Friendships...and Identity

Hello everybody!

"Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It's not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything."
--Muhammad Ali

I haven't wrote in a while and I still haven't finished reading "The Case for Faith" by Lee Strobel (I am still in school doing prereqs for Social Work) I know I usually talk about my experiences in this webpage and I tend to keep the positive in gear (okay, not when it comes to President Bush)...

To be fair, I missed writing in my blog I wanted to share what I feel here...The last few weeks have been very annoying to say the least...partially because as a student I again end up paying an arm and a leg for supplies and I got my bike vandalized by some drunk kids on campus.

I have been thinking about a few things in my mind: for some reason the words friendship and identity come to mind. So I would like to write about both topics as it relates to me.

Have you ever felt lost when it came to your friends? I never thought I would say this, but right now I do, ever since I accepted God in my life, things have been different, environments and people have changed and it seems I have changed as well. I really don't know if it is for better or worse.

The strangest thing is: I am different and yet I am still me. I am still as silly and as talkative or silent as always. I still manage to make people laugh (whether it was intentional or not) but something just feels: changed, it's not the same it used to be and yet I feel not pain or sadness...I don't know what to make of it, I am able to identify with some friends while I found that with some old personal friends I am unable to relate.

So what is friendship to me? Right on the top of my head I can think of friendship as a type of love, it's about helping and protecting people I care about, it was about laughter as much as it was about tears, as much joy as it was about pain.

So you might be wondering: what does friendship have to do with identity? I feel different... that when you are with a certain group of friends you suffer from "Group Think" where once the group agrees with an idea (no matter how good or bad it is) you are "dragged into it" or after that you become less like yourself because you have chosen to go with another group of friends instead.

I don't know but for me the issue of identity seems to be hard when I was always the wildcard in a group. For example, I am part of a group...but I do not fit in anywhere. I find it so confusing, but the good thing is, I think I managed to understand myself through my faith.

I only feel good because I know I have not lost myself, I am still me, I am not pretending to be what I am not, it's just me "with the volume turned up" I feel strange and it makes me wonder if anyone else ever felt the same way?

It's strange, this is simply because I never felt that before...I wonder if I have confused some friends this way. I sure hope not.

Signing off,

TKO