By Laurence Dawkins, Wellbeing Digital Editor
The Croft Magazine // A diverse network of good friends can help us achieve balance and satisfaction in our lives, so it's important to give friendships the attention they deserve.
Looking back to first year I was very lonely. I knew lots of people who I could call friends but I felt alone. Looking back, I see a miserable person.
I believed that there wasn't much point in making close friends as it was just time I would be losing when I could be developing myself instead. Much of my first year was spent struggling with abstruse philosophy, challenging physics and difficult works of literature. I believed I was trying to fulfil my development into the best version of myself. I am used to trying to be very controlling over the situations I put myself in, and the thought of putting my personal development on hold for others scared me.
The past few years, for me, have been about experimenting with life and finding my place in the world.
I was frustrated with trying to become a version of myself which I thought would be the best, because of the difficulty of the ideal to which I was trying to become. Through a particularly terrible bout of depression, and the following conversations with my therapist, I was able to see that the things I valued had to change, and the person I wanted to become would never be the person I would actually become. This was a big relinquishment of control, and seemed scary at the time, but I have since forgotten any of the difficulty of it.
Once I understood that I needed to change my values I then had to enact this change - which is ongoing. Herein is one of the significant values of friends and companionship: they help us to adjust our standards and allow us to more easily become better versions of ourselves.
Developing friendships is productive for many reasons; friends project back to us those things in our wellbeing which we might not have noticed, or have been ignoring, they allow us to experience vicariously situations which (for whatever reason) we didn't have the opportunity to, they give us advice and encouragement, company and comfort. They can make us feel a part of something.
The past few years, for me, have been about experimenting with life and finding my place in the world. Developing my interests, passions, beliefs and all those other things which give us the confidence in everyday life to feel as though what we are doing is worth it.
Everyone is slightly different and brings out something slightly different in our characters, which is why maintaining a diverse network of friends is also something pleasurable. Of course, it is not easy to maintain such a network, but there is no easy route to overall life satisfaction.
Looking onto my life now, as if from an outsider's perspective, I see a satisfied, happy, productive, kind, intelligent and friendly person, and I believe allowing friendships to form has been important in that shift.
The following links are to pages which might be useful to people struggling with isolation:
Find and sign up to Bristol University groups and societies here.
OTR is a mental health social movement by and for young people aged 11-25 living in Bristol and South Gloucestershire. Find out about them here.
VitaMinds are a Bristol based mental health service offering a varierty of treatments, including group sessions which can be found here.
Featured: Epigram / Henry Bourne
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