The Tide of Change Approaches

Friends help see me through, I’ve realised that recently more than ever.

I’m twenty years old now and find myself thinking about life a lot, I think perhaps too much. The burden of what I’m going to do with the rest of my life weighs heavily. Continue the degree? Change to a different degree? Find a job? Find a purpose? It all feels like a lot. Our lives are no longer as simple and straightforward as before, when the casual ‘meet at the park later?’ or ‘come into mine on the way back from school for a cuppa tea’ were commonplace. There are fragments of this that remain, but the faces are different now, and the places we meet have changed.

I suppose that’s what happens when you move away from your hometown. It had to be done, of course, the new territory that is, I always knew the time would come, the inevitability of people moving on, and there was definitely excitement surrounding the notion of change. Growth and new experiences, that’s what brought me to Scotland, but I have to admit it's the friends I’ve found that will be the reason why I stay.

They can make you feel at home, even when you’re hundreds of miles away from the place you utter when asked where home is. It’s not just the company on a night out but the smiles and laughter shared in a tiny dorm room, it’s the questions about what our lives were like in all the years leading up to now, it’s the panicked discussions about our futures and the guilty comfort we feel when you hear someone else express doubts about what they’re doing. The unspoken anxieties that occasionally make their appearance whilst we hang out and try to pretend together that it’ll all work out in the end, because it has to, right?

They say all you really need in life is good friends, and I think this must be true. I often struggle to envision how I want my life to look, I have things I know I definitely never want to find myself in life, namely being in a dead-end office job, but other aspects I find harder to see clearly. Living a life where I’ve always got that friend to call up or the one to cook dinner with or go to the pub with, is a life I most definitely want to lead. Life brings so much change, that is one thing that can be guaranteed, but when the tide of change approaches, I hope to always find a friend swimming next to me, to help me stay afloat.