“I could at least love you through each stumble, shift, and sway. So, fire away.” – Fire Away, Dawes
When thinking about what to write this week, I couldn't help but feel like this post, which I wrote more than two years ago, is more timely than ever.
Health officials everywhere have been telling us that the best thing we can do right now is stay home as much as we possibly can. I couldn't endorse that more.
But, staying home is lonely. Even for us introverts, at a certain point we want to see our friends again. So, I'm doing my part and not only am I staying home as much as I can, I'm trying to make a little community here on the blog.
I've been sharing about this on my instagram for the past few days, you can visit that page to see a few of the other tips and tricks and conversation starters I've shared there.
While we're all doing our best to protect each other, I hope you'll join me to keep up a community even if it's online. Until next time, here's a post about friendship.
About three weeks ago, I began my fourth and final year of college. I tend to constantly live in the future (bad habit), and so I’m beginning to feel pre-emptive sadness and nostalgia over goodbyes that are soon to come.
Although I’m not sure yet where any of my friends (or myself, for that matter) will end up, it is only inevitable that we will find our future selves in different states, countries, and time-zones.
Under circumstances like these, the term “seasonal friendships” begins to bubble to the surface.
You’ve heard the cliché before, “We have friends for a reason, a season, and a lifetime.” And, of course, no one can be all three.
I agree, friendships often end for very legitimate reasons, some people really do just fade away, and there really are people that we may need to remove from our lives for our own well-being. However, I wonder if we’re sometimes too quick to throw out the term “seasonal friendship”, and if maybe we should all work a little harder to keep people in our lives.
This is Abigail:
If there’s anyone in my life who could’ve, would’ve, should’ve been a “seasonal friendship”, she’s the one. When we were a mere 13 years old, she moved to a small town in North Carolina over 4 hours away. And remember, this is an age before we had laptops, iPhones, or drivers licenses.
We had (more than) our fair share of fights, late-night scathing texts, and silent treatments over the years. There were plenty of times when our friendship really almost disintegrated entirely. It didn’t, though.
Partly due to mom’s that drove us back and forth across that 4 hour stretch, and partly due to Facebook chat, and partly due to our mutual stubbornness. Our friendship persisted.
We ended up going to the same college, where I spent many an evening escaping on campus life by watching This Is Us or Catfish at her apartment. And now that she’s graduated, we text, call, and Marco Polo several times a week.
It would’ve been a whole lot easier to call Abigail a seasonal friend and forget the whole ordeal. She would’ve been a friend I remembered fondly from my childhood, but nothing more. Luckily, neither of us were really down to let life play out that way. We took our friendship and we turned it into what I like to call a “fire-away friendship”.
“What is a fire-away friendship,” you might be asking, “And how do I get one?”
I got the term from the song Fire Away by one of my all-time favorite bands, Dawes. It’s a song about friendship, and it’s become a friendship-anthem for me this past year.
The song (which I highly recommend you listen to), talks about various friendships and ends each description with the invitation to “fire away”.
To me, fire away friendships are the ones you take hold of and don’t let go. Even when it comes at a cost. Especially when it comes at a cost. They’re the ones that make you say to yourself, “I can’t believe we’re still friends.” They’re not the friendships of convenience or ease all the time, they’re hard-won, fought-for, dedicated friendships.
When my best friend, Emma, decided to move to Switzerland for 6 months, I wrote her a card with some of the Fire Away lyrics written on it. And when she came back, I ran the idea of fire-away friendships past her.
“Sometimes people leave your lives and there’s nothing you can do about it,” she told me, “But sometimes you have to fight for relationships with everything you have. And sometimes it’s complicated, and sometimes it’s not, but we have to keep doing it either way.”
When you need someone to walk away from. When you need someone to let you in. Fire away.
For today's challenge, I'm encouraging all my followers and anyone who's reading this to call or Facetime one friend who you know is staying at home for the time being. Surprise them and call out of the blue, or plan a time to chat and leave a comment letting me know how it goes. I'll be making my call tonight.
If you want to join my community and stay a part of what I've got going on here, I encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on instagram.
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