Why Best Friends Are The Weirdest People In The World

Grey's Anatomy
Grey’s Anatomy

I once spent an entire hour in the trash can aisle of Target with my best friend. We were laughing so hard that it took us that long to pick her out a new bin for her apartment. At one point I remembered that I’d actually seen the particular product I was looking at on the shelf at her place already.

“Don’t you already have this one?”

“Yeah, but I threw up in it so I had to put it in the dumpster.”

In between cry-laughs I noticed a middle aged man had entered our aisle, and by proxy, our conversation. He made a kind of “ah, to be young” gesture and then he left us alone again.

This was best friend world — the place where you can admit that rather than clean your own hangover vomit out of a trash can like an adult, you opted to completely replace it instead, like a woman-child.

And you need this, desperately.

Best friends are the people you wake up with at 4am by accident and stay awake for hours giggling in bed because it’s so much more fun to be awake with them than it is to sleep. They are the ones you can confess your weird crush on Severus Snape to, the ones who comfort you when your favorite character dies on Grey’s. They accept your weirdness and idiosyncrasies and you feel comfortable revealing them, because they share theirs too.

Your best friend is the person you can share your deepest fear with. As well as your second deepest fear: that the population at large will discover the thing you fear most is accidentally hitting ‘like’ when you are a year and a half deep into your crush’s Instagram.

A best friend will make you belly laugh when you’re grieving — because they are the person who helps you remember grace in a world filled with too-much gravity. They treat you how you wish you could treat yourself.

It’s crazy that it takes another person to see this, to see what it’s like to love a version of yourself in full, painful, broad-daylight awareness of not only the big flaws, but also the bizarre, tiny flaws most people never reveal even to their significant other. More than what it’s like, but how important and deserved that love is. This isn’t something you’d discover on your own. You’d go through life thinking that you’re the only person who has ever stayed up until 3am on Web M.D. because you had stomach cramps — a lone weirdo in a world of sanes. It takes another’s weirdness for you to admit your own, for you to learn to love your own. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Like this? Check out Why Your Best Friend is Your Soul Mate here.

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