I’ve loved the tv show Friends since college. While I wasn’t allowed to watch it in early high school, I got hooked on the show when it entered its 7th season my freshman year. At the time I loved the characters, their clothes, the dramatic relationships and the cool things they got to do. It wasn’t until the show had ended and I was living in California in 2006 that I finally grasped why I loved the show so much.
When I moved to Boston after undergrad, I was essentially on my own. I knew only one person from my past and the rest were new. Everything else was new too: new coffee shops, new highways, new banks, new ways to get to work, new everything. It was one of the hardest years of my life because I lacked a family. Don’t get me wrong, I have one of the best families around and even from a distance, my parents and siblings kept in touch and were supportive in every way they knew how. But still, they weren’t nearby and weren’t able to be supportive in the ways they were in high school and college.
When I moved to Boston after undergrad, I was essentially on my own. I knew only one person from my past and the rest were new. Everything else was new too: new coffee shops, new highways, new banks, new ways to get to work, new everything. It was one of the hardest years of my life because I lacked a family. Don’t get me wrong, I have one of the best families around and even from a distance, my parents and siblings kept in touch and were supportive in every way they knew how. But still, they weren’t nearby and weren’t able to be supportive in the ways they were in high school and college.
When you grow up and leave home, you can’t take your family with you. Instead, you create a new family; a family of friends. Friends become your parents, offering you advice and guidance as you take on the biggest challenges of your young life. They become your siblings, the people who you take on the world with and are daring with. They become your aunts and uncles, the people who help you create those really random memories and you have your favorite one who you know will always be the life of the party.
For me, my family of friends has held me together through some really great and really awful times in my 20s. From being alone in Boston, where my “family” consisted of an old acquaintance from college who became my brother, a new, younger sister who had more faith in me than I had in myself, and a group of Irish cousins who gave me more joy than I had experienced in a long time, to Kansas City and my current family of college friends who are teaching me by leading by example through their marriages, births, divorces, career success and failures, and more. Even my small, temporary families during my year in California and when I started my first "grown-up" job at MARC have each contributed greatly to my individual growth and development.
I love the show Friends because it showed that sometimes, life can be undefined and scary but with a "family of friends," you’ll be okay. I’ve been thinking a ton about this lately because of the bleakness of my current situation of still trying to figure out my life plan. I plan on doing a series of blogs on "friends as family" with some first-hand accounts of what it’s like to leave home and create a new family, as it brings many different ways of surviving. But until then, I’ll share with you a brief quote from Time Magazine that sums this up:
“No sitcom has ever been as deliberately self-effacing as Friends. The title, the theme song, the episode names ("The One Where...") were self-explanatory at best, insipid at worst. They were friends; they were there for each other. Move along, nothing more to see. But it wasn't just the sharp writing or the comic rapport that made Friends great. Its Gen-X characters were the children of divorce, suicide and cross-dressing, trying to grow up without any clear models of how to do it. They built ersatz families and had kids by adoption, surrogacy, out of wedlock or with their gay ex-wives. The show never pretended to be about anything weightier than 'We were on a break.' But the well-hidden secret of this show was that it called itself Friends, and was really about family.”
“No sitcom has ever been as deliberately self-effacing as Friends. The title, the theme song, the episode names ("The One Where...") were self-explanatory at best, insipid at worst. They were friends; they were there for each other. Move along, nothing more to see. But it wasn't just the sharp writing or the comic rapport that made Friends great. Its Gen-X characters were the children of divorce, suicide and cross-dressing, trying to grow up without any clear models of how to do it. They built ersatz families and had kids by adoption, surrogacy, out of wedlock or with their gay ex-wives. The show never pretended to be about anything weightier than 'We were on a break.' But the well-hidden secret of this show was that it called itself Friends, and was really about family.”
I’m realizing more and more each day how great my “family” is, and has been, and how it is your family of friends that gets you through your quarter-life crisis.
1 comment:
I can tell you many times when I have relied on my "framily" (coined phrase?) over my flesh-and-blood because my friends were the ones that stepped up and helped and encouraged me!
I'm raising my glass to you, and all others of you who have been there for me. You know who you are. Cheers!
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