Unshackled

For a long time, maybe more than a decade even, I thought I had attachment issues. I was that type of person who would stick to any friendship, whether good or bad. Even after becoming a minimalist, I still continued.

To be honest, I found it very easy to let go of clothes, shoes, books, you know, the material stuff. But when it came to friends, especially childhood friends, it was very difficult. Not that I didn’t know who needed to be in my life and who needed to go. I knew, but I just never acted. I had this fear fueled by the thought that childhood friends were a forever deal and you had to hold on to them no matter what.

I’m sure everyone here had a favorite toy when they were kids. And for some of us, no matter how old, rusty, and damaged that toy became, we never wanted to let go. Why? Because of the thought that we were never going to get anything similar or better to replace it. I’m sorry to even compare friends to toys but I just wanted to go as practical as possible.

It was the same thing with me. I always scared that the only people who would understand my personality and love me as a person were people I grew up with and it was going to be hard to get new friends. I held unto different form of treatment , did things I didn’t like because I was scared of what was out there. I mean what if I actually let them go and then nobody even wants to be friends with me because I had been told several times I was “complicated”?

And then, one day, I read this "minimalism in relationship" blog that said the reason why we let go of certain people is to make room for quality relationships with others. So to me, that meant as far as I was holding on to the same people all the time, I wasn’t going to meet new people. Gradually, I freed my mind from that thought, that fear. It wasn’t as easy as I’m saying.

I came to understand that it was actually a win for me to lose a bad friend, a friend who needs me to be a certain way before they could love me, whether we’ve been friends since babies or just met yesterday. And then as time went on it didn’t matter if I got a new friend or not because my minimalist lifestyle taught me how to enjoy my own company and life also taught me that the time factor doesn’t work in friendships.

Today, I can testify that it is indeed better to be alone than to have certain friends around you. And I must say life has been way better. I am no more caged by the fear that the best kind of friends to have are those you’ve known since ages and it would be catastrophic to lose them. I maintain friendships according to how healthy they are and the impact we both have on each other and not because of the number of years they’ve been in my life.