WHAT MAKES US FRIENDS?

It is strange how you can think you know someone, only to suddenly realize you know almost nothing at all. And maybe, if you are being honest, you will never know much more. For those who do not know me, I have developed a growing obsession with blogs. I love them. The candor. The humor. The writing when it is sharp. The unapologetic opinions. The debates they stir up. And more than anything, I love the sincerity and vulnerability some of my favorite bloggers are brave enough to share. As the blog addict I have become, I roam the internet like a quiet witness, craving my daily voyeuristic fix from the writers who unknowingly help me feel a little more seen. I stalk their pages in silence, marveling at how they can craft a sentence with wit or insight, never once knowing I was there. That deep admiration is precisely why, for the longest time, I refused to create a blog of my own. I felt that if I was not willing to be open with the full, messy, layered truth of who I am then I had no business participating in the conversation. Years ago, I started keeping a journal. A bound red notebook that I thought would be a space for my rawest thoughts. But even within its pages, I was performing. I was writing as if someone was watching. Each entry sprinkled with pop culture references and jokes I thought might make some imaginary future reader laugh. I would overexplain my own memories. I wrote around my soul. Not through it. Everything I shared sat on the top shelf. I call generic things with no depth “top shelf” because they are what you see when you refuse to open the cabinets. They are formulaic. Predictable. Safe. And yes, most of my entries were exactly that. Over the years I have gone back to read that journal. Sometimes I laugh. Sometimes I cringe. Sometimes I am simply embarrassed by how much I hid in plain sight. The reason I say all this is because when I started this blog just a few weeks ago, I made a promise to myself that I would do it differently. That I would be honest. That I would stop writing to be liked and start writing to be real. And one of the unexpected gifts of keeping this promise is discovering how many of my friends also have blogs of their own. Beautiful, honest, deeply personal spaces they never once mentioned in conversation. Reading their words has shown me more about who they are than any dinner or party or phone call ever did. There is one friend in particular I have known for years. Over a decade of friendship. Today, he emailed me about my blog (Thank you for the constructive criticism Sage, I truly appreciated the sincerity and love). When I clicked on the link to his own photo blog, I was not prepared for what I saw. This person, whom I have shared laughter and time with for so long, is a stunning photographer. Not just good. But breathtaking. He sees the world through a lens that made my heart stop more than once as I scrolled through his work. I was disturbed. And I was moved. What does it say about a friendship when something so massive, so defining, has gone unspoken for years? Was it my fault for never asking deeper questions? Was it his fault for not revealing that side of himself? Or maybe it was both of us. Maybe we never fully believed the other would understand or appreciate the parts of ourselves that are shaped by pain, longing, beauty, and ambition. I sat at my computer for over an hour going through his photographs. And with every image, I realized just how little I actually knew about my friend.

PLEASE LEAVE COMMENTS HERE IF YOU HAVE THEM, WOULD LOVE TO READ WHAT YOU THINK.

GVG
~we’re the warriors they write epics about~