Friends are all we care about when we’re young. We were taught to stay with our friends through everything, and to believe that a friend would never maliciously hurt us. Most of us have based our friendships on these presumptions, though the truth about authentic friendships changes as we move to identify what a real friendship is.  

For five years, the term “friend” was designated for anyone that I regularly hung out with or anyone kind enough to talk to me. I couldn’t tell the difference between a friend who was true from one who was fake.

When I was young, I was naive and put too much trust in others. This got to a point where I couldn’t tell which friendships were authentic or obligatory. When given glares and poorly concealed insults, I took them seriously and did anything to appear perfect.

Maybe it’s because we just want to hang out with the “popular” group.  We convince ourselves that the way our so-called friends are treating us is normal, and we neglect our true friends who are still patiently there for us.  Sooner or later, the risk is that you become just as potentially toxic as those who are “popular.”

In second grade, I started making friends who treated me as if I were less than they were.  I turned into a scapegoat for their poor decisions. I had hoped that being with them would increase my popularity. It didn’t.

When we are younger, some of us didn’t fully understand what a friend was. We saw them as stepping stones toward our own popularity – the more the merrier! We forgot that they had feelings too, and if we didn’t like them, we simply walked away.

In my case, I was unaware that having a friend meant being natural and carefree in their presence. I thought pleasing them was the priority. Some people try so hard to be in the ‘it’ group that realizing what friendship really means is a wake-up call.

In the end, when we identify our true friends, we might look back and see how naive we were. When we befriended the wrong people, thinking that they were the friends we needed, we were only looking to social climb. Maybe that’s when we will finally realize the difference between make-believe and reality.