On friendship

Friend

noun 

 \ ˈfrend \

1. One attached to another by affection or esteem

2. A companion

One of the many things that I find truly fascinating about being human is our social condition. Many animal species have been equipped with incredible tools to ensure their survival like claws, night vision, tentacles, or venom, and then when we look at humans we find that there’s nothing truly outstanding about our physique because the two main things we were given to cope with the world is our brain, and also each other. 

When it comes to the human brain there’s nothing I don’t find utterly unbelievable about it; there’s an organ inside of our skull that’s capable of writing books, of imagining movies, of starting revolutions, of remembering sunsets, of travelling to the past, of beginning wars, of creating music, of falling in love, of creating machines that land on the moon, of storing a life’s worth of memories…

And when we speak about our social condition, I believe it’s safe to say that we’re addressing the very subject that completely startles me. We humans, we survive because we unite, we collaborate, we interact, we socialize, we create countries, we start families, we organize, we share, we belong. Our social condition is our superpower, we humans simply cannot make it if we’re alone. We, by definition, need each other… How is that not fascinating?

This dependency on other humans manifests in many shapes and colors; in nations, in romantic love, in governments, in families, in institutions, and also in friendship… one of my personal favorites. To me, friendship is mesmerizing because we’re able to choose our friends. 

We might be born into a family, a community, or even a nationality not of our own making, but picking a bunch of humans and becoming friends with them grants us the opportunity of shaping our environment, the people we choose as our friends usually transform not only us, but also our reality. Us humans, we have been given the incredible privilege of being able to share, of living together, of belonging somewhere, of having a team backing us when the going gets tough… Aren’t we lucky?

I guess the most incredible thing friendship has done for me, apart from shaping me in ways I’m not even able to put into words, is the fact that my friends have saved me, on more than one occasion, not only from things that have happened to me along the way but especially from myself. 

There have often been times when I’ve lost myself along the path of becoming who I want to be. The road to self-discovery, of becoming, of growing, of living, could be described in many ways, but I think by saying it's messy we pretty much cover all the bases. 

We tend to get lost along the way, sometimes our vision gets clouded and we lose sight of who we are… and then we have a group of humans who simply by showing up, by the simple act of being there, they remind us of those little things we were starting to forget. They put us back on our feet, without even realizing we had tripped along the way. Sometimes when we break, the only thing that is able to hold our pieces together is another person, and that’s the exact moment when being cataloged as a human goes from being an adjective to being a privilege.

I believe there are many types of freedom. We might feel free whenever we stand in front of the ocean, or while doing those things that make our soul dance, but one of the types of freedom I cherish the most is whenever I’m surrounded by my closest friends, and I feel completely free to be myself, that feeling of being completely at ease, of being home. The incredible simplicity involved in sitting in a room where there are no judgments, no need to pretend, where there's just laughter and the peaceful act of being surrounded by a group of people whose mere existence has the power of turning off the voices in your head, of putting everything into place, of transforming silence into a space of honest comfort.

Whenever I look at myself, when I stop and analyse the person I am to this day, I see in me a mixture of all the people I’ve cross paths with. Every single one of those people has left something of them in me, whether them knowing it or not… If it ever came a time when I had to define myself, I would say I am the sum of all the people that have come into my life, shaping and transforming all my bits and pieces. 

“It is the great adventure in life: circulating, finding each other, meeting by accident on the road” – Gael García Bernal 

Sincerely yours, 

Natalia