Is the Distance Worth It?

Hey guys!
Most of you know that I've moved over ten times. Different houses, different countries, different time zones, different friends. When I think about all the friends I've had between all the moving craziness, I don't think that I'd be able to keep count.
True, I'm not super close with all of them. A lot of them I've sadly lost contact with. But there are a few that I've known for my entire life that I still talk to now and again.

So often I've heard people (especially people my age) say that trying to maintain a long-distance friendship is literally impossible, not worth it, or too much work. And every time I hear that it makes me kinda sad and mad at the same. In the words of 'Oh' from Home, "She's sad-mad."

Why? I'll tell you. When I moved to Stuttgart, for a while I struggled with maintaining friendships with people from Florida. We'd slowly begin to stop texting, we wouldn't talk on the phone, and the only bit of contact that we had left was liking each-others posts on Instagram. It made me really sad and a bit frustrated.
I remember crying to my mom, "They've completely forgotten about me," I'd tell her. Sometimes it felt like as soon as you cross and ocean people forget that you even existed. Yes that a little dramatic, and I'm sure it wasn't true, but it sure felt true.
I eventually stopped texting a lot of different people, not because I didn't care about them, but because I felt like I was being a bother. I wasn't a part of their life anymore so why should they take time to talk to me?

But, there were a few people that took the time to text or email me. And I'm telling you that it literally meant the world to me!

Guy's, you have no clue how much it means to someone when you take the extra five minutes to write them and just ask them how they're doing. Or maybe you do, maybe you're the one who needed the friend to talk to.

But why is it so hard to maintain friendships with people when we have so many ways to keep in touch? Why do friendships begin to fade with distance? This is the part that frustrates me.
A lot of times, as soon as you put distance between people, they think that the friendship is impossible to maintain.

After living oceans apart from some of the people who mean the most to me, I've learned that maintaining friendships (even when you're thousands of miles away) isn't impossible. And those friendships that you keep over months, or even years, are going to be the ones that could stay with you for your entire life.

Is it easy? No! There are going to be times when life where you're currently at gets busy. And trying to restart life somewhere new is difficult. But when you take the extra few minutes to tell someone you miss them or to be old fashion and write them a letter, it might impact them more then you thought it could. And the friendships that take the most effort are the ones that mean the most, and those people are the ones that you grow closest to.


Here's what I want to encourage you guys to do. Take an extra minute or two to text or call someone that you haven't talked to in a while. Or, better yet, write them a letter. Tell them you miss them, tell them that you care about their friendship and that you don't want to let it just fade away. Who knows what's going on in their life? You might be the best friend they have!


So, until next time, Your Friend,

Savannah