Is it possible for your best friends to be more important than your family?
I’m going to change the question slightly because I don’t like the original one. Nobody is more important than anybody. To me, the king of England is just as important as the teenager who works at McDonalds. My best friends aren’t more important than my family, and my family isn’t more important than my best friends.
But I can love my best friends just as much as my family. Here’s why:
This past summer I couldn’t sleep. My mind kept me up all night. Everything stressed me out. What if my friends don’t like me? What if I flunk tenth grade? T
There was a fight later that summer. A big one. I don’t remember what started it. I just remember that it was bad and that there were Six of us. My friend was mad at me, as well as a few others. They wouldn’t take her seriously and I was too stubborn to apologize, so she just kept on getting more upset which just gave everyone else in that same group more to deal with.
Two years ago I had lived in Iowa. I had a few friends. They didn’t much like each other and our collective growing pains eventually got too much. I haven’t talked to any of them since. That was baby stuff compared to this fight, though. If that had been growing pains this was a full-on heart attack.
I live in Vermont when it isn’t the summer. We all lived scattered across New England, too far apart to visit each other often but close enough to the same island in Maine to spend all summer there. I’ve known them all since we were about five or six.
I had friends back in Vermont, but we weren’t the closest and there weren’t very many of them. As far as I was concerned these six were all I had. And they were beginning to get more and more agitated.
I’m not quite sure what changed. I don’t know who did what or why they did it but things changed. It sounds silly but I swear if you were there you could’ve felt the air change.
The friend who’d been the most angry and who had yelled the most walked down the dock that we were all sitting on. Nobody said anything, as far as I remember. The six walked down the thin metal ramp to the small float that rocked and swayed in the frothy ocean water. We lay down. I don’t remember who started talking but someone did. That was the most significant conversation I think I’ve had in my entire life and the funny thing is that I don’t even remember any of it. No subjects were off the table, no secret wasn’t safe.
That night was the first time I had slept peacefully all summer.
So, yes. Of course, I can love my friends just as much as my family. (Don’t get me wrong, definitely not more than my family; I love my family.) The six who were there that night were able to power through some of the most extreme social pressure that any of us had ever experienced simply because of how much we knew we loved each other. How could I love them any less?
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