But sometimes not even that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship, what it means, what it requires, what a friend could or perhaps even should be. I have no definitive answer and I cannot impose my ideals of a friendship on someone else. How I might be as a friend to someone has no bearing on how they might be as a friend to me.

We can’t all give in the same way, have different capacities for love and different expectations for our interactions with others.

I know what I can give a friend. I know what I need in a friend. I never know what I may get from a friend.

Considering this new project I am working on, I find myself revisiting old blog entries, which is enlightening to say the least. I ended up reading this blog I published in August 2019. Not all of it is relevant for what I am trying to say here. But I must repeat this as it is relevant to friendship and where I find myself at right now:

I believe in fighting for one another. Not against each other. When there’s love, how can we let it become hate or contempt? Sometimes love is not enough, no matter how much we love. When someone is not receptive, it doesn’t matter. But don’t we have a duty to still treat each other with decency?

Is it necessary to be hurtful or cruel? Yes, rejection hurts and there’s practically nothing we can do to ease the pain. Whatever our intentions might be, the other person will still be hurt. And if that’s the case, we should try our best to do the right thing.

What is the right thing? That depends on the circumstances but at the very least we can take responsibility for our actions. Accept the consequences. And perhaps apologise.

Burning bridges and pretending that everything is alright is certainly not the right path.

At the end of the day, I don’t believe in causing pain to one another. Sometimes it happens despite our best intentions. Such is life. I’ve hurt people before. I’m not proud of it. I did my best to own it and make it better. But I can’t heal someone else. They have to do that themselves. I can only apologise and hope for forgiveness one day.

We’re all we have, you know? Ultimately we’re all the same. We’re all human. We have hopes and fears and sorrows and the capacity for joy. We all want to be loved. We want someone to see us. Someone to choose us. Someone to stand by our side.

Sometimes we don’t get these things. Sometimes we don’t get what we need or want. And that has to be okay as well.

Because it is not okay to take what somebody is unwilling to give.