When my sister and I were in the 12th grade, my sister and her best friend since the first grade started to drift away. They were the closest of friends for years on years, when all of a sudden, they weren’t anymore. Of course, being a by-stander in this relationship, I had no idea what was going on between the scenes. I didn’t know that it didn’t happen one minute out of the blue but was rather a process, that since I wasn’t a part of this relationship, I didn’t know. But I am getting ahead of myself, so let’s circle back to the beginning.

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When we are kids, we have this perception that our friends are going to stay with us forever. But, back then, I was no longer a kid. In my mind, I knew that friends come and go throughout life, as I have also experienced it first-hand. However, my sister and her friend were something else. They were close as sisters (it sometimes felt like we were triplets and not twins) – they spent many hours a day together, almost every day. They seemed unbreakable. And then, to my complete shock, their relationship came crumbling down.

My whole belief of friendships shattered. I believed that these two would stay together through everything, but I was wrong. Looking back, I don’t know what I was so surprised about, as I too had falling outs with friends around this time, as I shared with you and mentioned before. Seeing what had happened between my sister and her friend, and having been gone through my own falling out with friends, helped change my mindset. Throughout life, relationships come and go. We evolve, we grow, we change, and often our friends don’t change with us. We must accept that not all our friends are going to be a part of our lives forever. People grow apart, and that is completely natural.