What a difference a year makes!

A few nights ago I celebrated my 26th birthday. I must say it was one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had and I’m not just saying it. This wasn’t because there was a crazy party or hundreds of people or whatever you would picture an awesome party to be. Though I did have my first ever birthday makeout! I had only invited a small group of friends. I think it was more because it had shown how much I have grown as a person in the year that has past.

In the past I wasn't always big on celebrating birthdays. To me, I just saw it as another day or a lame excuse to get attention from people. At that point I didn’t have many friends (or I wasn’t sure who my real friends were) and I was very insecure of who I was. I had little direction of where I was headed and my future didn’t seem certain.

This year was a little different. In the year that had past I had become really close to 2 of my best friends, James and Nass. In the past, I saw friendship as just a bunch of guys meeting up and having a good time. When you have friends who don’t share the same interests as you, it would sometimes be a tedious task. I wasn’t very open with them and sometimes I would question why I was friends with them. So what changed?

I wasn’t always an open person. I felt that if I opened up people would use my openness as a way to take advantage of me. It had happened to me many times in the past. I would place trust in someone only to find that they had their own interests at heart. For a while I had curled up into a shell and wasn’t willing to let anybody in. A few years had past and I felt lonely and depressed. I can’t say exactly when I decided to be more open with my friends. I think I may have thrown out a few things about who I really was in small chunks overtime.

As the year past I think I built so much momentum that I started seeing my friends open up to me. I started talking about my fears, about my thoughts, my dreams, things that make me tick… and they would open up just as much as I have. James and Nass appear to be very confident guys. It was a great feeling to realize that not only did I have flaws within myself, they had same flaws as I did. Only that they had a different way from showing it to how I did. When we would open up to each other there wasn’t any desire to take from each other, we were sharing each others presence. Everytime I was with these guys I would feel like a better person just for being around them and I know they felt the same.

On the surface you could easily say that this was just an ordinary party. To me it was a reminder of how far I’ve come as a person and I’m looking forward to seeing who I become on my 27th birthday. In being a more open person I have also created new friendships and become closer to those who I wasn’t so close to. I believe the quality of life comes down to the people you influence and I feel more and more each day I am becoming an influential person.