Legendborn and a Love Letter to Friendships.
Bree and Alice reminded me what female friendship is...and I miss it.
“Alice has known me for half my life. We are sleepovers and skinned knees and first crushes and always making sure our lockers are side by side.”
―Tracy Deonn,Legendborn
I recently reread Legendborn because I had received an ARC copy of Bloodmarked (yes, I felt like gods favorite during that time) and the one of the mannnny things that stuck out to me was the friendship aspect of both books. The way Alice and Bree connected with one another, relied on each other and above all trusted each other. Or the way Nick and Sel fought for each other in book one and watched Sel and Bre try to find Nick regardless of the circumstances. While in my opinion the book is a love letter to friendships in all its forms it was eye opening for me and my struggle with forming, keeping and nurturing friendships.
I miss having friends but I’ve been to afraid to acknowledge it and accept that my inability to step outside myself has kept me from nurturing the friendships I once held dear to me. Here is the truth I know, I was not a good friend, in all honesty I was a shitty friend who was so focused on herself and her relationship that when the relationship I considered my identity began to fracture the support and friendship I desperately needed had been long gone. You cant expect friends to hang around when you stop pouring into those friendships and still hope to reap the benefits. It was a wake up call, a call I didn’t truly know I needed until I was breaking and I didn’t have a strong community outside my family to rely on. And here I am now, getting sucked into books with strong female led friendships who nurture and support one another and I am yearning for it.
I am yearning for a solace from the chaos that my life has turned into and have no one to truly turn to. BUT, I am beginning to mend the broken fences, reaching out and acknowledging the part I played in the demise of those relationships and its slow going but it feels exciting because now my romantic relationship isn’t my entire world and sole reason to live, I am finding out that ALL relationships deserve a space in my life. I cannot be truly, truly happy unless I fill up all of my cups and I definitely cannot rely on one person to fill up the cups I have left empty. My happiness is an internal state, it’s something I need to create for myself and then you bring it into all the relationships within my life.
Talk soon,
B.
The way this gut punched me in the throat.