My position on friendship has always been that everyone makes mistakes and that friends are not there to judge you or criticize your choices. They are simply supposed to be there to experience it all with you, good or bad. Part of this is just that I hate confrontation and therefore hate having to criticize people, especially my friends. The other part of it is that I believe people should make their own mistakes because that's how we learn. Besides, I've found that criticizing or giving advice is usually pointless (even when it's solicited) because in the end people follow their own hearts and minds and do what they think is best even if everyone else tells them it's wrong. At the end of the day, each of us has to live with our own lives, our own decisions and our own mistakes. No one else does.

Lately I think this has kind of come back to bite me in the rear. I've become the "reassuring" friend. The one that you go to when you've done something bad and you want someone to tell you it's okay and that everything will work out in the end. It's not that I necessarily mind being this friend 99% of the time, because I don't. I like that my friends come to me for comfort and a pat on the back. I like that they know they can come to me with their darkest secrets and that I will not judge them for it, that I will still love them.

Except.

Except, when they've done things I just really can't be supportive of. I don't know, maybe it's because as we get older our mistakes become more significant, more consequential. And lately there have been times when one friend or another has come to me wanting that comforting squeeze of the shoulder and I simply can't give it. Because I don't think what they've done is "okay" and I don't really think things will be "okay" and if they are then I would unreservedly be happy for them but I just can't tell them that it will be. Sometimes I wish I could find it in myself to be the friend that says, "I still love you, but honestly? You f*cked up."

But I guess, that's just not me.