This was a hard one for me. When I reach a space that is difficult to explore, I have a tendency to intellectualize my way through it. This allows me to detach myself from the idea, treating it as though it were something I was watching on TV, or a book written by someone else that I have to write a 5,000-word essay on that’s due Friday. I enjoy doing this because it satisfies two parts of my reward system. First, I LOVE reading books written by somebody else and writing 5,000-word essays that are due by Friday. And secondly, by avoiding direct contact with something that’s painful, I am, for the most part, avoiding pain. This is my fourth attempt at this prompt. I have decided that whatever I write will be the final draft, no exceptions. Unless it sucks.

In my life I have been treated terribly by people I believed were friends. I have also treated people I believed were my friends terribly. I would love to say that is because many, if not all, of my friends were drug friends, and that these are not friends in any sense a person who was not an addict would recognize. But the closest friends, the real friends that loved me, in the end I treated them as though they were extras in a tragic story where the only character that mattered was me.

They say that unless you love yourself you cannot truly love others. I am not sure if that is true. But I do know that if you don’t love yourself, the love others show you does not seem real. And because the feeling, love toward a person, you, is a feeling that you do not understand, you cannot completely empathize with it. Their love will always seem like a language you cannot speak. And like a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by people who share stories that are beyond your ken, you will always feel unseen and alone.

Things have changed. I cannot explain how I can still have so little love for myself, yet now see the world of friendship so much differently. It is not until quite recently that I have felt seen. For the first time in my life I am beginning to see that I am a person worthy of love. I think this is because for the first time I am genuinely seeing others as not characters in my fucked up life, but as characters whose lives I am a part of. And seeing the love that they show me has blown everything up, turned it all inside out in the most extraordinary ways.

For the first time in so many years, maybe my entire life, I have a reason to keep going. People who think about me when I’m not around. People who I think about when I see something on TV that reminds me of them, or a passage in a book I think they would really like. As alone as I am, they are always with me. Like stars in the sky on a sunny day. Or a new moon, invisible, but still so felt that the ocean bends to its call.

Friendship means many different things to many different people. But for me, real friendship is at the heart of love. It is because it is a love given freely, without obligations, only opportunities. It is a growing, evolving phenomenon that is forever a source of discovery, as well as a place where you can always return to and you will always be welcome and loved. Friendship is when you both sing the same wrong lyrics to the same bad song. It’s giving up the last slice of pizza even though you’re still hungry. Friendship, real friendship, asks for nothing more than to be seen and loved for who you are, and not for someone they want you to be.

The difference between family and friendship is that family can turn their back on you. A friend never will. And although it seems like an impossible bit of wordplay as opposed to a nuanced definition, there is, in my mind, a perfect proof for the opening statement. A friend will never betray you. They will never turn on you and hurt you in a way that can never be forgiven, because if they do, then they were never your friend to begin with. A true friend is one who stays.

For Emily and Caro.