Hello everyone, today I want to tell you about some of my special friends…… no, not those sort of special friends, that would be a COMPLETELY different sort of blog…. this is about the friends that make up your support network, the family that you get to choose…….

What is a friend?

Now that my strike you as an odd question, because everyone knows what a friend is right??… but actually I think people have very different opinions and expectations about what a friend might be. I will give you an example to show what I mean…..

My baby boy has a facebook account with 400 odd friends, and I only have 70 odd friends. So is my boy wildly more popular that his mummy? well no… I could easily have more facebook friends if I wanted, but I have different criteria for who I class as a friend than my boys does. Many people that he considers to be friends, I would call acquaintances. and neither of us is right or wrong, we just have different ways of looking at it.

What is my criteria for a friend?

Well I think the quote says it quite well. I have a very small select group of good friends, most of whom I do not talk on a daily basis, or even a weekly basis ( I have never been a friend who enjoys living in another persons pocket, and likewise do not chose friends who need constant attention….).

But what makes us special friends is our ability to pick up our friendship exactly where we left it after weeks, or even months without speaking,  and equally importantly is the knowledge that if I need them at 3am in the morning for any emergency then they would be there.

Now you may have spotted that I have used ‘talk’ and ‘speak’ rather than ‘see’ and this is because not all my Friends are people I live close enough to in order to be able to visit in person.

So let me introduce my friends…..

Now the first friends I would like to say you to meet is one of my oldest friends, and fellow twitter queen miss @ForestFlower23. Now we became friends when we were still at school some *ahem* years ago. We were both newbies to our school, me moving to the forest from Kent and Anthea from  Luton some 6 months or so before me. So obviously as new girls, we were tamed up as the ones who  come from the same place (foresters are not generally known for their geography skills, we came from the other side of the country dispite the 100 or so miles between the two places, and that was close enough for them)… and you know what? it didn’t matter, we got on fabulously from day one. Anthea was ( and still is) far cooler than me, but we clicked, same humour, same taste in music…..

Our favourite Saturday pastimes included making soup in her kitchen listening to Adam Ant and Duran Duran. Now fast forward a few years, and I had met and married my now ex. He did not like any of my friends, and slowly because of him, they drifted away.

However about 4 years ago through the miracle that is social media me and Anthea got back in touch, and I am truly grateful for this. After some 12 years without speaking we picked up like it had only been weeks, a sign of a true best friend.

Now I have several other close friends I could introduce you to. I met them  through work, and  they are now members of my bestest friends family. To list them all and how we met would bore you I’m sure.

Needless to say they are all special, wacky sense of humour, honest, caring, wonderful people who have supported me through some very difficult times these past few years… they know who they are and they know I love them.

My last group of friends who I want you to say hello to are a somewhat controversial group, not of course as individual people, but because they are ‘internet’ friends.  Now I am guessing that as readers of this blog, you are probably among the group of society who have embraced the social media explosion, but many people still fear it, as a dark destroyer of minds, social morals, the art of writing, conversations, and even the rain forests ( OK, I may have made that last one up, but you get my  drift).

I have been told by countless people that Internet friends are not ‘proper’ friends. This is a very narrow mined opinion I believe for two reasons… firstly what is a ‘proper friend’? Is someone you speak to on a daily basis online less of a friend than the person you stand next to and have a brief chat with a few times a week in the bus queue??

Secondly, nobody has the right to decide weather a person is my friend except me. So there are my facebook friends who I have never met, but I consider to be real, good friends. We all have an interest in psychology, as Open University students this is how we became friends. But we have more in common than that, and it is these things that make us friends.

And last but by no means last my twitter friends. This group of people are probably the people I chat to  the most, usually on a daily basis and yet most of them do not even know my real name.

What we have in common is a shared understanding of issues such as depression, stress and anxiety. These people recognise the things I struggle through and are the ones I turn to when I’m having a bad day. Between us we have built up a friendships support network that are very bit as real as those I have with real life people.

So there you are, my special friends.  I would love to know what you think about what makes a good friend, and your opinions about social media and online friends?

As always I would love to know what you think about my post, so please make me smile by adding a comment or two Xx