Small talk #1: Friendship fading at 15

I’ve seen three principal ways that friendships fade out in the early to mid-teen years. One is where the friend is stuck, stays immature, maybe fallen into drugs and you are at least somewhat more mature and in the real world. Another is where you are the ungrowing one and your friend is healthier, down-to-earth with future-focus built into her. The third is where both young teens are immature, and the gravity of their individual depressions and forcibly being pulled along the Timeline Conveyor Belt of Growing Up eventually blink out the friendship. I suppose there is a fourth related kind, where both friends are healthy and chronologically maturing yet they drift apart for obscure reasons. That sounds largely theoretical to me. And anyway, I have never encountered two mature teenage friends.

My client was 15. Yes, she had some problems – anxiety and what could be called “pathological introspection” – but therapy and my kicking her parent’s ass were helping her stay grounded. Her friend, same age, had always had such a hellacious home life with parental abuse and immaturity that she grew over time a protective personality, and became very self-medicating with marijuana. The two girls had been tight for three years, age 12 to 15, a long time as it included the telescoped psychology of the transition from childhood to adolescence. But the friend was now different – “very absent, not there.” She was growing, or we could say “de-growing” a character of negative attitude, of playing as her baseline. My client did not want to lose her, and this put her in a painful place. “Do not fall down the rabbit hole with her,” I advised, and maybe use the bond to throw some reality at her. My client asked: “When would be the right time to tell her we’ve become like pen pals, that she is different?” I said not to plan it. Say it when you feel it, in conversation, spontaneous.

I said that I expect this friendship to fade eventually, sad as that sounds and would be, if the girl never comes out of the dark. I made up a one-man role play of how I would try to reach her, if she were my client.

Every child grows differently. Some rot, some repair, some tool along a bright path in green fields. Put two of these together and you’ll have the chemistry of a friendship not as complex as the human brain – which scientists say has “more connections in it than there are stars in the universe"* – but as complicated as two universes.

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* https://brainmd.com/blog/how-your-brain-is-like-the-universe/