To give some preface to this article, I should establish my credibility as to why I believe the friends we surround ourselves with are (metaphorically speaking of course) our families.

I always though I was an only-child to my knowledge, until I was eight years old and met my sister for the first time. (A story for another day) I was involved in several activities in, and out of school like baseball, basketball, football, scouts, and I would hang out with my friends until the sun went down (and sometimes until it rose) as well. I’m grateful of my friendships born from these affairs because it gave me a sense of community that I, and any child for that matter, desperately needs to feel in order to build good team-building, and skill-sharing tendencies for the rest of one’s life. Through friendships, I found the validation I needed.

My entire life I was in a household with just my mother, and myself. Due to the nature of mortgages and bills, my mom was usually focused on providing the best possible home. Sometimes that doesn’t leave much room for advice, or lessons that I acquired through friendships.

The reason why I decided to muse on this topic is that as I have gotten older, I have grown to appreciate the friendships and bonds I have grown to love in my work, social, and extra-curricular life. As we all grow older we fulfill our potential to understand those that will have a more permanent and long-lasting role, versus those that we may not cross paths with for very long in our lifetimes. Some friends stay with you through the passage of time, and some don’t. There are friends that you can talk to like you never skipped a beat, even after taking an extended break apart. There are also friends that we’ve already said the last things we will ever say to them for the rest of their lifetime. Friendships and the relationships we have with our friends can vary wildly from person to person. For myself, it was a support network, and in that network I found my own sense of family.

Friends can be seen as a family unit through one’s eyes for a variety of reasons. Friendships create bonds between people that foster advice, unconditional love, passion for common interests, and meaningful relationships between humans that we all need being the social creatures that we are. We need friendships for the same reasons we need to work, or we need family… they create communities for us to understand our own intrinsic value. Through that understanding, it can create a sense of purpose and a common goal, or community that can lead to greater projects, ambitions, and achievements be it socially, professionally, behaviorally, or even in the pursuit of leisure.

Friendships are also unique in how they create a sense of community not always found in family units.

Friendships can be extremely helpful in diffusing situations at home, or with families too. Friendships can be useful in this aspect, because they provide an outside perspective that redacts any emotional reasoning that may be in personal logic to come to a conclusion for a resolution when it comes to our own personal affairs. On top of this, a great friend can understand when a relationship with a family member, person, or activity is beneficial or harmful to our health and behavior in day-to-day activity.

I can look back several times over at my true friends looking out for me, providing advice on how to handle a situation, or if my homework was correct or not, and vice versa.

For example, my friends helped me through the most stressful situation in my life when I was told by my grandfather that my mother and I would be forced out of our home. To keep it brief, due to my mother losing her job, and my father never supporting us, my grandfather (father’s side) offered to take on the remainder of the mortgage, and turn the house over to myself upon me reaching 18. At the time of this deal I was 13. That didn’t happen, and a little less than a month before my birthday on Valentines day in 2015, I received a call from my father who I hadn’t seen in almost two years, offering to go out to lunch. At that lunch, I was told that we had a month left in the only home I had known, and there was “nothing I could do about it”.

To say that I freaked out is an understatement. I frantically tried to explain what happened with my best friends, and at the time I felt like they, and my mother’s family were the only people truly in my corner. Although we had to move, and we lost in court, all the while I had my friends to blow off some steam with, and have the chance to be a kid. I needed to be able to just let go of the worries of what was to come. I took solace in my friends and they supported me in my time of need. I will never forget that. My friends helped me understand what family meant more than I had previously comprehended through that adversity.

Our friends are the ones we share our deepest secrets, and regrets with. They lift us up when we need encouragement and provide constructive criticism when we get too zany, or things go awry. They provide a diverse community every person needs to thrive and be the best selves they can be.

A perfect example of what it means to be a friend can be thought of by anyone with a good friend group, or great friend around them. I do want to challenge anyone who immediately thought of what it meant to be to be a friend when you read the aforementioned statement. There are times in everyone’s life where we need someone to lean on, where we go to someone for advice, or we just need a steady presence to relax with. Without pontificating the subject of whether or not you would do the things you would for friends, but not for certain distant family members, Ask yourself what are the differences between how we would take care and look after those that we find ourselves coincidentally related to, versus those we have close, long-lasting friendships with. The differences between the two are non-existent for myself, and minutiae for most.

Thanks for reading,

Sean Shoemaker