#reverb10 – Day 16: Friendship

December 16 Prompt

Author: Martha Mihalick
Editor at Harper Collins
@curiousmartha

Prompt: Friendship. How has a friend changed you or your perspective on the world this year? Was this change gradual, or a sudden burst?

reverb10.com

I don’t think I can think of a specific incident where a friend changed me or my perspective. It likely happened, but nothing sticks out.

Edit: December 21, 2010, 9:35pm

So my husband read this post through Facebook and wrote me the following comment:

Weak sauce..you have friends on the Internet community that helped you be more social, friends that are pregnant that allow you to appreciate the miracle children give, a November weekend that allowed you to appreciate alone time and remind you that your still a woman and not just a mom..would you like me to write these for you 🙂

I wrote the following back to him:

Point taken. Thanks for calling me on it. I have to admit, I haven’t been giving some of these posts the thought they deserve. I’ve been just trying to push them out. Not everything needs an over-the-top story, but that subject didn’t deserve such a weak response.

I think I’ll go back and edit a little later and incorporate what you’ve reminded me of. Thanks.

(For those playing along at home, I’m at my folk’s place right now so that is why Sean and I are talking about this here instead of face-to-face.)

So yeah, Sean was totally right. Hear that honey? You were right. We’ve since talked offline (well, technically online since it was a Skype conversation, but it was just a conversation between the two of us).

I was thinking about this the wrong way. I was thinking about how an individual friend had completely changed my life. I wasn’t thinking about the gifts that my friends have given me this year.

Each of the three things Sean mentioned are extremely valuable to me. I’m not a good friend. I don’t keep in touch as much as I should. I don’t nurture my friendships very well. Yet people still talk to me.

That is a gift unto itself.

I need to change my perspective and return that gift to them.

6 thoughts on “#reverb10 – Day 16: Friendship”

  1. That’s a great perspective. And, might I point out that you have a pretty stellar friendship with Sean if he’s tuned in to your life enough to point these things out. It’s great to have someone like that around.

    Friendships are time-consuming and hard to maintain, but you really do get what you give. It’s infinitely rewarding to nurture friendships with the right people. That’s been a big lesson for me this year – online and offline.

    Reply
    • I’m definitely grateful for Sean’s friendship (and partnership as a husband).I’m also grateful that he’s willing to call me out. We were apart last week (I was off for Christmas before he was and took Flora down to visit our families) and I really appreciated that he took the time to read what I was writing (without prompting from me) and more importantly, take the time to say something about it.

      We’re back home now, so I’m hoping to slowly catch up on the #reverb10 posts this week. I do plan to put a little more thought into them – I was a little too flippant with some of the subject matter. 🙂

      Reply
  2. How wonderful that your husband appreciates your friends and how they contribute to your life. (Bonus that he can express it with such poignant clarity!) You clearly have a wonderful friend in him.

    And I’m betting that you are a far better friend than you give yourself credit for.

    Reply
    • Thank you Michelle. I am definitely very grateful for Sean. As to your second point, I don’t think I can answer that without some insight from my friends. I know I’m not a great friend, so I figure I should admit to that.

      Reply
  3. Mel you are a good friend and I am with you at being just as bad at not nuturing friendships as much as I should. However having said that isn’t it nice to know that you have some friends who don’t require that much nuturing…..that you can be away from them for a long time, but still get together and have great laughs and have it seem like time hasn’t passed.

    Guess that makes us weeds in your garden of friends, but really nice flowery weeds, the ones that you don’t want to pull out cause they have nice flowers on them 🙂

    Reply
    • I really like your analogy Katrina. You’re definitely my kind of gardener. Thanks for your comment. I do think I need to be more of an active friend versus a passive one. xo 🙂

      Reply

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada
This work by Melissa Price-Mitchell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada.
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