if you're not losing friends, you're not growing
There is a particular sentence that appears whenever someone loses a friendship:
If you're not losing friends, you're not growing.
Which is comforting. Almost suspiciously comforting.
It turns every ending into evidence of evolution. The friendship ended because you grew. They no longer fit because you've changed. You are entering a new chapter, raising your standards, protecting your peace, becoming someone they simply cannot follow.
And sometimes that is exactly what happened.
Sometimes you really do outgrow people.
But I wonder when we decided that growth should leave behind quite so many casualties.
There is something very convenient about a philosophy that allows us to interpret every person who leaves our life as someone we have surpassed. It means we never have to entertain the considerably less flattering possibility that perhaps they didn't fail to grow with us.
Perhaps they got tired of us.
Maybe we were selfish. Maybe we became difficult to talk to. Maybe we kept calling something a "boundary" that was actually an unwillingness to compromise. Maybe we expected people to understand our behavior while offering very little patience for theirs.
An irritating possibility, I know.
I think we've become very good at giving beautiful language to endings.
Protecting my peace.
Outgrowing people.
Cutting off negative energy.
No longer accepting what doesn't serve me.
There is truth in all of these. Nobody should remain indefinitely in relationships that are cruel, destructive, manipulative, or fundamentally incompatible with who they are becoming.
But surely growth cannot only be measured by our willingness to leave.
Sometimes growth is learning how to stay.
Learning how to have an uncomfortable conversation instead of quietly deciding someone no longer deserves access to you. Learning that a friend disappointing you does not automatically make them a bad friend. Learning to apologize without attaching an explanation long enough to make it someone else's fault again.
Perhaps even learning that not every relationship exists to serve us.
That phrase has always struck me as slightly strange anyway. This friendship no longer serves me.
Serves you?
I don't know that the people I love are supposed to function like subscriptions.
Human relationships are inconvenient by design. People misunderstand us. They change at inconvenient speeds. They go through seasons where they have less to give. They develop interests we don't share, make decisions we wouldn't make, become busy, become distant, come back.
And sometimes, yes, two lives genuinely stop fitting together.
There doesn't always need to be a villain in that.
But I don't think there always needs to be a graduation ceremony either.
Maybe losing people can be evidence that you've grown.
Maybe keeping people can be evidence of growth too.
There is something to be said for friendships that survive several versions of both people—not because neither person changed, but because they learned how to make room for the changing.
Perhaps the better measure of growth isn't how many people you've become willing to lose.
Maybe it's whether you're becoming someone worth growing beside.