No More Best Friends

I know it's been over a month since I've last posted, but I've been super busy with Christmas, work, and school, and am just now finding the time to post.

Disclaimer: I've been thinking about the statements in this post a lot and the entire thing really comes from my heart. This post is not meant to insult any of my friends, present or former. I'm just writing about my personal thoughts and feelings.
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Life is hard. Especially when you account for all of the weird drama that can arise from having friends. Specifically, best friends.

Throughout my life, I've had several different "best friends". We all have. That one friend to whom you devote most of your time and energy and feel as if you can share anything and everything with. Of course, as we get older, these friendships become significantly more complex, paralleling our ever-growing problems.

For me, these "best friend" relationships have never really lasted too long. It always seems that when I open up and become really close with one friend, after a little while they slowly start to ignore me or push me away, until I am eventually cut off.

At first, I thought that I was flawed and incapable of having close friends, but then I started to realize that I resent the concept of a "best friend".

Sometime during my freshman year of high school, I decided that it was easier to have several somewhat close friendships that just one or two "best friends". That's when I become the "floater" of my extended friend group.

I was, and still am, part of a group of about fifteen or so friends that would all collectively hang out often. Of course, there were a couple different smaller cliques within the group, and, being the floater, I never knew when, or if, I would be invited to a certain gathering or activity of a specific clique.

Being the floater, I did miss out on a lot. The main downside was that I would sometimes just feel alone because I didn't have one specific friend that I could open up to or always spend time with, and I still feel that way a lot, even with having a different friend group in college.

In the long run, I feel like it's better, at least for me, to devote my time to more people, as evenly as I can, than to spend all my energy on one or two specific friends, who are likely to end up not being there for me in the end.

I've kind of started to stray away from this philosophy the past few months or so, but I feel like it's something I need to focus on more, especially as I get older and accept the fact that I probably won't be in close contact with any of my current friends in a few years.

At this point in my life, I feel like it's more important to build several friendships that aren't as deep or exclusive as a "best friend" relationship, than to focus on just building one or two overly strong friendships.