Friendship and Choices
I’ve been thinking about my life and my friendships. I think I lived most of my life making good choices and judgements — having good judgement and doing what I knew was right. I didn’t have any major problems or huge mistakes as some people do. I’ve always believed that you minimize your problems in life if you strive to do what is right and make choices from a good moral viewpoint. Then, when I reached about age 40, I made a couple big mistakes/poor choices. When I did make a poor choice, it had to be a big one. And, it cost me the only life-long true friendship I ever had. I’ve always had a pretty restrictive definition of true friendship. I’ve believed that true friendship was not what people commonly call being friends. What people commonly call “friends”, is what we called “acquaintances”. He and I both had the same viewpoint on friendship. We had talked about the saying of how true friendship was like one soul in two bodies and we thought it applied to our friendship. My father always said, “If you have one true friend in your life, you’re lucky.” I was lucky. We thought we would always be friends; true friends. And we were for 30+ years. I tried to be a true friend to him. Then, I ruined that friendship. We’ve made an effort to maintain the friendship since; but the friendship we’ve had since then is not like the one before. I wanted to fix it completely even though I don’t know that it’s possible. I think he doesn’t really desire to have the friendship, and I don’t blame him. I never would have dreamed I would have been in this place, especially of my own doing. I think I will never forgive myself. I think I will never have a good opinion of myself again.