I recently wrote about the women who have hurt me—the friendships that ended in betrayal and the pain of discovering that someone I loved could disregard me so easily.
But that is not my entire experience of female friendship.
Because I also have Tracey.
I met Tracey at university when we were 18 years old, and we have been best friends ever since.
If you saw us together back then, you probably called us Trouble and Trouble.
And if you did not see us, you definitely heard us.
We were two outgoing blondes who were completely on fire. We had an enormous zest for life, laughed our asses off and created the kind of memories that probably should have remained undocumented.
More than three decades later, she is still my person.
The person I can tell absolutely anything
When I say Tracey knows everything about me, I mean everything.
She knows the deepest, darkest secrets. The embarrassing stories. The things our bodies are doing that nobody warns you about. The relationships that exploded, the friendships that failed, the jobs that went wrong and the decisions that seemed brilliant at the time but absolutely were not.
She knows my trauma.
She knows my greatest achievements.
She knows the parts of my life I am proud of and the parts I would quite happily bury beneath a concrete patio.
And I know hers.
There is extraordinary freedom in having one person with whom you never have to perform.
I do not have to make my life sound better than it is. I do not have to explain the entire backstory because she already knows it. I can call her in the middle of something chaotic and begin halfway through a sentence—and somehow she understands exactly what the fuck I am talking about.
We tell each other the truth
Tracey does not simply agree with everything I say.
She gives me shit.
I give her shit.
We tell each other what the other person needs to hear, even when it is not what she wants to hear.
Sometimes support looks like, “You are absolutely right.”
Sometimes it looks like, “Claudia, you are being a complete idiot.”
Both are love.
Real friendship is not blindly validating every decision. It is knowing someone well enough to recognise when she needs comfort, when she needs honesty and when she needs somebody to help her pull her head out of her own ass.
We have disagreed. We have annoyed each other. We have watched each other make mistakes.
But underneath all of it has always been the certainty that neither of us is going anywhere simply because life—or one of us—became difficult.
Tracey taught me what unconditional love feels like
No matter what I have done, Tracey has loved me.
That does not mean she approves of every choice. It does not mean we have never needed space, boundaries or an uncomfortable conversation.
It means that my humanity has never made me disposable to her.
Through relationships, children, work, trauma, enormous changes, geographical distance and every strange version of ourselves we have become, the friendship has remained.
Having that kind of stability has been one of the greatest gifts of my life.
And apparently, friendship really is good for us. A systematic review of adult friendship research found that strong, high-quality friendships are consistently associated with greater wellbeing. Another major analysis found that the strength of our social relationships is meaningfully connected with physical health and longevity—not merely whether we feel socially busy. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Science is essentially confirming what anyone fortunate enough to have a Tracey already knows:
A real friend helps carry you through life.
Everyone deserves a Tracey
I wish every human being could experience this kind of friendship.
Every girl. Every boy. Every woman and every man.
Not hundreds of acquaintances. Not thousands of followers. Just one person you can call when your entire life has gone to shit and know that you will not have to face it alone.
One person who remembers who you were before the world told you who to become.
One person who has seen your brilliance, your disasters and everything in between—and loves the whole ridiculous collection.
If you find that person when you are young and somehow manage to keep one another through every version of life, you have won the lottery.
Tracey, thank you for the laughter.
Thank you for the truth.
Thank you for carrying my secrets, surviving my intensity and never asking me to become smaller or quieter to make loving me easier.
Thank you for more than three decades of Trouble and Trouble.
Some people spend their entire lives searching for what we found at 18.
And I will cherish it for the rest of mine.
OH! And by the way, Happy Birthday Tracey!
