Over my adulthood, my mother has always told me that “If I want a friend, I need to be a friend.” For many years that has been a tough pill to swallow because I live in constant fear that I am not a good enough of a friend and that I am never holding my end of a friendship up that I am going to be rejected for trying my best and again be back to square one of having to find a friend again.

For a long time in my life, I was very reluctant to have friends in my life because I thought they would pray too much in my life or they would be too stressful and complicated. Yet, I felt alone on an island where I felt the need for continual connection. Everyone wants that sort of connection. Thankfully, there are great online tools, if used safely that can be used to connect to others with similar interests. You will not believe how deep the connection can be if you really look for it and how many times it keeps me going when the times get tough.

If anything, the last decade has made me see where I want to draw the line of friendship and relationship, what I want in a friend and what a true friend can be. It has provided a fair share of issues that eventually made me who I am and even a stronger man because I stood my ground and said that I was going to choose who I was going to let in my life.

Over time I had to clean my feeds and only allow positivity to reign in my life. I had been hurt too much in the beginning and my family could see the detrimental effects of it and I would take it out on them. I knew I had to make a change, and sometimes that change can happen literally at the snap of the finger. Sometimes you have to say goodbye to something that is unhealthy and you fear being on the end that must build that wall, but when you do and it goes as smooth as it can, you shine like a diamond and are so proud of yourself.

There will be times that the ones you build the boundary around will try to pry into your life, but you must be stronger and find better ways to let go of what was. It had taught me that I have the power to define how I want to live my life and who I want to associate with and when it becomes a point to where it becomes unhealthy, and I have to say goodbye.

But, if it is indeed a strong friendship, you must hold your end of the friendship by being a good friend and working to meet a compromise on things about it like the frequency and duration of communication and setting limits on when and where that is done. This is building boundaries and while I had to learn the hard way in life in how to set them, they are a crucial part of any friendship or relationship and can be the thing that can make or break it.

However, being honest and giving it your best is equally important when you need to keep a friendship or relationship going in order to make it unilaterally even and be there to support each other, because the other friend does not know what is going on with you if you are not willing to share something no matter how little it is, if it is a good friend, they will support you through thick and thin, if not or they see your value in other things, then that is your que to exit the friendship.

We are all human beings, and we all have desires and wants. Only pushing our feelings back and living in the land of denial makes the work harder and the discovery of who you are much harder in the long run. I had to realize that I need to make that connection sometime in my life before its too late, Idleness is a sore thing that can build a undue load of stress that is not necessary and can make life so much harder to live without seeing some sort of hope that there are other people out there who are  similar to you that need to connect and have the same desire to find someone to share what they are feeling too.