Friendship is more important and therapeutic than anyone realizes. Your friends are the family that you can build on your own compared to the one you were born into. In my personal experience, the family and friends I have made over the years have given me more support and comfort than anything.

I am eternally grateful for that. 

Today, I’d like to talk about how the friendships I’ve made have helped me through a lot of struggles in my personal life. To say that I am appreciative of them is an understatement. A group of friends that I’ve made have saved my life and helped me crawl out of my depression.

I used to think that I was so undeserving of a good group of friends based off past trauma of having friendships broken in the most horrible way.

But now I know that when you find yourself a good group of friends you do not have to worry about them causing you heartache. 

 My current group of friends has taught me about how to rely and lean on someone for emotional support and how to appropriately give emotional support. I could say in the past that I’ve always had a problem being supportive by reaching out because for some reason in my mind I felt that me reaching out to somebody to help them or asking for help was such an inconvenience and I’ve found myself stopping myself from reaching out.  

Self-refection

It took me a long time to learn to reach out and humble myself to accept help and emotional support. For so long I was used to doing it on my own and it started to make me bitter and cynical in a way. It wasn’t until I befriended a group of people who are all different as far as their backgrounds and their jobs.

We come together to form this wonderful group of friends that I cannot imagine not knowing. 

 I love how we are able to talk about anything and everything under the sun whether it be happy, sad, or silly. My favorite is when we make it a point to talk over video chat once a week or twice a week just to act crazy blow off steam and play virtual games together. Little do they know that this has helped my mental health and my self-esteem so much in the past seven months.

I now feel like I am no longer alone in the world and that there are people out there that have my back. 

Before I met this group of friends that I have now I was always at home by myself alone with my kids not talking to anyone. It was very depressing and sad for me for two reasons; reason one being that no person deserves to go through life alone and unsupported. The second reason is that being afraid and reliving my past traumas to a point has caused me to self-isolate and that was not good for me or my mental health.  

After a lot of soul searching, I had to learn to let somebody in and let them love me in the way I needed to be loved.

With their help I became a little bit more secure in the type of friend that I am and the person that I am. I now know longer have to relive trauma from being told that I was never good enough for anything or Anyone.

I now have friends that love me just the way I am and that makes me so incredibly happy.

In a way it also makes me feel safe and secure.  What I love most about my friends is how supportive they are. We support each other in anything and everything that we do in our private lives. I also hope they know how much I love them and that I hope that they have the same feeling of love and security from me that they have given to me. 

I really wish that it is expressed more on how important it is to have a good set of friends. It’s so sad to see how many people are depressed and lonely when all of this can so easily be fixed with the right amount of support from loving people.

Final Thoughts…

If you are out there in need of friends, please don’t hesitate to reach out to anyone that you might know in a coffee group, a book club, or a meet up for play dates.  

Even joining a few Facebook groups can do the trick. Connecting virtually has become more popular in it is so easy to find people to talk to that share your interests and values. Good friends are out there! And now making the first move is hard but it is so rewarding in the end.

Who knows, maybe you’ll be like me and find a wonderful loving group of friends that will have your back no matter what and make your heart smile 😊. 

*For more from Anastassia, check out our Band of Bloggers Page.