Posts Tagged ‘friendship’

We only have about eight weeks left till we board the plane to Los Angeles for good. Besides work, packing stuff, doing formal work and planning our first few months, there is one thing that takes up most of our time: Spending quality time with our family and friends. I’ve never been so busy with setting up dates for meetings with my friends before. We already do not have a single weekend left for ourselves or for packing in December. And all the friends we want to see didn’t even fit in our busy schedule yet.

Even if it is just the beginning of December, it already is the time to say farewell to some people, because we won’t see them again before we leave. The other weekend I went to my parents and attended a little dinner party they had with their best friends. These guys were the first to say good bye to me with the knowledge of not seeing me for what might be a very long time. Last weekend we visited some of Flo’s friends in Frankfurt and it is very likely that we won’t see them again till May when they will come out to California for a long planned vacation. My last day at work will be on December 21 and I than will have to say goodbye to the people I worked with for the last 12 months. And that long farewell list goes on and on for what feels like forever.

Even if I know that the real friendships we have will last even when we live in the US, it hurts me a lot to leave all those people behind. But maybe shedding all of my tears in the next eight weeks is not the worst idea at all. Because being sad and stressed out now may help me to be ready for some happiness when we finally arrive in LA. And I guess happiness is the thing I will need most in the first few weeks.

As I told you before, i am really scared of losing my friends when I live thousands miles away at the other end of the world! This fear vanished a bit after I talked to my best friend the other day. Petra moved to London three years ago. Before she moved we were unbelievably close, talked to each other on the phone for hours daily, saw each other nearly every day and had one of the best summers ever together. I still cry with laughter when I think about some situations we got ourselves in.

Nowadays Petra and I don’t see each other very often, nor do we talk to each other every day anymore. Actually we don’t even talk every months. But still Petra is one of the closest friends I have in my life! Everytime I talk to her on the phone, I don’t feel like I missed out on anything or have to tell her a lot, because it feels like we just talked the day before. My hubby and I visited Petra in February and the minute we both hugged each other all the long months we haven’t seen each other for just vanished.

Petra not only encourages me in our emigration plans with her experience and with standing by my side, but also with showing me how real friendships work. My english teacher once told me, that she hadn’t seen her best friend in ages after moving away from her home country Ireland. But she said it doesn’t matter how far or how long you are away from each other, because that would never break the band of a real friendship.

I don’t know how many of my friendships will reveal themselves to be real and unbreakable, but I know a hundred percent that the people I care most about will be in my life for a long long time. And that’s what will keep me alive – even at the other end of the world!

These days I am kind of emotional. The birth of my little nephew again made me realize how fast my last year in Germany is running by and how soon I will be separated from my family and friends. I had a long talk with my friend Petra in London, who told me about an article she read about how women tend to stick to friendships just for the sake of not losing them and not because of their “quality”. This is a big issue for me considered that I will be a thousand miles away from my friends very soon.

I think especially at my age when you get married, start your own family, have to work overtime etc. you come to realize who the people are which you can count on the most. I call myself lucky to have many great friends and I am a hundred percent sure that I will not lose the closest of them during the whole emigration process. But there are also some friends I am nearly a hundred percent sure to lose in the next couple of years.

I would describe myself as a very emotional and sensible person when it comes to dealing with problems in a friendship. Nearly every fight with close friends makes my stomach twist for days and kills me from the inside. But in the last couple of months I noticed a change in me dealing with this kind of problems. I grew much more confident and am not so afraid to let go friends anymore. I guess this is one of the best changes I can make before moving away to another continent. I know from friends experiences that – especially as an emigrant – you realize very fast who your real friends are and I don’t want myself to get even more emotionally injured, than I already will be.

So even if it is a hard thing to do, I guess I should cut off some time I used to spend with worrying about different friendships and spend much more quality time with the people I really love and who honestly love me back!