Soundbites of Adulthood: Friendships
With a camera, two bags of chips, cookies, and some handouts explaining my vision, I walk over to Central Park's Conservatory Garden on 5th Ave. One by one, my friends walk into the garden prepared to be my muses for the day.
What's the vision?
Soundbites of Adulthood: A Four Part Series
A visual and textual editorial in which I interview friends about life after college.
In these interviews, my aim is to talk casually about how life has changed since leaving college. Some of us took semesters off, some of us were college athletes, others were very involved in clubs and activism. Some did all of those things.
When leaving college, something I kept hearing was that college did not prepare us for life afterwards. Everything changed. We now have different careers, activities, and some of us are finishing up school. So this is an attempt to air out, what happens once you leave college? These four part interviews will touch friendships, careers, relationships, and families.
Each interview focuses on one particular topic and has different participants. Through questions and casual conversation, we discuss what it means to no longer have the security of college. We understand the privilege we have in being to attend college and what that has done to change our lives. I suspect that other topics such as race and class will come up as all of us are people of color and have varying social classes.
My participants for the first installation, which focuses on friendships are:
Darializa, Iris, Ronald, Michaela, Alexis, and Scooter (ordered left to right in video below)
After taking gorgeous pictures of them (the rest are in my photo journal, check it out), I sat them down on a park bench to talk about friendships. All of us were friends in college and still maintain those relationships. I started with a simple question: Have things changed?
All of them: Yes.
Darializa: I mean, things are definitely different now. Its harder to maintain friendships outside of college. You have to plan hangouts and things like that.
Iris: Hangouts are more expensive.
Scooter: Hangouts are more expensive, it just takes planning.
Michaela: I mean I live in a different city and I don't see any of you but I think we are still cool.
Alexis: I mean I think it depends on the friend, like I have some friends that I don't have to see often and things are still the same. I also got reacquainted with the friends that I have back home, and got closer to them since leaving for college.
Scooter: Yeah I think there are friends I have from back home who when I see them no matter how long its been, we go right back to our relationship.
The conversation began to flow naturally and within a few minutes there was a shift to how social media plays a role in friendships. I asked them: Does social media make friendships better or worse? Michaela, who lives further away than all of us, expressed how being able to see life updates on Facebook helps her feel connected to her friends. It makes her happy to see that people are doing well. But, Iris expressed how sometimes the long Facebook updates aren't that great to her, she feels like its a way for people to be slightly elitist, especially since we went to an Ivy League school. Social media can be fake at times because everyone is putting their best self forward. So I asked, Can you be honest and your true self in your friendships outside of social media? Does that exist? Do you share everything with one person? Is that realistic? Check out the clip below to hear their answers.
Sidenote: Forgive me for my shaky hands and the background noise...apparently parks are really loud!
Iris asked why not? Why can't someone be everything? Why can't you have a friend you trust with all of your stuff? Everyone else explained that somebody can't hold all of one person. .
Friendships are not places where you receive everything you need in life. Its a place where you should feel safe and honest. Its a place where balance, support, and having fun are priority.
In this section of the conversation, my friends explained that sometimes being a good friend means that you don't share everything with your friend. It means sometimes understanding your friend is having an emotionally hard week and bearing your soul to them is not the best idea.
Friendship involves sacrifice.
The conversation kept moving naturally with people talking about their experiences. But, I took a moment to interrupt the flow of the conversation and ask an important question, listen below.
Ron: I feel like I have more expectations for my white friends, I expect them to do more in a way that I don't from my black friends.
Alexis: Long Island is kind of "the south the north" so there aren't that many white people who I trust enough to be friends with. The few white friends I still have I am very close to. Growing up, I only had non-Black friends. As I explored my identity at Columbia I became "too Black" for a lot of them, so I cut off the people I made uncomfortable.
Darializa: Well yeah, I guess I just get upset with white people from Columbia [University] who come to this diverse place and still choose to be racist.
This leads into the video below:
The conversation went on for a while and I was so thankful that I was able to gather my friends to talk about this. All I did was give them a vague topic and they hit a lot of the concerns that come up in friendships.
How do we keep being good friends? How do we better the relationships? I don't have all the answers, but they sure helped me.
To end my wonderful experience with my friends, I will leave you with a quote Ron said about the quality of his friendships.
"I weigh the quality of my friendships on how good of a wedding toast I could give. The better the story. The more moving the moments- the closer I imagine us to be. It's not enough to just know someone if you can't share that relationship on such a special day."
Thank you for reading and thank you again to Darializa, Alexis, Scooter, Ron, Iris, and Michaela! I had so much fun!
