Friendship

I have always had a really close group of friends. For the most part, we have been friends since we were little kids. We have added people here and there and spouses have been inducted in but the core is the same. When I think back on undergrad I think that my experiences were different from most because I went to school around here and the group was still connected (although this is where several of them added in). Don't get my wrong. I loved college and would not pass up the memories made by our friends during that time. There were TONS of late nights at Potters House, Monday night football, parties at the apartment, camping trips, baseball games etc. However, I didn't really branch out. I stayed close only with our group.



When I moved to Oklahoma for grad school, I was scared to death....but our cohort was close and I quickly made some super great friends. I still consider many of those people great friends (even though I am really bad at keeping in touch..sorry!). We have some amazing memories of conferences, crazy road trips, and great parties. When I went to Fort Worth, the same thing happened. Awesome friendships. I can not imagine my life had I not moved to these places and made such great friends (if you were not included in the pictures, sorry, I pulled the ones that were easy for me to get to) :)





Now that I am back in Missouri, I find myself falling back into the old pattern of "I don't need any new friends, it is hard enough keeping up with the ones I have." However, today was a rough day for me. I was emotional and felt like everything was going wrong. I got an unexpected pick-me-up when I had lunch with some of my co-workers. We were just chatting about everyday things and I started thinking....these people are my friends, we share personal information with one another, have common beliefs, etc. Basically, this entire thought process boiled down to this: I need to do more to nurture my friendships both old ones that I know will last forever and may be taken for granted, and new ones that need more attention! This will be one of my new goals and we all know how I love goal setting...