. The people that I have so much love for will always be of the utmost importance to me and my story. But as life progresses and my responsibilities pile up, it feels like there’s so much of me that I have to give away. So much of me that I am dying to keep to myself. But because love isn’t always fluid, and because love is a choice, I allocate those remaining parts of me to give to them.
The word friend means so much to me because as I learn to value myself, I realize how important those pieces of me are. I’m careful with who I give myself to and careful with how they handle the fragments.
It takes a lot out of me to place myself in their hands and it's why I try to be so careful with the people that I call my friends.
Being emotionally vulnerable is incredibly daunting. It’s horrifying to me. And when I have to bare myself to an extreme with certain people, I do it with the people I care about: my family, my friends.
I have people in my life that I care for and want to see succeed in every way possible, but that doesn’t make them a friend. I have people in my life that make me smile and laugh and that doesn’t make them a friend.
In fact, it seems almost disingenuous to assume that that's all it takes to make a friend. Otherwise, I think everyone would be my friend.
Friends are the people you choose day in and day out. They’re the people who you trust with your vulnerability. And most of all, they're the people that feed your soul.
It means so much to be a friend and to have a friend and because of that we need to put more value on that word specifically. A friend is an invitation into the deepest parts of you and being choosy, being careful about the people you select is imperative. Because when you willingly plant the seeds of your soul, you need to have faith that those people you chose will water it.