Are You Ever Really As Close To University Friends As The Ones You’ve Known Since Childhood?

Childhood friendships aren’t like other friendships. My sister was the first to point this out to me, when we were in our 20s, forming the earliest adult friendships of our lives. She said that the friends we make as adults are our friends because we have something in common; our childhood friends are our friends because that’s what they’ve always been. The truth of this is more evident to me now than it was at the time. The friends I’ve made in the 15 or so years I’ve been living in London are largely connected in some way to writing and publishing, and are all politically progressive. My childhood friends from Karachi work in banking, advertising, private equity and architecture, and their politics are harder to pin down with a single word.

I was at the same school from the age of four to 18; the origins of a number of my childhood friendships stretch back beyond memory. By the time we left school, we all knew each other’s insecurities and flaws, the cruelties and jealousies of which we were capable, the versions of ourselves we wanted to be but weren’t. At five or 12 or 15, your character hasn’t learnt to disguise itself. But then, school was over, and we shot off in different directions. Most of us went to university in America, but we were scattered around that vast country. I ended up on a campus on a hill in a village in New York State, miles and miles away from everyone I knew.

At first, I was tremendously homesick and would wait for 11pm when phone calls became cheaper to call my closest friends and hear their familiar voices. But in those first few weeks, I felt abandoned – my very best friend in the world had plunged delightedly into campus life in Ohio and wanted to tell me about his amazing new friends, the fun they were all having together. Often, when I called, he was out, or had friends in his room and couldn’t talk for long. While I wanted to hear his voice, he wanted to pass the phone to these new friends so I could say hello.

In retrospect, I realise it was an act of friendship for him to want me to know these new friends of his; at the time, it was just wounding. But within a few weeks I, too, discovered the pleasure of making university friends – we could stay up until all hours getting to know each other, discussing ideas that seemed so thrilling and new at an American campus in the early ’90s. Best of all, no one had any preconceptions of me, or could imagine the shy, insecure child I had been in kindergarten and beyond. I understood then why some people may want to jettison their childhood friends and start anew with an element of reinvention.

Disclaimer: This is part of an essay written by Kamila Shamsie for British Vogue. To read the full version click here.

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