Steph Claire Smith

But it's just this season of my life.

I'm really prioritizing my career.

It's very important to me.

So it's kind of like just sending that message and being very clear on why.

And basically making sure it's clear to them it's not because you don't like them.

It's not because you think they're annoying.

It's because you're in a season of your life where there's something else that you're focusing on as we could and as we should feel enabled to do and empowered to do.

I also feel like there might be an opportunity here for your friend in knowing, feeling safe in your relationship, but then having, not being able to, you know, communicate 24-7 because that doesn't work in your season of life right now.

It might mean that they're forced to go out and create new friendships because especially when you've been friends with someone since middle school, you become, because I think we speak a lot about codependency in intimate relationships, but we can also have codependency in platonic relationships.

In family.

Exactly.

And I think sometimes we don't realise that because we're not intimate with the person.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But you can be codependent in a friendship and that's not always healthy for... It's not just the person that's being relied on all the time and feels overwhelmed and the person that wrote in.

It's actually on the other person as well because they have not been empowered to be independent themselves.

And so by you...

again in a safe way saying like I'm here but I can't be here for you in the same the way you need right now they might be forced or they will be forced maybe to go and seek some other relationships and build other relationships that they haven't needed to because you're their safety blanket yeah you know what this actually reminded me of when I was just saying that then was I actually had a conversation like this with Josh when we were doing distance when I was living in New York

Because he was traveling around the same time and he was calling me every day.

And because of the time differences for a lot of his stints, he was calling me at like dinner time when I was like with some friends or trying to network or whatever.

Yeah.