Some wisdom doesn’t translate. It just travels. My mother brought hers from Afghanistan, wrapped in Farsi, in a phrase she offered quietly and often: Doori wa Dosti. Distance and friendship. I spent years thinking it was something she said. Now I think it was something she knew.

I’m in my 50s, and I know exactly who my people are.

Not in the way you think you know at 25, when friendship is proximity and shared weekends and whoever happens to be around. I mean I know it the way you know something that had to be lived before it made sense. The women in my life right now, we’re on the same frequency. There’s no performance in it. No managing, no tiptoeing, no wondering where you stand. Some of these women came into my life because our kids were friends. That reason is long gone. They stayed anyway, and that tells you everything. We show up for each other in the ways that matter and we don’t keep score. I don’t take that for granted anymore.

Getting here cost something. I spent years grieving a friendship of 30 years that ended over something that didn’t deserve that much of my heart. I mourned her the way you mourn the dead, except she was still alive, still out there, just no longer someone I knew. The person I was grieving didn’t exist anymore. She had changed. I had changed. What we’d had was real, it was wonderful, she was my sister for a long time, and then we became two people who had grown in completely different directions. That’s not a betrayal. It’s just life.

What I wasted was the grief. The years I spent missing someone who had already moved on. I won’t do that again.

There are people I love now who I see twice a year, and it’s enough. Doori wa Dosti. The distance doesn’t mean the love isn’t real, it means I’ve learned how to hold things without gripping them. And there are people I keep at a gentle arm’s length, not because I don’t care, but because that’s the exact right distance for what we are to each other. My mother knew this. It took me decades to catch up.

What I know now is that the people who drifted away were supposed to. Not everyone is meant to be with you at every stage. Some friendships exist to teach you something, to carry you through a particular season, and when that season ends, so does the friendship. That used to feel like failure. Now it just feels like life moving the way it’s supposed to.

I’m in the middle of one of the biggest transitions of my life, my daughter growing into her own woman, the house quieter, everything shifting. It’s harder than I let on. I want to know she’s okay, what she’s doing, how she’s doing, and when I ask she hears it as control. Maybe she’s right, some of it is. She’s testing things right now, dipping a foot in and pulling it back, trying versions of herself on. Some of it makes me nervous. I don’t know if it’s the right way to do this. I don’t think there is one. I’m learning that my role has to change while she’s still figuring out who she even is, and neither of us has done this before. She’s never grown into an adult before. I’ve never watched my little girl turn into someone I don’t fully recognize yet. We’re both stumbling through a first, just from opposite sides of it. My girlfriends are carrying me through it. My husband, who is my best friend, is right beside me.

I choose to move forward with love, with the people who genuinely see me, who show up, who are worth showing up for. And if you’re somewhere in your own version of this, still carrying relationships that stopped feeding you a long time ago, still grieving someone who already left, I hope you give yourself permission to put it down.

I’d love to know who your people are. Tell me in the comments.