As a child, the start of the school year brought a lot of trepidation.
Would I still be friends with the same children from the year before?
I usually didn't see a lot of my classmates over the summer, so I always worried if new friendships had been forged and I had been replaced. It was not a good feeling to start the year off with.
Things were usually fine, and by the end of the first week, we fell into our routine of where we sat at lunch and who we would walk to class with.
Sometimes our friendships changed over the course of the year, but we chalked it up to we were growing up and going our separate ways.
But those were simpler times.
As adults, we don't have a classroom or school full of friends to choose from.
We usually find our friends through our jobs, church or volunteering. And now when the friendships evolve, it sometimes brings a sting of disappointment and the scar of betrayal.
That pain is even worse when it's someone we think we are really close with - that we have been friends with for a number of years, shared things with, talked to often and then suddenly in the blink of an eye, they have changed.
Or we have.
Maybe we finally saw things we didn't want to before.
Regardless, it still hurts.
My eyes were recently opened about someone I had cherished as a dear friend and it cut me to the quick.
Lamar had warned me months earlier. He even predicted how it would unfold.
I refused to listen.
Mama told me after the fact she saw it coming. A mother's hindsight is always 20/20, of course.
None of that made it any less painful.
There wasn't a big nasty fight. There wasn't even one single event where I realized I was no longer friends with this person - if anything, it was a series of little epiphanies where I realized either we weren't as good of friends as I thought, or I had really not known her.
I was saddened.
And now, a drastic divide fell between us that I don't know will ever be healed.
Losing friends is a lot harder as an adult.
Maybe because with our hectic schedules we really have to make time for friendship.
Some friends drift apart after a marriage, or the birth of a child.
Maybe it's a matter of it being harder to make friends as an adult.
Instead of selecting our friends because they have the same lunchbox, or like the same band, there are so many other factors we tend to put in the mix.
We have to be willing to invest a little more thought, a little more effort as to why we want this person in our life.
And sometimes, maybe it's just a matter of letting go, no matter how bad it hurts.
Sudie Crouch is an award-winning humor columnist and certified life coach. She lives in the north Georgia mountains with her family and four insane, but fairly well behaved dogs.