Over the years, my personal definition of the word friend has changed quite a bit. Growing up, a friend was someone I knew in person that I could always rely on to keep me entertained or to just spend time with doing nothing. As I got a bit older, in the junior high years, my friend base got smaller because at that time my definition of a friend was someone I could tell my deepest secrets to and they would always understand. I had two great friends during those years and we shared everything with each other. In high school, my friend margin narrowed even more. Though there were loads of people I was friendly with there were only a few that I considered my friends.
Now, through the Internet, I've redefined friendship once more. This all came to light over the past couple of months when a woman I supervised at work was "let go". She contacted me last week via Facebook and then left a voice mail for me asking me to call her so we could still be friends. I had to think about this long and hard.
Facebook allows any individual to have hundreds of "friends" at any given time. I have many Facebook friends - some I feel I would like in "real life" and others that are good people but I probably wouldn't really hang with them in real life. Certainly, meeting up with Paul, Arsh, Eva, Marlyse, Gittan, Ingrid, Karin, Astrid, Åsa, Giuseppe, and all of my CoS friends would be a wonderful thing. I feel like we've shared little bits of ourselves over the years, enough to know we'd really like each other!
The woman I worked with was never someone I associated with outside of work in any way. We only ever saw each other at work and rarely interacted with one another outside of our work roles. So her sudden request to remain "my friend" made me very uncomfortable and questioning her motives! I certainly didn't want to rehash her firing. Yikes! I never like to hurt someones feelings but after thinking about it for a long time, I had to respond to her and that's exactly what I told her. (Not the questioning her motives part! I'm not crazy!). I told her that it would put me in a strange position to be friends with someone I fired. It would make me uncomfortable. And I wish her all the best in her life. That was it! She responded with a thank you and it's done.
Yesterday I had lunch with an old and dear friend. We see each other sporadically. And all of this made me think about my true meaning of friendship. It's pretty basic really. My meaning of friendship is this:
You be you and I be me.
And we enjoy each other for who we are.
And when that can happen - good times ensue. Pretty simple. No strings attached.
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