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Help! I love my friends too much. By Aimee

Hi, my name is Aimee and I’m a final year Biomedical Sciences student living in Manchester. I love baking and walking so fast it seems like I’m being chased.

Sometimes I try to pick out the benefits of being care-experienced. I’m pretty sure I do it to soften the sting of missing out on something that most other people have. There has to be something that is just ours, and for the longest time I’ve hypothesised that it is the friendships we can form. I think my friends are my landing place. I feel like I just unfold in front of them and achieve a level of ease that was never possible in my house. I can form very close friendships very rapidly and I love it, but it also kind of hurts.

The nature of being a student is that your life changes very frequently. In a way, I think care experienced/estranged people are probably quite adept at dealing with that. But I’m kind of burnt out from it? As a final year student, I’m supposed to be gearing up for this really exciting and spontaneous period of my life and yet I can’t help but feel frightened of what I’m about to lose. All of my friends have families and hometowns to go back to. Meanwhile, my friends are kind of my whole deal. They make me feel so appreciated and I know that they aren’t choosing something over me, but to always be the person who needs the other slightly more is becoming quite exhausting.

I spend a lot of my time trying to reign in my intensity. It is half out of pure love and admiration for my friends and half an incessant need to convince people to keep knowing me because !shock! kind-of-adopted person has abandonment issues. For my friends, this means a lot of baked goods and drunken speeches about their significance in my life and for me it means warmth and gratitude and pain.

I suppose you’re in a really great position if you’re scared of losing something. Part of me knows that the catastrophe situation in my brain where I simply never make another friend again is not realistic but wow, being care experienced can really make it feel that way. We are promised family, it is expected to be unconditional. When the aspect of your life that is supposed to be unshakeable falls apart in front of you, it feels like everything else is just doomed to crumble with it.

Usually I don’t dwell on this, though. I think the tenacity of my love for my friends is beautiful and very much born from the dust of the worst parts of my childhood. In many ways I feel like being a good friend was kind of my purpose. And there truly are much much worse things to be. Still, it seems plausible to me that what I’m missing is more connection with the care experienced/estranged community. I’m not used to being able to relate to people over family stuff. It could be nice to talk to other people whose lives play out much like an Eastenders storyline. Maybe it’s time to start planning a gathering via All of Us…

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