Building lifelong friendships

Recently I read a story that was posted by a friend on Facebook about the esteemed title of an emergency contact.

In the story, a mother expressed the anxiety and concern that she experienced when needing to relocate to a new state. For the first time in her life, she faced the blank line on her children’s registration forms for an emergency contact with anxiety because she didn’t know anyone in the town.

While I don’t have children, I certainly identified with this woman’s concern about moving to a new place, away from the surroundings of family and friends.

Certainly, when I moved to St. Louis, I remember feeling a panic during my first night, after my parents left. There I was in my own apartment by myself, not knowing a single person in the city.

At that time, I certainly held a mixture of excitement and fear. But on that first night, it was primarily fear. Of course, I knew that friends can be made easily, but developing the kind of trusting friendships that I had made over the course of my four years in college, was something that could not happen overnight.

Now, four years later, I no longer have the same fears: being married provides me with a constant companion and emergency contact. I have developed friendships that are as strong as the ones that I thought I would have to leave behind four years ago, and I have learned the importance of maintaining the friendships that I solidified in college.

Yes, friends come and go throughout our lives, depending on our circumstances. But what I have learned in the four years since my first night in St. Louis is that friendship changes as we continue to grow. The friends that I thought would be lifetime friends are not the same friends as those I now consider to be a major part of my life.

Of course, these reflections on moving away from our shared communities of friends that we’ve built up over the years have precedence.

For the first time since I’ve been in graduate school, a friend that I’ve worked with and seen almost every day has received a job offer at a university in West Virginia. We celebrated, but also reflected on the fact that with the state of the economy, many of us have no choice but to go where the job takes us.

We are a generation that may constantly be uprooted, constantly under flux, constantly forging and maintaining new friendships. We may not have the luxury of staying in the city where we grew up, the city we call home because our parents continue to live there. And that can be terrifying.

I suppose the one thing that continues to resonate with me is that when we think about leaving behind a form of our lives that we built for a period of time, we cannot only think about the ways in which a move will impact ourselves.

As I get closer to finishing my dissertation and as I continue thinking about the job market, I find myself thinking about the community that I will leave behind. And the terrifying fear of what my new community will hold.

Heather Bozant Witcher can be reached at hbozantwitcher @clarionherald.org.