A Peace of Friendship

When I was asked to write a blog about friendship and how my early life and adoption experiences have affected this, I considered two things: Kindness and Trust.

The definition of kindness is “the quality of being friendly, generous and considerate” and trust “a firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability in someone or something”

We all witness kindness and trust at different points in life, real or imaginary. I don’t know about you, reader, but I know from a personal perspective that it isn’t something I witness every day.

My life has featured a various number of events, that have built on and knocked down my experience of these two concepts. From having been adopted, starting a new primary school (at a young age), high school and most recently, being an apprentice worker at a nursery.

At these points in my life, there have been times where trust, kindness and friendship either came for free or with a price. Through the years, I have gained and lost people from friends to family. Sometimes through things being out with my control and sometimes through myself.

Back in the past, I found it easy to look for the best in everyone, to look for trust in everyone I met, but it’s become far more difficult. It was especially difficult when I arrived in the institution known as High School.

In the movies you see the conflict in teenagers at high school. High school for me was very hard. Whenever I made friends, I couldn’t seem to keep them. I like my space and sometimes socialising is hard for me. However, my friends from school thought I should do what they wanted and that I should live up to their expectations. When my friends found that it suited them, they would tell some of the private things that I told them about my adoption. In other times, they would take advantage of my friendship, by getting me to pay for things, or even choose not to be my friend, due to who my other friends were. All this was made far more difficult due to the foundation of distrust I already held from my birth mothers lies and manipulations.

However, during this period of time, I was invited into my adoption group. These guys understood my distrust in people in general. It was there, when I found the most trustworthy friends, as they understood my pain and my wariness around people. My advice to you, reader, is to find a group of people who understand you and with whom you can be kind without being taken advantage of. I left high school in S5 and it was the best thing I’ve done. I left for an apprenticeship looking after children in a private nursery and here I found it easier to fit in and relax. Maybe I had learned to trust that people could be kind and trustworthy?

When I look back to compare my high school “friends” to my friends/co-workers, I find that I personally act more mature and more myself with my work friends. Earlier in this blog, I said that I could lose myself and by that, I mean that when I lose trust in others, I start to make myself an island. When I look at who I can trust now, I see my family, I see my co-workers, I see the couple of friends that I have and my adoption group. The last thing I say before I go is that trust and kindness is a two-way track. One doesn’t work without the other.

Chloe Age 17 Scottish Adoption Teen Ambassador