Your Real Friends Are Not the Ones Who Come to Your Funeral

This isn’t an inspirational story. This is my story.

When I was around 20 and in college, all I did was go to class, go to Jiu-Jitsu practice, and go home and be sad. I didn’t go out. I didn’t “party”. I trained, studied, and cried. For years, that was my real life.

I was living with my parents, and I battling some pretty heavy depression and stuck in derealization, and I was painfully insecure about everything.

I was so insecure and I clung to my friends like a tick to a dog. My friends were growing up and moving on with their lives and doing exciting things, and all I wanted was someone, anyone, to connect with me.

For as long as I can remember, I was deeply insecure about everything I did — even my “greatest achievements”. I lived like this for years until I learned about genuine friendship, kindness, and support. Now that I’ve felt it, I’m never going back.

This is how I learned to enjoy being alone.

Solitude makes you a less obnoxious dude

I used to require validation from other people to get through the day. If I didn’t hear from my friends for more than a few hours, I was always the person who would send out memes or self-deprecating jokes in order to get laughing emojis (positive validation — dopamine) sent my way.

I thought had friends, but really, I just had various living, breathing, dopamine sources.

Desperately, I wanted everyone to see my value, and I wanted everyone to see it all the time.

It sounds brutal to say, but doing this made me expendable. I became the person who was “always there”, and because of that people began to think that they could be “not there” for me because I was always there for them. I stumbled my way into a codependent relationship after codependent relationship, and I was always left feeling strung out and empty after each painful breakup, and “friend breakup” ripped my heart out.

If you keep running into the same problem, you’re the problem.

Needless to say, we’re working on this in therapy right now.

But in the end, I found myself stuck with only a handful of “friends”, and they were all people who had the same codependency issue as me. Like attracts like, and in this case, the “like” was “people who think that everyone is going to forget about them if they disappear for 5 minutes”.

My insecurity ruled my life, and my relationships were the main aspect that was suffering.

This is how I’ve been building my head back for the past 3 years.

Anxiety is a disorder, not a worldview

Anxious thoughts are not a valid understanding of reality.

The sooner you accept this, the sooner you will be able to develop a worldview based on happiness. As someone who has struggled with anxiety and depression for many years, I’ve always thought things like “oh, I’m worried about this bad thing (anxiety), and it’s definitely going to happen”. I thought that negative thoughts were valid because I was sad.

Then, I went to therapy, and I started challenging my thoughts like a WWE wrestler on Wrestlemania. I’ve been quietly challenging all of the anxious thoughts in my brain every single day for so long that by now, I appear very confident to a lot of people.

I appear confident because I am confident. I’m just a confident person with anxiety.

My confidence is genuine because I worked on it.

Anxiety and friendship

When I began to understand my anxiety, my triggers, and the causes of my anxious feelings, I started to notice the same patterns in the people around me. I realized that I was surrounding myself with people who didn't want the best for me.

I was surrounding myself with people who didn’t want me to leave.

Friendships are difficult to build and even harder to maintain. The worst reason to try to be friends with someone is “because you’ve known them for a long time”. If your childhood best friend treats you like crap, don’t be friends with them anymore. Bad friendships with sentimental value are still bad friendships.

For me, the friendships with sentimental value that I was losing were my friendships with my “college buddies”.

In college, my friends and I would take a bullet for each other. If someone had a breakup, a mental health crisis, or even just a bad day, we were all there for each other, until our friend felt better. We had a strong bond. They were my brothers and sisters.

They were. Now, we don’t talk at all.

Growing apart is okay

I used to think that every friendship that died was my fault in the same way that I thought that every breakup that happened was my fault.

I thought I was the source of every single relationship failure because I was the only common denominator in all of my relationships.

The thing is, though I’ve worked hard to build my confidence, I still struggle with relationship failures. I’m confident, but sometimes my confidence causes me to be blindsided by failure, and I’m forced to face my insecurities head-on all over again.

This is a pain in the ass.

For the longest time, I thought that every relationship failure was a reason to question my entire existence and all of my behaviors. I thought that every breakup was an indication for me to start reading Sun Tzu and to develop a new life philosophy.

Yeah, I was that guy.

Never once did it occur to me that I could just “chill out a bit”. I never once thought that I wasn’t “running out of time”. My life seemed fleeting until I realized that it is. Mindfulness set me free.

True friends act like this

When your life is falling apart, your real friends will show up for you.

At the same time, a bunch of other random people who kind of know you will probably show up for you too.

Last month, when I pulled out of the IBJJF World Championships, I had kind messages from so many people — most of whom I barely knew. My friends reached out in support, along with some random guy I met at an event in St. Louis one time. Your true friends are not the ones who show up when you’re down (although, they will), your true friends are the ones who are in the trenches with you, growing, suffering, and enjoying every moment.

Connection is built through experience. Once you give up common experiences, connections will suffer. You can only talk about the “good old days” for so long.

The real “good old days” are right now.

When you realize that, it’s far easier to take stock of the people in your life and to decide who is really worth investing your time into.

Closing thoughts

When you’re struggling, it feels nice when people reach out to you. You get a dopamine hit.

When I was in college and struggling with mental health stuff (long before I met my “college buddies”), all I wanted was someone to give a shit about my existence. I just wanted to feel important and love and cared about.

I wanted this so bad that I was willing to accept friendship and love from people who saw me as a “filler”. But as I’ve learned in the last few months, our friendship was more serious to me than it was to them. Maybe I’m just too sensitive, but it hurts.

However, I’ve also grown a lot from these painful “friend breakups”. I’ve met new people who are giving me more support and more love than I ever thought was possible from friends. I’m loved in a way that I realized that I’ve always deserved but have been too afraid to ask for.

I can’t help but feel that for the first time in a long time, I’m feeling what friendship is really like. For the first time in my life, I’m excited about the future.