Kindness Is Cool: The Price of Friendship
Tags: Personal, Friendship, Journal, Advice, Diary

I grew up being told that making friends as easy.

Yet, as a young Christian homeschooler, I had a lot of trouble with friendships. Most of my friends at an early age were just family acquaintances, or kids in my Sunday school. It was only when I reached middle school that I began to desire an actual close kinship with somebody. And it seemed like every kid I tried to grow close to just left me behind. Middle school is ruthless. If you aren’t pretty, or popular, no one wants to talk to you.

All my older siblings had “best friends,” so why didn’t I? When I asked my dad this, he told me that there was a secret to making friends I should know. One that made being popular almost mindless. And being the lonely, left-behind kid in all my circles, I was interested.

My dad told me this, word for word. I remember it to this day.

“People don’t want to be friends with cool people. They want to be friends with kind people. Be kind to others, and they’ll line up to talk to you. Kindness is cool.”

I took this to heart. I took it to heart through all of middle school, and soon enough I was hanging out with a different person every week. Kids I didn’t even know invited me to their birthday parties. When I walked up to a circle of people, they moved to make room for me. I felt like I had unlocked a superpower.

In high school, my strategy was the same. I went to a online, classical Christian school, where the competition was even more intense than middle school. My classmates went to debate clubs and their favorite books were by C. S Lewis or Herodotus. Even the boys were reading Jane Austen. I was added to a group chat just for Lord of the Rings memes. I felt completely and utterly out of my element. I was smart, sure, but this was a whole new level of intelligence. It was like in a romantic comedy when the rough-around-the-edges country girl has to learn which fork to use for dinner at the big mansion or whatever. I don’t know, weird analogy.

Either way, I was determined to connect with some of these people. I put my well-practiced kindness to work, and sure enough I started to get to know some of my classmates. I quickly realized, however, that Level 2 wasn’t going to be that simple. People liked kindness, sure, but they also liked intelligence. And you can’t really just flip a switch for that.

I was never booksmart in high school, and I’m still not. But that wasn’t going to stop me. I pretended to know who Nietzsche was. I laughed at jokes I didn’t understand. I faked having interest in competitive essay writing and the history of WW2. After a while, I was really starting to seem like one of them. I felt included. I felt like I had earned their friendship.

The only problem was that it wasn’t sustainable. The truth was, I just wasn’t like them. When the last two years of high school hit, my family moved and I got completely depressed, pushed to the edge. I stopped going to class, and cheated just to get a passing grade. I was deteriorating, and so was my image. People just… left me behind. Again. I graduated with no one beside me and a blank front yearbook page.

And I think that’s when I realized how expensive friendship really was. I had no one beside me in life. I didn’t party, and I’d never had a boyfriend. So I sought out friendships online.

I joined discord servers and Instagram group chats. I met people through competitive gaming communities. I had more people in my life than I knew what to do with, but I just couldn’t figure out how to buy them yet. Half these people were shallow, competitive gossips. I knew as soon as I turned around, they were talking about me, too. Three of some of my closest online friends muted me on Twitter, and I realized I had to figure out how much I was willing to pay for them.

What was it, then? A couple extra compliments? A sub to their private Twitch channel? Modding them on my Discord server? I told myself I wouldn’t be shallow like them, but the little things piled up. I even kept it a secret that I was religious, one of the most important integral parts of my identity, because I was so terrified they would leave me behind.

There was no trust, no real connection. It was just a bunch of tinder for a slowly dying fire. I had given so much time, energy, money, and dedication, and I became so emotionally exhausted without a single thing to show for it. I was bitter. I hated seeing other people happy unless it was conceptualized in a TV show. I resented other people’s accomplishments. I hated seeing people succeed where I couldn’t, get compliments where I didn’t, get invited places that I wasn’t. Friendship was a transaction.

You’d think with that revelation, there would be a twist coming. Some big change, like a redemption arc. Maybe you’re expecting me to say that now that I’ve learned my lesson, I’m surrounded by friends and I’m happy.

Two years out of high school, and I really can’t say that anything has changed.

I do have one friend now. We connected over kpop, of all things. She’s my favorite person in the whole world. Only one year of friendship, but I know that she would take a bullet for me in a heartbeat. She makes sure I eat enough, because she knows I have a problem with that.

She’s the only person I’ve ever told about what happened those last two years of high school that pushed me to the brink. And I think, that night on her bedroom floor, the moment I opened my mouth was the moment I realized what I had been doing wrong.

“People don’t want to be friends with cool people. They want to be friends with kind people. Be kind to others, and they’ll line up to talk to you. Kindness is cool.”

I was that person. That friend, on the other end. I had wasted so many resources chasing the cool people, just to make me feel like I had a place. But the truth is, I hated every second of it. It’s agony.

When she came into my life, her first priority was always taking care of me, and I gravitated towards that faster than any other person I’d ever met in my life. Even when we had only been friends for a few months, she took me shopping for my birthday. We listened to music in my car for hours. I know her guest bedroom is always available, no matter what, just in case I need an escape. She’s the coolest person I’ve ever met.

Thirteen years of excruciating effort, and my best friend beat me to succeeding in following my dad’s advice. Friendship isn’t expensive at all. Friendship isn’t exhausting or traumatic. It’s a connection. It’s two people putting the other person first in this world for some crazy, mysterious reason. And that’s really, really cool.