Thursday, 16 January 2025

Friendship

 If there’s one thing I’ve really missed about my life it’s this: long-lasting friendships.

Let me explain. If you’ve followed my blog over the past few years you might remember when I wrote about my time at Cromer High School, about the problems I faced after my mother passed away in 1983, about how I was bullied and how I’ve suffered from mental health problems off and on ever since then.

At the time it was determined by “those in the know” that the best thing for me was to move schools from Cromer to North Walsham High School. When that didn’t work out I was moved to the North Walsham Senior Tutorial Centre, a place where kids who had problems were sent to. I lasted there for a couple of years before I was sent back to Cromer High to end my schooling, an end which couldn’t have come soon enough for me.

Being shunted around made it difficult to maintain any kind of friendship. I lost touch with the people I grew up with, guys I first met at infants school and ended up with at the high school for the first couple of years. There were quite a few people I thought of as good friends at the time, and quite a few others I would quite happily avoid if given the chance.



My health problems meant that I never got to “hang out” with any of them in the years after school. I never went to any pubs or clubs with them, I never went to any gigs or sporting events with them, I never actually did anything with them, simply because I didn’t know where they were or how to approach them, and while they were growing up, getting married and having families I was simply trying to survive, to find my way in life. After all, it was a big scary world out there, and my somewhat fraught school years had hardly prepared me for adult life.

It wasn’t until many years later that I connected with many of the people from my school years, firstly through Friends Reunited, and then through other social media platforms, and while it was nice to find out what some of them had been doing it became more than obvious just how much I missed out on during those years.

The people I knew back them are now all over the place. They’ve become mothers and fathers, and grandmothers and grandfathers. I’ve managed to exchange the occasional few minutes of conversation with some of them, but I’ve never sat down with any of them and just talked.

I’m not sure what I would do if any of them invited me out for a cuppa in a café somewhere. Most of them have lived their lives while it seems like I’ve just managed to survive. But I freely admit it would be nice just to sit down with someone to talk about what’s happened to me over the past eighteen months or so, someone that isn’t related to me.

Social media is all well and good, but true friendship is what I’ve missed over the years.

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