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as not, worried that my shoes were wrong.
    I am so happy to have that little bit of Formerly wisdom. We
can
go home. We don’t have to be friends with toxic, draining people to learn that you don’t have to be friends with toxic draining people! If you do that once, it’s enough. It’s not that different the second time. A Formerly is not friends with someone because your mom went to college with her mom or because you want some of her charisma or popularity to rub off on you or because you can’t bear to be alone. What a gigantic relief! When you’re younger, “You feel so alienated, you try so hard to fit into a group,” says Rhonda. “Now my friendships give me community, but I don’t need them to give me my identity.” Amen to that, sister.
    The other big thing about friendships as a Formerly is that we’ve had decades to accumulate a vast army of friends, some old, some new. I was in the Brownies when I was a kid, and they taught us to sing that adage “Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other’s gold” in a round. One group of girls started the song, and each subsequent group began the verse just after the previous group had finished singing the word “friends.” We were told to enunciate the first word, so the song always sounded to me like “MAKE new friends, MAKE new friends, MAKE new friends …” and the whole part about keeping old friends because they were so valuable got drowned out. It was also unclear when, if ever, you were supposed to stop singing. It was like a perpetual loop of a single mantra—MAKE new friends—and could cause a little girl to lose her tiny mindand just want to eat all the Girl Scout cookies she was supposed to be selling.
    In any event, no thanks to that song, I’ve been very fortunate to have kept many of my oldest friends, probably because I’ve lived in one place most of my life, a place (New York City) where people don’t automatically flee as soon as they get their driver’s licenses. (This may be because many never get their driver’s licenses, but that’s another subject entirely.) I know it’s rare to have so many childhood friends, because my newer friends often marvel at my vintage friendships.
    But because I have such a crop of old and relatively new friends, I’ve got some perspective on why they’re both important. Gold and silver is way too facile a way of viewing their absolute and relative value.
    Old friends, on the one hand, are the keepers of your context. They knew you when you were your Formerly—whether you were Formerly Hot, Formerly Wild, Formerly Arrogant, Formerly Fat or Formerly Cripplingly Shy but nonetheless the girl who would take down a no-neck fraternity bully with one cutting phrase if you had to. No matter what you become, they get it, they get you and they get how you arrived at now. What’s more, if you stray too far from what you were, in a bad way—say, you’re Patrick Dempsey, all sexy and sensitive as McDreamy on
Gray’s Anatomy
—and you get a swelled head, you need an old friend around to remind you that in 1986, you once considered yourself lucky to star in
Meatballs III
.
    Then again, if your Formerly wasn’t something you were entirely proud of, new friends can be a fresh start. They don’t know you as Formerly Slutty, that girl who slept with half the guys in her freshman dorm, or Formerly the Prodigy, the one who everyone thought would be the first woman President but who now works in a yarn store (So the eff what? You love to knit!). They see who you are now, and like what they see, and don’t have lingering judgments.
    Of course, newer friends can’t see patterns, a perspective that as a Formerly I need more than ever. With so little spare time, I find myself ever more frustrated when I make the same dumb-ass mistakes I’ve made for years, or get all twisted up over the things in life that will probably never change and are just not worth the angst. It’s good to have a friend