Friendship on a string
Dear Sam,
I remember when I first met you in 1st year of high school, and I still remember what I first thought of you. You were clowning around outside of reception with Ryan, Jack, Connor and a few others. I thought you were going to be the class clown, and to an extent you were. But you ended up being a lot more than that. It's difficult to explain the impact you had on my life, but I'm going to try and contextualise it a bit. High school is a difficult time for a lot of people, most people in fact struggle, socially, academically or both. I was the latter, I was a socially awkward nerd, who didn't know the first thing about interacting with other people, and was good at soaking up information but didn't test particularly well (I still don't as a 3rd year economics student, but I'll survive). I was also, probably depressed for much of high school. Barely anyone in my friend group knew this about me at the time, but I was struggling with my mental health largely due to years of watching my dad go in and out of hospital, with every operation being marked with "potentially deadly", constantly anxious about every day being his last.
