Mental Meanderings

What is Loyalty to you?

Ok so I've been gone, again... Not a great track record lately. *sighs* My excuse? Well... I've basically been on a rocky rollercoaster from hell mood wise. No promises which way up you'll find me today either and it doesn't help to get a strange illness as well. Not quite flu, not a cold, not really anything but pain and irritated glands. I put it down to the physical rottenness brought on by the stress of my chaotic emotions.

Anyway, I was having one of those interesting deep and meaningful conversations I like to have. My trid and I were discussing the nature of friendships and what causes some to be lasting and others to be transient. In my life almost everyone has provent transient. Everyone is, ultimately, with death being the ultimate clutches into with friendships will fall. Sure, it's not an ending to the friendship, but it is... *sighs*

Talking about friendships lead us to wonder about the nature of loyalty.
What is loyalty to you?
How far should loyalty extend?
Is there a point where being loyal just isn't enough to hold a friendship together?
Do you believe you're a loyal friend?
Any examples of loyalty or disloyalty at play?

To me, loyalty is a sense of with you through thick and thin. It's that line from those viral emails that says, 'A true friend will be sitting beside saying, "we stuffed up, but boy it was fun."' Loyalty is knowing that no matter how bad it gets the friendship will last. It's knowing that even when the fights get so bad you don't talk for days the friendship remains and eventually the hugs and tears of forgiveness will reign. Being loyal requires patience and understanding and total acceptance. It means knowing all the bad that goes with the good and caring anyway. Loyalty is standing up against the bully who is twice your size and knows Karate just because he stole your friends lunch money. It's getting pounded by that same bully and having your friend smile a watery smile of gratitude with no words as he helps you walk home.

Would you remain loyal to a friend who abused you, mentally or physically? One who did drugs? One who was committed to a mental institute? Does loyalty hold true in a coma? When they're interests no longer walk hand in hand with your own? Does loyalty come into play when they marry a person who dislikes you? What about if they stole your girlfriend? Where is that line in the sand that makes a friend no longer worthy of your loyalty?

Does loyalty withstand rejection? Would a loyal friend hold on if the other attempts to end the friendship? Do they fight for it?

I suspect I'm not a particularly loyal person. I have clearly set limits and when things aren't working for me or are likely to cause me a great deal of pain, loss, or damage I bail. I know I don't make enough effort to sustain a failing friendship. I test loyalties, I test truth by giving it space to flounder and more often than not just moving on when a friend falls from grace.

I'm not proud to say that about myself. It's disheartening to know but I've got a very jaded sense of what loyalty is. Ultimately I think I'm right to do what I do even if it leaves me a lot lonely sometimes. Friendships ARE transient, we are in each others lives for a second, a season, or a life, but ultimately, the end comes. I'll take and give what a friendship is worth for as long as it lasts but I don't expect any of them to last forever.

I've had a lot of friendships come and go. I lost touch with all of my friends from primary school when my family moved away after I graduated. I miss them a lot actually and have been wanting to chase them up but don't know how to begin trying to get a reunion together. Highschool was a rocky friendship experience for me. By then I was truly sociaphobic. In primary school I knew everyone, it was a tightknit class who had gone from kindergarten to year seven together but in highschool I was the new kid on the block and it took me six months before I made a single friend.

Of course, the friend I made was a cross-tangent friend. She was friends with the cool kids and with the geeks. I was probably more geek than cool kid but got into that cool kid crowd by association. We had fun together, we weren't the hip and posh cool kids like Cher in Clueless. We were the sneaking notes behind the teachers back kind. I was more delinquent than the others and eventually they got pretty nasty and booted me out of the group. One friend later proved she was one of those rare gifts, a loyal friend, but only after I'd left school for good.

In adult life friends come and go with the turning of seasons and interests. I've made many friends, through gaming, hosting gaming websites, and playing computer games online, but they've faded. We still talk and when we do we're as close as ever but the occasions are infrequent. They are drifter friendships where the closeness we have created a bond that ties our transitions together but doesn't keep us close.

I also have a few good friends on WDC. Many associates but some really good friends. We mightn't chat every day but we exchange these blogs and have gotten to know each other well. It's still likely to be a transient friendship but I hope these friendships will be more drifter than ended. We'll all move in our own fashions as interests change or hectic life intrudes and paths diverge but we've developed a bond that is strengthened every day.

True friends are a rare gift that deserve to be treasured. Loyalty is something that's often forgotten about in this age where everything moves to fast and land bonding is forgotten. In the times when who you know is a status symbol rather than a survival instinct it's easy to forget how important our social circles are.

I consider the stages of social circles. You stand in the middle, your own little circles. Then next would probably be your lover. In the circle beyond that your children. And beyond that your immediate family, mother, father, sisters, brothers. Beyond that the closest of friends. Beyond are more distant family then more distant friends and it spirals out those six degrees of separation where every life impacts on every other by six degrees.

Within it all is that sense of loyalty we have to ourselves. I am my own best friend and I have to be because ultimately, that's the single friendship that truly CAN last forever. If you turn your back on yourself then there is no one left to stand by your side. I think that's why I'm less loyal as a friend to others, because my loyalty and friendship to myself demands I stand only for things that do not harm me as a person. I'm pretty fragile, don't break me, or you might break a friendship, and friendship is something you should never throw away lightly.