When I newly gained admission into the university, I was a loner in 200 level because I was a direct entry student. Not because I didn’t want to make friends or because I felt too big, rather, I was trying to be sure that I didn’t choose the wrong people as friends, maybe because of the lessons I had learnt earlier in life about friendship.
I didn’t want to fall into the pit that almost swallowed me in the name of friendship when I had friends who were secretly jealous of what I had no idea about. Richer parents lived in the city, boys hovering around them, and there was me who would quietly avoid getting noticed, but one thing I had that belonged to the village girl like me annoyed them, my brain.
I didn’t know this, so when they stretched the hands of friendship, I accepted without thinking too much since we were in the same school anyway. Oh, the end of that relationship was brutal.
This mindset, I carried to the university because I didn’t want a repeat of the event, so, carefully, I chose my friends, and there were just three of them, all Christians, and in different departments.
One day, one of my classmates, a guy approached me and said, “why don’t you like to talk to people? Is it that you are too proud?”, and I responded, “what do you think?” funny is, that was how our friendship started. This guy, also a Christian. I don’t know whatever conversation they’ve had among themselves before he approached me, but I suddenly noticed that my course mates started warming up to me, it was a beautiful time indeed.
These new friends I gained were blissful. Some lasted just the duration of my undergraduate studies because they came with an ulterior motive, and others, still flourishing till now.
Sometimes when I think about the troubles some friends showed me, I used to think maybe I was the problem. Then, I realized that I have had a friend in my life for over twenty years, and it keeps getting better every year, then, I concluded that I was and am not still a problem.
The guy that approached me earlier is still my friend till date even though we are continents apart. He is a staunch Christian, and honestly, we’ve never had a reason to stop being friends.
Among my top three friends in school, I had one who was a pastor at her fellowship, and her church wasn’t far from my hostel. Sometimes, when they had celebrations at their church, she would bring food and snacks for me, and I did the same. We never had a reason to stop being friends. In fact, at no point in our years of being together had we talked about our religious or tribal differences or invited each other to our places of worship. That’s not the essence of friendship.
The second friend was also a top member at her fellowship, and we had no issues, because friendship is respecting the differences that make you human and special.
The boundaries in friendship for me are noticing signs of envy or hatred in words or actions, then, I quietly take a bow out of the friendship. Tolerance is not accepting toxicity all in the name of friendship. Rather, it is a difference in what we do, the way we think, and how much we are into one another as friends.
Images are mine.
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