Friends support you. They hold you up. They push you forward. They are brutally honest with you. The fact of the matter is that we all have bullshit we need to be called out on. As much as it hurts to hear it, brutal honesty is need in our lives. They only way to improve is to know what you need to improve on and way. Like an artist. We have our worked critiqued; placed under a microscope and token apart. We need that to grow. We improve in our art through feedback. As people we are the same. Feedback helps orientate us.
Of course, there is a different between constructive criticism and being an ass. The friends in your life give you constructive criticism. They do not tear you down. They want the best for you and help you achieve that.
As nice as it is to hear how great you are at said thing, or how lovely you look. At the end of the day you need people in your life who will also point out when you are not being who you are. They are people who know you to your core and tell you when you fucked up. Something you probably already know too but do not want to admit. No one likes to admit they screwed up but we all do. We need people in our lives who not only point out our mistakes but are also there to hold you and help you as you clean them up.
In order to grow, we need to keep changing. Who is me, is a difficult question to answer. The reason being a very simple one, there is no definite answer. We change with our experiences and become a layer of who we use to be and still are. Who we are changes with every choice we make, we mold ourselves into a new version every time we take a step. We all have core value systems, we have things ingrained into our system but like the earth we have parts of ourselves that reshape, that grow and die.
When we are not being true to ourselves, we are not being the best version of ourselves that we can be; we need to hear the ugly truth. Brutally honest friends will tell it like it is. Call you out for your laziness, call you out for your poor time management. Not out of malleolus but out of care because they want to see you succeed. A true friend does not do you any favors by sugar coating it or by saying everything is fine when it’s not.
I knew all of these in theory. That I need to be slapped sense into, but it hurts the ego. No one wants to be called out for bullshit they are aware of, but we need to be. The goal is to be better than the person you were a day ago or even two seconds ago. The goal is to accomplish this idealized version of ourselves or for ourselves. Whether it be professional, personal, or social and we need people in our life to help build a life with. We work hard for a future where we are happy and accomplished in our individual ways.
It is the reason we go to college, the reason we chose our major. The reason we chose to be in a certain relationship or live in a certain place. We want to be our best selves. We wake in the morning and make choices for the outcomes we want for ourselves. The thing is, like with a piece of work, sometimes we need outside viewers to look at the bigger picture. We are in the center of our lives. We can sometimes miss things that our friends may see and that is why we need good, brutally honest friends in our lives. Friends that will hype you up just as much as they will call you out when you are back on your bullshit.