Insights

When You Realize That the People You Are Friends with Aren't Friends with You.

Friendship often begins with an assumption. We spend time together, share conversations, celebrate milestones, and slowly begin to believe the relationship carries the same meaning for both people. Most of the time, we never stop to ask whether that assumption is true. Then life has a way of revealing the answer.

Perhaps it is during a difficult season, a moment of need, or simply the gradual silence that follows when we stop making the effort. It becomes clear that while we considered someone a friend, they may have simply considered us an acquaintance, a colleague, or someone who happened to be nearby for a season of life.

It is a painful realisation, not because someone has necessarily done something wrong, but because our understanding of the relationship was different from theirs. Perhaps friendship is not measured by how long people remain in our lives, but by whether both hearts quietly agreed they were walking the same road together.

Not every friendship ends because someone walked away, sometimes it ends because the journey was never shared in the first place.

Thought-provoking reflections on life, identity and relationships, written in the style of a modern-day Socratic journal and told through poetic paradoxes and emotional honesty.

by Paul Strydom.

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Read, reflect, agree, disagree, or just see things differently.