WS and Long Distance Friends

Hey all… welcome back to my pink room!

Have a seat, get comfortable… we might be here for a little while. So if you have been following along, you now know a little bit about my story, well at least how I ended up with this blog, talking to you. I have let you see my intimate anger and rebellious pain. And to be honest, I thought that would be the hard part, actually getting my voice out there. But let me tell you it is so hard to be authentic especially when you know people may be watching.

It’s only been three days and already I find my day completely consumed by my obsession with the perceived approval of readers (that to be honest I still can’t even be sure exist). I have reread each of my post like 15 times or more just to see if they can be improved to maybe attract more visitors. Then WordPress of course has this thing where you can track the “traffic” to your site which is definitely not good for maniacs like me because I swear I spend more time studying the number of visitors to a given post than “unassuming” gen-Zers roaming through instagram (which if you ask “Social Dilemma” folks they will tell you that is a serious problem).

So that brings us to this moment and I can’t help but think what story will sell. I started by introducing you to Jamie, the girl who is dying from anger and drowning in grief and to be honest that is a hard story to top. But I have decided as my own little resistance to trauma porn to talk about something that makes smile and do a little happy dance. As you may have guessed from the title yes, my friends.

I have decided by request (shout out to the beautiful Jana) to talk about two friends that have become my people since college. I thought I would share just a couple things about my friends that make me smile.

1. We are a friend group.

This is important and strange because I have never in my entire life had a friend group somehow it just wasn’t in my genes or something. I always figured you just had to be a certain kind of person to have one. You know the type… the person who at every stage of their life has that cute group of 3 sometimes 4 friends with whom they are inseparable. They take cute instagram photos at the strangest locations. They do cute little group activities together like baking and movie nights. And they are likely to end up in each others weddings. Well, I just never managed to make the cut.

And this is where the slightly strange part comes in, I literally just realized a few days I have friend group now. Like we have done movie nights and birthday parties and taken cute photos or at least embarrassing ones together. And if I do get married, these are the people I would call because well they know me. And it’s actually kind of nice.

2. Long distance has nothing on us, just take a look at our groupchat

So we have had two infamous group chats that have been honestly life blood of our friendship since freshman year. The first was called WS” and it was your classic groupme groupchat. Apparently the story behind the title is that Jana (pictured above on the right), wanted to make a groupchat to talk about our writing seminars that I have since erased from my memory. But somehow they just never came up I guess.

Anyway, at first we would mainly use it to make plans for dinner, Jana and Haley (pictured at the bottom) were my most common dinner buddies freshman year. And slowly, we began to share pictures of random snow days and make plans for Broadway shows or just NYC weekend rendezvous.

So sophomore year my dinner plans shifted but Jana and Haley became my Saturday brunch crew, where we were supposed to be eating mediocre but good nonetheless “make it your own” açai bowls. Well anyway by now we had spent enough time together that friends would be the best way to describe us. And so we started planning movie nights on our WS groupme groupchat and food outings and sometimes study sessions (this was pretty rare because somehow I managed to never actually get work done during those sessions so they stopped inviting me…).

But come Junior year we had so many cute pictures, you would think there was no use in denying the fact of groupness but somehow they never really ended up instagram (so the real question is do the pictures even count). Well then COVID hit and groupchat 2 was born, on the infamous Messenger app.

We need a place to call weekly since now we had no meals to unite us being in different locations and all. And whatsapp was tragedy for my internet so we turned to messenger and we have since fully transitioned off of our old groupme groupchat, which honestly is probably for the best if you ask me.

This groupchat has morphed into so many beautiful things. We have hosted virtual birthday parties using all the fun effects on messenger even though I still have beef with facebook since I didn’t have the birthday effect on my actual birthday but whatever its fine. A place to laugh, and sometimes even to cry. And in its current iteration a safe space of workout accountability and encouragement . It is so cute. We send check ins about our workouts that day or week and we all always cheer each other on and send silly pictures of our post-workout selves.

Wow I kept you here longer than I expected but I guess to wrap up the gist is I love my friends… but don’t be jealous it appears that anyone can become a friend group kind of person. Well our time together is officially up and I hope to see you back here in my pink room tomorrow at 11 am ET. I might just let you in on some of my crazy ideas but we will see.

Till then…