7 Days of Thanks – Day Three: Friendship

I have never heard of the concept of Friendsgiving until this year. It’s the idea that one takes a night to enjoy a Thanksgiving Day meal with their friends at school, work, or from other places before returning home to spend time with family. I guess I do not totally understand it because I spent most of my Thanksgivings in college with two of my best friends. Because of this, the idea of spending Thanksgiving with friends is not weird or unusual or different for me at all.

This leads me to what I am grateful for today. I am grateful to know some of the most amazing people ever. Well, not just to know them, but to be able to call them my friends. The majority of the friends that I still talk to are from the past five and a half years.

Going through college was an incredible experience, because while I learned that family should be like an amazing set of friends that you do not get to choose, I learned that friends are the family you do get to choose. I got to know so many people from so many places and backgrounds. Knowing so many people from so many places has been phenomenal, because I have gotten to see Disneyland like a local does, I have gotten to hear stories of other places, see houses that have entryways the size of my apartment growing up and share parts of my life with people who have been willing to share parts of their life with me.

That’s the coolest part about friendship, I think. No matter how long you stay connected to someone, they always rub off – even just the tiniest bit – on you, and your life is forever changed by something they said or did.

All these words, stories, moments and adventures shared lead to a collective identity – that each member of the friendship has a small part of the other.

Foucault wrote about the idea that even after an event happens that alters a friendship – perhaps challenging or destroying it – while we may no longer have that individual in our lives, we still have the memory of that individual in our mind. Nothing about events in the past can or will ever change. While the friendship is different, the memories are the same. Because of this, we should not look back on them with disdain or remorse, but with joy that they were moments that happened. Moments that changed our lives.

How have you changed someones life today?