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**I'm drifting apart from the people I used to know**

<div class="text-justify">When you're young, friends always seemed to come by easily. Whether it be in school, weekend sports, or any other extra-cirricular activity in life, it was a given that people would enter your life easily.
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Then, as you grew up and entered college age, you started to find people older than you, mostly in their late twenties, begin to tell you that your social circles would shrink dramatically and that you should make your best effort to make friends now that you'll carry with you into adulthood. At the time you wouldn't believe it - your whole life you've been brought up in a social environment and entering the workforce would simply be a continuation of that, right?
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<center><i>If only it was that simple.</i></center>
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People grow up and pair off. They begin long-term relationships and invest in them. Suddenly, they become like ghosts who only seem to exist in one's memories. They no longer have free time to spend with you, or free time to even chat with you. They start families and commit to their careers and you've been left out in the cold. They tell you that they would spend more time with you if they had some to give, but is that really true?

<center>**Lately I've been finding myself drifting away from all my old friends. It wasn't really because of relationship status or physical proximity to one another, but gradual and subtle changes in personality and worldview that seemed to drive us apart naturally.**</center>

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It seemed to creep up on me without my ever noticing it. All the friends I made are alot like me, and are either still single or in relationships, but none of them have children. I honestly thought I was pretty safe, but over time it's become increasingly difficult to maintain relationships with them and my desire to see alot of them has diminished. It's been months since I last saw a number of them and I don't feel any worse for it.

**I realized it was because I was no longer as emotionally invested in them as I was before**. I wasn't able to connect with them the way I used to. We share a group conversation on Facebook and it's become a dead chatgroup. How does a group conversation with 6 people become so stagnant? It's unfortunate because I once shared everything with them, but I realized that they didn't really return the favor and kept alot of their real feelings and opinions hidden and as a result, made it difficult for us to connect. It began to feel like wasted time and breath telling someone about something I've been doing or am interested in when I receive what amounts to a generic response that would have been the same regardless of what I'd said. I would speak naturally but I wasn't feeling it returned, and this really affected my motivation to keep being myself, especially when I had other friends with whom I could really get along better.

The irony of it all is that these other people live in other places all over the world and I've only met a handful of times, and in spite of that, those are the people I really get along with, and **it feels natural to maintain friendships with them**. It's refreshing having people you can be yourself around and it doesn't feel like a wasted effort. It was through them that I began to see how short-changed I was being with my former friends group.

If anything, this post is a tribute to them and a hope for better days in the future. Maybe I need to think about it more and come up with some other ideas, but for the meantime, I need to let this off my chest.</div>
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