Life Lessons on Friendship

When I started dating I found that one of the biggest challenges was simply presenting myself as who I was. You have to know yourself to survive out there, those dating app bio prompts become a beaming torch into the parts of yourself you haven't figured out yet. I'd been someone's girlfriend for my entire adult life, I had no solid grasp on the woman I was waiting to become now that I was alone. But every day that I spent with my friends, I found a little bit more of her.
Pouring myself into my relationships with them gave me nearly every kind of connection that I'd been missing over those years. They listened and actually heard me. They helped me paint what I wanted my world to look like and cheered when there was progress. They made me remember how it felt to cackle until black streaks ran down my cheeks and strangers stared confusedly as we shrieked. I started coming home from hopeless internet dates, spending five minutes with my new room mate and wondering why I'd even left the house, when there was such a rare kind of love living there already.