Meet My Friends! (Part 1)

Since I mention them so often, I thought it was time to put faces to the names... of my friends, that is.

I've mentioned to them that I have a blog... they don't know that they feature on it.

We'll go in chronological order, shall we?


I first met Elise in Year 8, only my second year at PAC.

The story goes that at a pool party for a fellow PAC-er, we were the only ones not in the pool (we were at the food table! Ha! that should help explain our friendship!) and so we struck up a conversation and we've been BFFs (Best Friends Forever) ever since.


We are similar in many ways- we picked similar subjects at school and uni because our interests are the same (history, psychology... cookie dough icecream and toblerone cheesecake...) and we have the same sense of intellect and humour.



We even (inadvertently) wore very similar style dresses to our Year 10 formal.



Yet we are also very different. She's more logical and realistic than I am. I'm definitely the dreamer in the relationship!

Often we'll like different things about the same thing - for example, what Brooke Fraser songs she loves, I don't like and vice versa. But we both love Brooke.



We went through high school joined pretty much at the hip.

We've been overseas on a school trip to New Caledonia together and got baffled equally by the French language and our bizarre host family.


We were school prefects together.


We went through (and survived!) the HSC together.

We debated uni courses together (and when she choose to attend Sydney Uni while I went to UWS, it was the hardest year of our friendship but STILL we survived).

We've dealt with boys, death, separation, stress, craziness and joy together. At school, she was my best friend. We went through a period of "readjustment" as we embarked on this journey called "tertiary education" but we are now back to the authentic version of ourselves.


She is in her third year of the first of many degrees (seriously, she's going to be at uni for SEVEN years!) which is what you get when you want to become a doctor. Be on the lookout for Dr Elise Butler in about, oh, 10 years.

Nowadays, we hang out together at each other's houses and our conversations range from the deep and intense to the light and whimsical. I love that we can flow from one to the other so seamlessly. We get each other.









I met Keisha early on in high school, but we didn't really get close until Year 11.




Each of us had been 'restructuring' our groups of friends, as you do at 15-16, and we hit it off pretty quickly. At school, Keisha was the bubbly girl who would talk really fast to anyone. We had the same classes all the way through school and so our friendship developed over many years.






In Year 11 four of us just seemed to gravitate towards each other (we say it was "a God thing") and we suddenly had this really intense friendship. Even though we were all doing different subjects, we always had lunch together (we snuck into one of the empty classrooms) and caught up with each other.

Keisha and I were very alike in high school... we were the softies, the dreamers, the romantics. We often had similar points of view. Keisha can be relied upon to provide a little silliness and a lot of heart.






After school, Keisha became my closest friend. She went to the UWS campus next door to mine, studying Communications, and so we often met up during the week and forged a really strong friendship outside of the school bubble.

Last year she quit uni, got a full time, very well-paying job with the government, got engaged and moved out of home. So we've faced a lot in our friendship!

Her fiance Adam was my best guy-friend at school, and if you'd told me they would eventually get married, I would never have believed you. For starters, Keisha didn't even like Adam at school! I was the only one that saw his potential as a human being! And now they own property together, have a mortgage and are planning a wedding.






Despite all that, Keisha has been my sanity these past few post-school years. She's quick to bring stress-head me back down to earth. We all go to church together, which has been another milestone for both of us after much to-ing and fro-ing with churches. She's grown up so much (I say her owning a house makes me feel 10 years old!) but underneath she's still the same girl who would sing stupid songs at the top of her voice in class.