Balancing Act

Sometimes, life is a balancing act. Actually, life is always a balancing act, but sometimes more than others.I've blogged about this a little before, but lately I've been feeling like my friendships are becoming a more and more precarious balancing act.

I've been told that I'm everybody's friend, and that's kind of true. I have people that I don't talk to much and people that I don't particularly like, but I don't have many real enemies. I've decided that the best way for me is to try and keep it that way. Hence my optimism and title as Everybody's Friend. But then, I'm not one of those people who can just have a big group of--for lack of a better way to put it--loose friends. I need close friends. The kind of people who will never judge me, the kind of people who I can spill my guts to at 10:00 at night, the kind of people who care what you say when they ask "How are you?" And I've found some of those people. I'm blessed enough to have found quite a few of them.

But, then, this is where it gets tricky. See, in 6th grade, I was sort of a floater. In a class that didn't really have exclusive cliques, but rather "groups" of friends who usually hung out together but still did stuff with other people, I floated from group to group. Then, I found my place in one group of friends and I found my best friends within that group. There were four of us that most people saw as one unit. We got ready for dances together, we always had birthday parties together, we went to the mall together, stuff like that. Then, in 7th grade, I became really close friends with a girl who hung out with almost a completely different group of people, but reminded me a lot of...me. All of her close friends were in the other section, so we started hanging out together. In 8th grade, her two best friends were in our section, so the four of us would hang out, but a bunch of my other friends were in that section too. I kind of felt like I was rotating, or something. So now, I had best friends in two different groups of people, some of whom didn't exactly like each other. That was tricky.

Enter high school. My best friend from one group and my best friend from the other group both come, along with some other really close friends and people that I had met through friends. It's not that they don't get along or anything, it's just that they hang out with completely different people and it's just gotten more obvious going from a class of 38 to a class of 150. For instance, the other day I had two off mods. That's not really enough time for me to get myself into my homework mode, so I was chilling in the cafeteria. Actually, I was running back and forth between tables on almost completely opposite sides of the caf, talking to one friend, talking to the other, running from someone who was attempting to beat me up with a zipper-bag, going to grab my lunchbox. To be dramatic, I was running between two different worlds. In one, people were talking loudly [[fitting for some theater people]], laughing loudly, petting each other [[now that's a long story...]], and just being overall crazy. In the other, my Nerd/Jock friend was doing homework while my other friends there were talking relatively quietly and tamely. Key word: relative. But anyway...

I started thinking, what am I going to do? I love all my friends so much, I don't want to lose any of them, but I don't know what to do. I feel like I can't keep this up forever, but I also feel like I have to. Now, I've made a bunch of new friends who barely know some of my best friends just because they never interact with each other. I'm balancing on the skinniest of points, trying to keep two groups of friends that are practically polar opposites. Jocks and Drama Freaks, to be rather stereotypical. Nerds [[which, ironically, are also the Jocks]] and some Not-So-Nerds, if you want to put it that way. I can't say which of them I'd rather be part of, because they are completely equal. I can't lose them. I just can't.