My Ride Or Dies

Come two at a time...

[they are being pursued by about a dozen police cars]

Thelma: I guess everything from here on in is going to be pretty shitty.

Louise: Unbearable, I’d imagine.

Thelma: Well, look, everything that we got to lose is gone anyway!

Louise: Oh, God, how do you stay so positive?

***

I’m pretty self-contained, and I don’t have the grown-up girl-gang that so many women seem to. Even as a kid, I was always on the edge of them, never in the centre, if that makes sense. Ante natal classes gave me a gang for a while, when I ended up in a splinter group who were less new-mum competitive and boring, and we talked about important stuff like telly and gossip rather than the regularity of our baby’s poo.

Then I moved away (following divorce number one) and started over.

The school gates gave me another small group, until I got divorced again and people slid away like smoke in the air. I didn’t blame them, getting divorced twice in eight years seems a little flaky, and I was too tired and traumatised to explain the ins and outs of how and why it had all happened.

I have friends, but they are all separate, and I meet them on a one-to-one, which I’ve always preferred anyway. I like having the time and head space to really catch up with someone and hear how they are.

They are all different. They all have different jobs, personalities, and apart from being of a similar age, are completely unique. I like that too.

What’s really interesting is that the length of time I’ve known them doesn’t make any difference as to how we get along.

I’ve had one friend since we were children; our parents were friends before we were.

One of my closest friends is someone I only see once or twice a year; we met working in a pub when we were 18 and have stayed close ever since. We shared a place together for a while after Uni and travelling; she worked as a waitress while training to be a teacher, I worked in a clothes shop with a side hustle as a freelance writer. I was with her in our local nightclub when the guy she fancied finally made a move. I was a bridesmaid at their wedding, and they are still together now. I’ve walked up and down the aisle three times since then, and she’s been to all my weddings…

I’ve met some friends through work, and interestingly, none through play. I guess I don’t ‘play’ that much – although it is now on my to-do list for 2025.

Some friendships have happened randomly; one came about because she bought my house! She spotted me many years later and came over to say hello. I had zero recollection of meeting her, but we kept bumping into each other, she invited me for a coffee and I said yes (which I never do to people I don’t really know) and we discovered that we are spookily alike in our quirky humour and deep interest in human behaviour, and now our meet-ups are a really important part of my calendar. Who’d have thought?

When I was poorly at the start of the year, there was only a tight circle of people who knew. My family and some close friends who’d messaged to say Happy New Year, and wondered why I didn’t reply. I was officially discharged from hospital in early January, and I didn’t feel well enough to chat about it, and I also didn’t want to ruin peoples’ holiday vibe. I didn’t want to be ‘that girl’, the Debbie Downer who on top of the struggles we’ve experienced over the past few years (I’ll explain more about all that at some point) I didn’t want to add “Oh, I was hospitalised with a life-threatening infection, I can barely walk the length of myself, but apart from that, all good here!”

So I only told a really close few.

That’s when I realised that I actually do have a gang; they just aren’t all together, and most have never even met.

The WhatsApp messages kept coming. The funny memes, the daily check-ins. Flowers and cards from people I really didn’t think of as flowers and card people. An actual hamper of wellness – it was packed with super healthy soups, smoothies, teas and vitamins to boost my immune system. I was bowled over.

I have to be honest, it made me feel pretty good, and genuinely helped.

My life can feel a bit small sometimes, and I know it has gotten even smaller over the past few years as circumstances have meant I’ve have pulled back from socialising as much as I used to. Strangely, the horrible experience of being home-bound for weeks on end while getting pick-me-ups from friends has been a lovely reminder that I do have them. It can be easy to forget that when you aren’t doing the things that are Instagrammable and what we see as ‘girl gang’ fun; you’re just laying on your sofa, chatting on the phone and eating biscuits.

Surely that’s what good friends are for – even if the gang is a gang of two-at-a-time, it still counts, right?