Happy Bubbles: Friendship In a New Age, How Authentic Friendships Saved My Life - A Dolphin Cocoon Contest Entry

Once upon a time, I was a lost, lonely, depressed, and suicidal kid who thought I would be alone forever, and that anyone who I tried to become friends with would always end up leaving me in the end. You see, I'm not exaggerating when I say that the story of my life is that just about every single friend I had made over the course of my life has always one day told me that they were never really my friend, that they just felt sorry for me so they were nice to me but now no longer wanted to hang out with me.

I experienced this kind of abandonment for so many years of my life, and only managed to find a short change after I joined the military and began to make my very first lifelong true friends who I know would always have my back and always be there for me when I need them. It was in the military that I began to formulate my personal idea of what friendship truly is, and what it really means. It was during my time in the military that I got my first taste of friendships that I knew were real and genuine, where I met people who changed my life and demonstrated to me what it truly means when someone says that they are my friend and will never desert me.

The following is the story of three significant individuals in my life who I credit with being the most influential friends I have ever had in my life, the three people who I am not related to by blood but will always love with all my heart and soul.

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Nate

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It was in the military that I met a man who I will always consider my best friend of all time. I had just gotten transferred to Naval Air Station Pensacola, and I was still pretty new to the base when I met Nate. We hit it off right away and it was as if we had known each other our whole lives. There were no walls between us and we felt so comfortable with each other that we could just be our real and genuine selves with each other and enjoy our life-changing friendship and not care about what anyone else thought of us.

We spent basically every waking hour in each other's company when we weren't off at our respective A Schools or hanging out with our other friends (because of course we still had our separate friend circles that we navigated through). I would hang out in his barracks room all the time and we would just watch TV shows and movies and just generally enjoy being in each other's company. With how close and inseparable and intimate we were, I have no doubt that the casual observer would have just assumed that we were gay for each other.

That wasn't the case, but we did have a friendship and a depth and richness to our relationship that burned so intensely, an intensity which most other people in this world don't even know they actually wish to have with a true friend in this world. We had a genuine interest and passion for each other that the poets of olde used to write about, this real notion of true friendship that even the likes of Emerson and Thoreau would have envied.

Needless to say, it was quite the tragic parting when Nate graduated from his A School first and had to leave Pensacola to move on to his C School. We kept in touch for a while after that, but after I moved on to the fleet and went on deployment, we both lost touch with each other for a period. Every time we would lose touch with each other, though, we somehow always ended up finding each other again, and every time we re-connected, it was always as if not a single day had passed since we were together in Pensacola.

Our relationship has not always been bright and sunny, though. There was once a time, a few years ago, when my world was shattered and I honestly believed that our 6 year friendship (at the time it was 6 years) had truly been obliterated and had no hope of ever being restored. We got into an ideological argument over differences in religious perspectives, and things got really heated. I'm talking like all caps text messages to each other, and yelling at each other over the phone, etc. It ended with him telling me goodbye, and that he was deleting my number from his phone as well as all the messages we had ever sent to each other. He was determined to completely remove me from his life, and that killed me.

It was about 4 or 5 months before I finally heard back from Nate again, and during that time, things got really bad for me again and I was in a very dark place in life. I had lost all hope for ever finding true friendship again, since the one man who I thought would always be in my life and always be my best friend had so easily chosen to toss it all away over some petty ideological differences.

Needless to say, when he finally called me and made amends, it was one of the happiest days of my life at the time. All the hope came rushing back to me, all the belief in friendship, everything had been restored. And though things were kind of weird for us for a while, as we had to get used to being in each other's lives again and I had to start chipping away at the wall that I had erected to protect myself from that kind of pain, eventually, things went back to normal for us.

Nowadays, we are back to talking to each other frequently. We still haven't managed to go back to the days when we used to talk to each other on the phone every day, but we both know and understand that the same love is still there and has only been strengthened after we had our little falling out.

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Clayton

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When I got out of the military, I moved away from all of my friends from the military and once again was thrown into the loneliness of the vast human sea that is Los Angeles, California. Though I was surrounded by people everywhere, I once again felt so alone in the world. It didn't help that no one could really relate to me and everyone tended to avoid me once they found out that I was a veteran.

I found myself slipping into a horrible lonely depression again, feeling like I had no friends and that I couldn't reach out to anyone anymore. I felt so aimless in life, like there just was no point to living anymore. I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing with my life and I truly felt like I was a waste of an existence.

It was during this time in my life that I met a guy who I came to know as the little brother I had always wished I had growing up. Clayton and I met during a chance encounter in French class one semester, and we really hit it off right from the start. We began to hang out a lot and really get to know each other, and we had so much in common, yet still so much that was different that we could really learn and grow from being friends with each other.

Clayton lit a fire in me that I thought would never be reignited come alive. It was during that time of being best friends and brothers with him that I became inspired to pick up the pieces of my life and actually try to do something with it. It was then, that I came to this epiphany of what it was that I am truly supposed to be doing with me life, what my destiny is. Just being in his presence and seeing how determined he was to make life work out in his favor, inspired me to do the same thing.

We connected to each other on so many levels, and had so much in common with each other that it constantly blew both our minds. We went on many adventures together and he showed me around his hometown of Cayucos, which felt so much like my own hometown of Saipan, that I truly felt at home there with him. We went camping several times, and he introduced me to the wonderful world of backpacking.

He took me on my first backpacking adventure ever, an experience that forever changed my life and instilled in me a true sense of the importance of nature, and of how essential it is for everyone to go on a backpacking journey at least once a year to reset and recharge away from all the troubles and distractions and disconnectedness of society.

That backpacking adventure through Yosemite, through the John Muir Trail, was one of the most challenging things I had ever done at that point in my life. I still weighed about 240 lbs back then, so I couldn't really keep up with Clayton and our friend Reef, which meant I had a lot of time on that journey to be alone with my thoughts. I was able to reassess my life and analyze a lot of what was going on, and I was able to come up with certain things that I needed to do in order to change and become the better man that Clayton always inspired me to be.

Similar to my relationship with Nate, however, things weren't always bright and sunny for us. At least, on my end, anyway. Eventually, Clayton got a girlfriend and he started to spend a lot more time with her, and he ended up neglecting me and before I knew it we weren't hanging out anymore. Me being the butthurt kid I was back then, instead of confronting the situation and addressing my concerns with him, I chose to wallow in my bitterness and my logic was along the lines of "well if he's not gonna make an effort to hit me up and hang out with me, I just won't try anymore either, screw it!"

This disconnect between us continued all the way until I ended up deciding to pack my bags and move to Utah. I did invite him to my farewell party, and he came with his girlfriend Heather. I appreciated their presence, and it was so good to see him again after what was probably months of not having seen him. However, there was still a lingering weirdness between us, and there were definitely some words that were left unsaid on both our parts.

It wasn't until I had already moved to Utah and I decided to just send him a long letter explaining everything that I was feeling about how everything went down, that we were able to work things out and patch up our relationship. That was when I learned that I should have been more upfront with him about how hurt I was feeling over his neglect of me, because apparently he had no idea that I was even going through any of that. He just assumed that I was ok with all that was going on because I never spoke up. He taught me a very important life lesson in that moment, one that I still hold true to this day, and I will always be grateful to him for that.

I was recently able to visit him in California, and it was such a long overdue reunion that proved that our friendship stood the test of time and distance, because it was as if nothing had changed between us and we were right back to being "thick as thieves." The bond we share as brothers is stronger than ever now, and we both know that no matter what happens we will always be brothers and we can always depend on each other for true friendship.

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TJ

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I've made some friends since moving to Utah, and one of them I was convinced was my best friend out here...but he ended up being a toxic narcissist who took advantage of me and he brought back memories of all my failed "friendships" in the past. I had invested so much of my time, energy, and money into our relationship, only for him to come to me one day and tell me that we were never really best friends, and that he was only keeping me around because I was so nice and was always doing stuff for him.

That tragic end to what I had thought was a real friendship truly broke me again, and I was seriously considering just not trying to make any friends anymore because of how much I thought what we had was a real friendship, only to be once again betrayed by someone who I thought would not repeat the same patterns as my past "friends."

In my depressed state, I found myself back in the Electronic Dance Music scene, and it was after I started going to EDM festivals that I met the guy who I've come to know as my best friend out here. TJ and I had been friends on Facebook for a while, but we never really actually talked to each other up until he messaged me on Facebook one day saying that we should hang out. We decided to go to Global Dance Festival Colorado together, and that adventure of a trip was our first time ever hanging out. We clicked real well with each other right from the start, and it was as if we had been in each other's lives for a long time already. You can read more about our first meeting ever here.

I had been so lost and aimless until TJ came into my life. He showed me that my goals and dreams in life were worth working towards, and he truly reignited the spark inside me that I thought had died out forever. I have been the most productive and motivated that I have ever been in my life, thanks to my life-changing relationship with TJ. He inspires me every day to be a better person, just by being himself and working towards his own dreams, which I am blessed enough to be a part of.

He helped me to overcome a lot of the mental and emotional blockages that I had been trapped by my whole life due to being abandoned by so many people who I thought were my friends in the past. He helped to lift me out of a very dark place in my life and showed me that there are people in this world who deserve my kindness, who deserve my investment, and there are people who just don't. Obviously, he's in the former camp, not the latter.

TJ has helped me to truly believe in friendship again, after a time in my life when I had once again lost all hope for my "silly" notions of what true friendship is. We now have a few ventures that we are planning to execute, and we are both super stoked to see our plans come to life over the next year. I am truly looking forward to seeing how successful we are in a year from now. One thing we are both certain of, is that we will accomplish great things together.

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What Friendship Means to Me

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The following are what I refer to as my "Realizations on Friendship" which I have written down in my notebook over the past year. I consider them my main tenets of Friendship, and they are being added to as time goes by and I come to new realizations. I've written entire blog posts expanding on these tenets, which you can also find under the #friendshipinanewage tag here on Steemit.

• A friend is someone who respects you enough as a human being to be completely real with you. They deem you cool enough or worthy enough to know who they really are.
• A friend is someone who accepts who you are, as you are. They love you for being who you are and do not wish for you to change.
• A friend is someone who reminds you that you are an important person. They acknowledge the fact that your presence in their life has helped make life a better experience.
• A friend is someone who wants to spend time with you often. They value your company and show you how much they truly appreciate your time and attention when you are able to give it to them.
• A friend is someone who confides in you, who talks to you about their problems and insecurities, and comes to you for emotional support. They know that you are someone they can express their feelings to without being judged or looked down upon.
• A friend is someone who allows your being to unfold in the present moment. They don't judge your actions or inactions based on their previous experiences with other people.
• A friend is someone who freely and honestly unburdens onto you. They have faith in the integrity of the bond of friendship that you share and trust that you won't be put off by what they tell you.
• A friend is someone who listens to your hopes for the future and truly supports your dreams. They encourage you to never give up on your goals and let you know how much they truly believe in your ability to achieve them.

I will always love all of my friends and be so grateful for their true friendship, but the three guys mentioned above will always have a disproportionate amount of that love and gratitude, for reasons which I hope I have made clear in this post. Their authentic friendship truly saved my life and put me on a much better trajectory, and I will always keep them close in my heart because of that. I would not be where I am today, had these three men never come into my life and befriended me, and shown me what true friendship means.

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The Happy Bubbles Contest

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Thank you so much for reading my story! I never intended for it to be this long, but Friendship is such an important topic for me, that when I start writing, I end up writing a ridiculous amount. (^_^;)> This post is an entry to the Happy Bubbles Contest, hosted by @thedolphincocoon. It will run for the entire month of December, with a new theme each week. Week 1's theme is Friendship, so I figured I would just tie it into a new Friendship In a New Age blog post as well. Please click here to check out the contest announcement post.

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Check out some of my other posts!

What You Need to Know About Telling Veterans "Thank You" on Veterans Day
How The Minnow Support Project Helps You Achieve Your Dreams on Steemit
How I Achieved 200 Followers in My First Month on Steemit
Why I Chose to Invest $100 in Steem
How To Set Up Your Steemit Profile
The Dawn of The Dancing Dreamers
The Dawn of Friendship In a New Age
I'm Just an Island Boy Living in Utah who Loves EDM

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