Sometimes my friends and I end up reminiscing about how much change we’ve lived through.
And I know that it’s nothing compared to what my mom or Mike have endured, but it’s still uniquely ours.
Everything from historical moments to pop culture vignettes and school memories are brought up in our group chat.
And when the chat goes silent due to real-life interference outside of our phones, well, someone drops a line to assess everyone’s state of being.
After that, our conversations usually pick back up and we’re discussing current events while bouncing back and forth between sharing memes and reels to the inevitable moment someone brings up the past again.
I don’t know if it’s perpetually that way, but for the majority of the time we’re linking everything from the present to the past in some sort of experience capsule.
Honestly, I think the part that’s hardest for us is having this nebulous and floating sense of adulthood in a numerical experience, but most of us didn’t envision our future selves like this while we were in school.
As a group, none of us have any children yet, most of us have careers and some of us are homeowners.
A few of us take care of our parents and try to find time between work and other responsibilities to keep in contact with each other.
The hardest part about my friend group is when someone suggests an event or experience last-minute – it never fails that someone has an off day that the rest of us don’t share, and they have an idea for something fun.
It’s Fair & Rodeo time right now, so I’m unable to do anything with the scant free time I have available to me.
I need at least a week’s notice at minimum and three days if it’s a lax week at work.
For me, that’s during holiday seasons, the summer and long weekends – I’m kind of on the same schedule that most teachers have to deal with in that regard.
Sure, I’d like to be more spontaneous and have the freedom to drop everything I’m working on at the moment to go have some fun.
I mean, what adult wouldn’t, right?
Unfortunately, I can’t get past viewing that as an interruption that could possibly derail my carefully crafted schedule – then I get irritated.
My ADHD plays a major factor in this thought process and I just haven’t been able to break free from it yet.
I’m mostly playing catch-up while trying to rein in my anger in the middle of an outburst – sometimes it works at shutting down my irritation and other times it doesn’t.
Then again, according to my sister, I’ve always had this problem and the family has just dealt with it by taking it in stride.
I have no idea if my friends have noticed it, but undertones are always hard to gauge over text anyway.
If anything, those sudden invites are met with silence because I’m too busy to reply and that leads me to apologize hours or days later.
But, like true friends, they just roll with it, and I couldn’t be more grateful to have them in my life.
