Here’s the truth: I find friendships hard.

I don’t find keeping up with my true friends hard work at all. The problem I have is around boundaries with people in my life who sit in the murky space between friend and acquaintance. They want to spend time with me, and I don’t want to spend time with them.

The problem is, I lack boundaries in this murky area, and I can’t say no without opening up a huge chasm of guilt, fear, and anxiety.

The issue is, the term 'friend' is so loose and open to interpretation. There is a vast spectrum of different relationships we have with people, and 'friend' is possibly the most complex of them all.

I have better relationships with people I work with than with people I am supposedly friends with, so how does that figure? Well, this is what I want, and need, to explore as I write this.

Writing, for me, is a chance to reflect on the big energies that rush up and overwhelm me. Like a storm that sweeps through, leaving chaos in its wake, I have to wait until I’m out the other side of it before I find the clarity and stillness of the situation.

This post is like a spot that is ready to burst. I can’t deal with this anymore and I’m really ready to let it out. My hope in writing this is that it might resonate with you on some level too, so that you know you’re not alone in feeling this way.

The conditioning of friendships and socialising

Part of the problem I have around friendships, boundaries, and everything in between is that I grew up in an environment where being social was seen as necessary and normal. To this day, my family are still the most social people I know, making plans left, right, and centre that make my inner introvert break out in hives.

This is what I grew up with: this expectation that constant socialising is important, needed and necessary, and that just doesn’t sit true withing me anymore. The problem is that what we grow up with often becomes imprinted in our subconscious, and our subconscious runs the show in our lives.

So, when we go against a deeply ingrained belief (even one we don’t align with or want to have), it causes major tension within us. There is the much less powerful conscious part of us that says 'no' against the giant of the subconscious that says 'yes'.

This battle is where all stress, tension, and anxiety come from, and it takes a lot of energy, courage, and effort to break free of this battle and let the truth of our soul be heard.

We all want to please our parents and gain their approval, none more so than me. I have taken an unconventional path in life, doing something that is unfamiliar and strange to my family and oldest friends. I also hold a completely different belief system, which kicked off from the events of 2020, that put even greater distance and disconnection between me and my relationships.

I felt like an outsider, and in the turmoil of this awakening, with the fear, grief, and anger, it felt impossible to hold friendships in the simplicity of what they once were. Things changed for me on a vast scale, and I’m still negotiating this change after those deeply traumatic years.

All of this is why there is a strong part of me that wants to prove that I’m 'normal', and that means joining in with activities that don’t actually resonate with me, and putting on a mask to hide how I really feel about things inside.

We are all completely unique, wonderful beings, but sometimes it takes more courage than we feel capable of bringing forth to actually step into our most authentic selves. As I have so much strong 7-7 energy in my Soul Contract, this is one of my deepest challenges.

I need to feel safe to be seen, and with some people, I just don’t feel safe, and that’s not something I can fake.

The nice girl within me that can’t say no

When I was 13, I went to a boarding school.

It was there that I spent the next 5 years living with a small group of girls, some of whom I resonated with, and some I didn’t. I know, at my core, that I didn’t feel safe standing up to these girls, some of whom were manipulative and sly. Instead, I found myself in a small friendship group with girls who were actually no better.

It’s only recently that I let the final tether go with one of these friends. It takes me a long time to see the wolf in sheep’s clothing, but the warning bells in my nervous system cannot lie and can no longer be ignored.

The problem is, I have these 12-3’s in my Soul Contract, which means I tend to see the best in people, ignoring the things that feel uncomfortable or that I don’t like. What’s more, if I do sense those warning signs, I find it incredibly hard to extract myself and say no.

And this is the big issue for me, and perhaps for you too.

As I said earlier, friendship covers a huge spectrum. I have people right on the outer edge of my rainbow and some nestled right next to my heart. And I no longer want to spend my time with people on the outer edge; I want to spend time with those who I feel 100% safe to be myself with, who nourish me, and with whom I feel joyful in their company.

I don’t want to be friends with everyone. I may be friendly, but I’m not your friend, and I want to be able to say no. Yet, as soon as I do, all the feelings of guilt come rushing up. In-built within me is this core belief that I have to be nice, I have to be kind, I have to explain myself, and I have to make time for others.

I know the ‘nice girl’ syndrome is something that’s deeply embedded in a lot of women, and it goes back to generations before us. This is why it’s so damn difficult to shift.

Wanting to be seen as nice is a huge by-product of not wanting to face up to the ‘un-nice’ parts within us. It’s like an active avoidance of seeing the depth of humanness within all of us. While we don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings, we also want to protect our image of being nice and kind, which society rewards us for being.

The ego doesn’t want to go there.

The tide of coming and going in friendships

I’ve been part of many different friendship groups that I’ve come and gone from. And for a long time, I’ve held this deep guilt that I should have made more of an effort to stay in touch or that I should still be in the energy of those circles, and the fact that I’m not makes me feel like a poor choice of a friend.

There was the group of English girls I went to study abroad with in America, the team in my first job, the group of girls at university, my travelling friends, the London friends who I spent my weekends with, the guys I trained with, the dancing community I made friends with when I moved to Cambridge, and on and on it goes.

The pattern with me is that I float into a friendship circle, and then I float out again because it no longer resonates with me and where I am in my life.

Instead of recognising this as a natural part of life’s fluidity and the normal consequence of change, I feel guilty and ashamed, like I abandoned people or let them down. This is a feeling I carry around every day, even now, because of the core belief within me that there is something very wrong with me.

I have nothing but great memories of all the times I spent with all these wonderful people in my life, but I don’t feel capable of fitting in more than a few deep and meaningful friendships into my life. And, what’s more, I no longer want to spend my time with people I’m only seeing because of the guilt and shame driving me to make plans with them.

This isn’t social anxiety. I’m not awkward, difficult or abnormal.

I know that when I make plans with someone special in my life, I can’t wait for it. I also know that when I make plans with someone I feel flat with, it’s wildly out of alignment for me, and I’ll see it as a chore in my day rather than a delight.

The more I grapple with this, the more the universe sends me people to challenge it. And with my impulsive and speedy people-pleasing reflexes, I get myself tangled up in things I don’t know how to extract myself from.

True friendships aren’t hard at all

So, I’m going to revise my earlier statements.

I don’t find friendships hard. I find it hard to set boundaries, I find it hard to be myself, I find it hard to say no, and I find it hard to go against the conditioning deep within me that prevents me from making the choices I want to make.

I find it hard to show up for myself and the people in my life who matter because I’m in a state of overwhelm from showing up for the people who don’t.

I find it hard, and exhausting, to go against the guilt and shame that have been my constant companions for so long, constantly telling me that I let people down, that I’m not to be trusted, and that, at my core, I’m not good enough or deserving of wonderful people in my life.

All of these energies push on me so strongly, and no wonder; if you look at my Soul Contract, all the answers are there. In my karma, I have 8-8’s, which are all about boundaries and letting go of other people's stuff, right alongside the goals of 9-9’s, which tell me I’m here to step out of disempowerment and into my power.

I now realise that I don’t need to be making constant plans with people to prove anything to anyone. I don’t have to hold a single friendship in my life that doesn’t nourish my soul or my heart. I don’t need to hold this huge expectation on my shoulders that I can be everything to everyone, because I can’t, it’s an impossible standard and I’m absolutely exhausted trying to hold it.

And I don’t have to live my life in alignment with the deeply ingrained, painful beliefs within me that tell me to be a good person means I have to be social, kind and good all the time and to everyone I meet.

I can choose to focus my time on the people who genuinely fill my heart, not out of a sense of guilt but out of a deep resonance that I share with those special people.

For the people I don’t feel aligned with, I’m going to have to make peace with the fact that I’m not a bad person because of this. I’m still a good person with a kind heart, even if I don’t want to be your friend, and I know that the friendships I do have will flourish all the more because of this.

Let’s see where this takes me.

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