Dear Birdy,

I’ve had a tight-knit group of friends since elementary school, and we’ve remained close enough as we’ve grown older. We all live in different places now, but on rare occasions have the opportunity to be together. In many ways we’ve grown apart, but there’s something really special about the connection we have, and I imagined we’d remain in each others’ lives forever, in one way or another. We’re in our late 30’s now, and last month we all got together to celebrate my birthday. We all chipped in to rent a beautiful house on a lake for all of us to gather. Over the course of the weekend, I realized there’s one of these friends I’ve just completely outgrown. She was drunk the whole time and facetiming with her new boyfriend every hour or two. It was hard to have any kind of meaningful conversation with her, and her presence dominated the whole event. I will always have a fondness for her and the past we’ve shared, but I feel like our friendship has fundamentally changed, and I am ready to walk away. How do I let go of a friendship I’ve had my whole life?

Sincerely,
Too Grown for This

Dear Too Grown for This,

I live right now on the edge of the sea. Every six hours or so, the world is made entirely anew by the changing of the tides. Low tide arrives and the entire history of the shore is revealed—craters in the sand, boulders that are invisible when the sea floods the earth. On some shorelines, entire universes are uncovered in the tidepools visible to us only when the water recedes, but present always, nonetheless. 

High tide rolls in with the kind of scouring power we can’t even really fathom with our limited human ways of understanding the world. Water and all it carries rises, rises, rises. The history of the shore is covered bit by rising bit. Exposed craters in sand become the ocean floor once again, boulders submerge their bodies under the surface, tidepools return themselves to the sea. Beaches become smaller, some unpassable entirely, as the ocean is tugged higher and higher onto land. 

When the tide begins again to recede, it will leave behind all kinds of washed up bits. Driftwood, plastic deposited into our communal liquid lungs by us faulty humans, bits of fishing rope, feathers, seaweed, crab shells, jellyfish, the rare glass float. Below the wrack line, where most of the tide’s evidence remains, the beach is a blank slate, a smooth palette on which the history of the next twelve or so hours will be written. 

The point I’m trying to make here, my love, is that change is inevitable. It is, if greeting card wisdom has anything to say about it, the only true constant in our lives. The ocean doesn’t worry herself over the ways in which she is different this morning than she was under last night’s moon. She doesn’t say to the things she carries, I’m leaving you behind now, my darling. You’re on your own. She simply recedes, and what she no longer has the energy to carry, she leaves behind. 

Your friendship with this person has lasted a long time, and I imagine in the beginning was born out of love. That love can remain even if you choose to set the friendship down. You are allowed to grow. You have permission to change. You have permission to cast aside what you no longer have the energy to carry as you are tugged in the direction of your becoming.

Perhaps there is the perfect someone looking for a treasure just like the one you’re ready to release, or maybe the sea will take it back into her glorious, generous body and offer whatever it is this particular treasure needs to emerge on some later high tide, edges grown softer from the gift of the churning. Maybe one day you’ll even find that treasure again and hold it in your hands and recognize it as a jewel. And maybe none of this will happen, and what you leave behind will simply go on existing in its own imperfect, human way, and you will have simply set it aside. Either way, the tide will keep on rising and falling. Either way, history will keep on being written and the ocean will keep on washing it away with her soft and relentless power as the earth’s most reliable author of change.

Love,
Birdy