belonging

The Weight of a Name

/ Kelly Thomas / Leave a comment

I have ADHD, which means my mind has never been very good at leaving things alone.

It catches on the smallest details, things most people probably wouldn’t give a second thought to, and before I know it I’ve spent an hour turning one little idea over and over in my head. It’s why I end up wondering why some places feel like home long after you’ve left them, why certain songs can carry entire years inside of them, or why a single photograph can make your chest ache in a way you can’t quite explain.

This time, it was titles.

Not the kind you put on a résumé or a business card, but the ones we give each other. Friend. Best friend. Brother. Sister. Family.

The more I thought about them, the more one word refused to leave me alone.

Friend.

Maybe it’s strange to spend this much time thinking about a single word. Then again, I’ve never really believed words were just words. They’ve always felt heavier than that to me. They carry memories. Promises. Expectations. Sometimes they carry grief. Sometimes they carry home. A word can become so intertwined with a person that hearing it years later still brings them to mind.

That’s why I think so much about them.

Lately, I’ve realized something that surprised me.

I think I’d rather be called a friend than a best friend.

Not because I don’t value the people closest to me. Quite the opposite, actually.

It’s because I’ve started wondering if we’ve made “best friend” so common that it’s begun to lose some of the weight it once had. It’s everywhere now. Captions, conversations, introductions, birthday posts. It has become the default way of telling someone they’re important to us. Maybe that’s enough for most people, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. This isn’t me saying people shouldn’t use it.

I just don’t think it’s ever been the word that meant the most to me.

I’ve never really understood why friendship became something we rank.

Maybe that’s human nature. We like putting things into neat little categories. First place. Second place. Best. Favorite. Closest. We do it with books, movies, songs, restaurants, photographs. We like lists because they make the world feel organized.

But people have never felt like lists to me.

Every friendship has asked something different of me. Every person has walked into my life carrying different joys, different wounds, different stories. Some friendships have been loud and adventurous. Others have been built almost entirely on quiet conversations and comfortable silence. Some lasted only a season but changed me forever. Others have quietly stretched across years, surviving distance, changing schedules, different versions of ourselves, and all the ordinary ways life slowly rearranges people.

How do you rank something like that?

How do you decide which friend mattered more?

The one who sat beside you during the darkest season of your life?

The one who reminds you to laugh when you’ve forgotten how?

The one who lives hundreds of miles away but still feels strangely close?

The one who understands your silence well enough to know it doesn’t always need to be filled?

I don’t think I could.

Maybe that’s why the word friend has always sounded complete to me. It has never felt like a title waiting for another word to make it more important.

If anything, I think we’ve forgotten how beautiful friendship actually is.

There are very few relationships where the only thing keeping two people together is their continued desire to know one another. Friendship is one of them, and I think that’s part of what makes it so extraordinary. Every day, without ever talking about it, we simply decide whether we’ll continue making room for another person in our lives.

That feels sacred to me.

Maybe it’s because I’ve watched how easily life changes people.

I’ve watched friends move away.

I’ve watched careers consume time that used to belong to conversations.

I’ve watched marriages, children, grief, illness, loss, and distance reshape lives in ways no one could have predicted.

I’ve learned that loving someone doesn’t guarantee you’ll always walk beside them. Sometimes life simply carries people in different directions, no matter how much they wish it wouldn’t.

Maybe that’s why I value the ones who continue choosing each other.

Not perfectly.

Not constantly.

Just… consistently.

I don’t think friendship is measured by how often you see each other or how quickly someone replies to a message. Life gets busy. People become overwhelmed. Seasons change. The older I get, the more grace I find myself wanting to give the people I love.

Instead, I think friendship is measured in quieter ways.

It’s remembering.

It’s continuing to reach for someone after months have slipped by.

It’s learning how someone changes without expecting them to stay exactly the same.

It’s making room for the person they’re becoming instead of mourning the person they used to be.

It’s believing a relationship is worth tending to, even when life doesn’t make it easy.

Those things don’t usually come with announcements.

Most people will never notice them.

But I think that’s where friendship quietly lives.

Maybe that’s why titles matter less to me now than they used to.

When I think about the people I treasure most, I don’t think about what we’ve called each other over the years. I think about the roads we’ve walked together. I think about the conversations that lasted long after the sun disappeared. I think about the moments one of us needed someone, and the other simply showed up. I think about all the ordinary days that seemed insignificant while we were living them, only to realize later they had become the memories we missed the most.

That’s what gives a title its weight.

Not the word itself.

Everything that came before it.

So if you ever introduce me as your friend, I don’t think I’ll hear something smaller than “best friend.”

I’ll hear years.

I’ll hear trust.

I’ll hear every ordinary Tuesday that slowly became a lifetime of knowing another human being.

Because to me, friendship has never been an ordinary thing.

It’s one person looking at another in a world where everyone is constantly changing, constantly moving, constantly leaving pieces of themselves behind, and quietly deciding,

“I’d still like to keep knowing you.”

I don’t know if there’s a greater compliment than that.

Part 1: When Love Isn’t Enough to Stay

/ Kelly Thomas / Leave a comment

This is the first of several reflections on the eleven years I spent at camp, the people who shaped them, and what it means to leave a place that will always feel a little like home.
•
I don’t think anyone prepares you for the grief that comes from leaving something you still love.

We’re taught to expect grief after death. After divorce. After losing a job or saying goodbye to someone we’ve known for years. Those losses make sense to people. They have names. They have rituals. They have casseroles and sympathy cards and conversations that begin with, “I’m so sorry.”

But what do you call the ache that comes from willingly walking away from a place that shaped you?

What do you call the kind of grief that comes from making the right decision, while wishing with every part of you that it hadn’t been necessary?

I’ve asked myself those questions more times than I can count over the past few months.

When people hear that I left camp, the response is usually simple.

“Well… you chose to leave.”

They’re right.

I did.

But I wish people understood that choosing something doesn’t make it painless.

Sometimes the deepest grief is born from the decisions we make with clear eyes. Decisions that aren’t made because love disappeared, but because somewhere along the way, you realized that love alone couldn’t carry what had become too heavy.

I spent eleven years at camp.

Eleven years is long enough for a place to stop feeling like a destination and start feeling like part of your identity.

It became woven into the rhythm of my life so quietly that I never noticed it happening. Summers were measured by staff week and closing day. My calendar bent around retreats and work weekends. I could drive those mountain roads without thinking because my hands had learned every curve before my mind ever had.

Home stopped being an address.

Sometimes it was a gravel road disappearing into the Blue Ridge Mountains.

People ask what I miss, and I never know how to answer.

I could tell them I miss the mountains, and that would be true.

I could tell them I miss hearing laughter echo across camp after the sun went down, or watching the valley disappear beneath morning fog, or the familiar sound of screen doors slamming all summer long.

That would all be true too.

But those aren’t the things that wake me up missing camp.

What I miss is harder to explain.

I miss the certainty.

I miss belonging somewhere so completely that I never questioned whether there was a place for me there.

I miss believing that there would always be another summer.

There is something quietly heartbreaking about discovering that a chapter of your life has ended before your heart has caught up to it.

Your mind knows you’ve left.

Your feet know you don’t drive that road anymore.

But your heart still keeps reaching for something that no longer belongs to your present.

People don’t always understand that kind of grief.

Maybe because the place is still there.

Camp didn’t disappear.

The cabins are still standing.

The campfires are still being lit.

Someone else is making memories in the spaces where mine were made.

Life continued exactly as it was supposed to.

It just continued without me.

I think that’s what has made this loss feel so isolating.

When someone dies, everyone grieves together.

When you leave a place, the world rarely notices.

It doesn’t pause.

It doesn’t ask how you’re doing months later.

It simply expects you to find something else and keep moving.

Maybe I will.

Maybe, someday, another place will feel like home.

But I don’t think that diminishes what camp was.

For eleven years, it held versions of me that no longer exist.

The eager twenty-something who thought she had forever.

The exhausted staff member who ran on coffee and purpose.

The woman who celebrated victories, carried disappointments, cried in quiet places where no one could see, laughed until she couldn’t breathe, and kept showing up because she believed the work mattered.

Those versions of me are still there somehow.

Scattered across those mountains like forgotten wildflowers.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s why leaving hurt so much.

It wasn’t because I was walking away from a place.

It was because I was saying goodbye to every version of myself that had been loved, stretched, broken, healed, and changed there.

People say you can’t go back.

They’re right.

Even if I drove through those gates tomorrow, I couldn’t return to the camp I’m grieving.

Because the place I’m missing isn’t only made of cabins and trails.

It’s made of moments.

Of people.

Of seasons.

Of a younger version of myself who had no idea that one day she’d have to learn how to love a place from a distance.

Maybe that’s what grief really asks of us.

Not to forget.

Not to move on.

But to carry what was beautiful without asking it to become what it used to be.

I’m still learning how to do that.

Some days I do it well.

Other days, I still find myself looking toward the mountains, missing a place that gave me eleven years… and wondering if somewhere, in ways I’ll never fully understand, it is still holding pieces of me too.

I Don’t Want To Be A Chore:

/ Kelly Thomas / Leave a comment

-This playlist is for the feeling of trying to be easy to love. For holding your words back, making your hurt smaller, pretending you don’t need as much as you do, just so no one feels like staying with you is work. It’s for the quiet fear that one day someone will realize loving you takes effort, and decide they’re too tired to keep trying. I don’t want to be a chore. I just want to be something someone keeps choosing without thinking about why.

•Wings by Birdy
•Porch Light by Noah Kahan
•You and Me by Cameron Whitcomb
•Crooked the Road by Mon Rovia
•Refuge by Dermot Kennedy
•Steady by Bella Kay
•Muscle Memory by Isabella Contadini
•Anyone’s Dream by bennie
•Sailor Song by Gigi Perez
•David by Lorde
•Dirty Liar by Ike Dweck
•You Can’t Follow by Alice Rose Lyn
•Youth by Daughter
•If I Get High by Nothing But Thieves
•Meet You at the Graveyard by Cleffy
•Empty (Ballad Version) by Brook Lynn
•Drown by Emilie Su
•Already Gone by Sleeping At Last
•Someone To Stay by Vancouver Sleep Clinic
•Let Me Follow by Son Lux