Confessions of a libra

Friendship as a sanctuary | Credit: Here

17.07.25

Friendship isn’t supposed to be a never-ending chasm of tolerance. Friendship should be about frequency and alignment. You are allowed to grow into, then out of friendship. No one should beg or expect you to dim your light because they have lost sight of theirs. I am living testament to the blessings that life can bring when you prune the people you allow in your inner circle or auric field. I’ve always been known as this person who can be a hardarse about my standards in friendship. I have lost more people than I can count. They should all start a Thando’s ex-friends club, to keep each other warm. I include lovers in this as I have explained before, my 11th house placements means I am friends with the people I end up sleeping with.

A lot people’s modern understanding of loyalty is rooted in insecurity and control. Loyalty is earned and not expected. You also do not get to a level in love platonic or romantic, where you stop trying to be the best version of yourself. A lot of friendships I have lost can boil down to a few qualifiable reasons. My sensing unresolved jealousy, my sensing/unearthing lies, and frequency mismatch. Many people have been drawn to me like moths to flames. There’s been this unspoken social currency that comes with being in my orbit. Even by the very people who hate me in private and secretly pray for my downfall. Even they can admit on some level, that it is better to be close to where the magic happens than to be untouched by the light. Yet for many, they fly to close and are seared largely by my perception.

I would like to write this to encourage you to be more intentional with your friendships. Especially if you value your evolution or are even inspired by my level of autonomy. This piece will end up as a series because I have a lot to say about friendship alchemy and I hope by telling my story, it can allow you to better evaluate the health of your friendships, and make room for more if need be. In Astrology, my chart ruler Venus sits in my 11th house. This means my life overarchingly has a friendship theme (among others) occurring. This is likely how I receiving blessings, learn lessons and express the full spectrum of human experience. As such my friendships are never light and where they are, I do not hold them to high regard. My presence demands depth, which can be arousing or frightening depending on the soul.

I have compiled a list of friendships I have consciously let go off at least since teenagehood. I have also included the Sun signs of the people I remember, so I can give you some anecdotes then a breakdown of what the signs taught me. I have definitely noticed a trend in the friendships that have come and gone and I would like to break down why I may have been drawn to them, as well as how they facilitated my evolution. I would like to delve only into the most pivotal people and stories, otherwise we will be here all day. One day in my memoir you can read everything in greater detail.

One of the earliest and most impactful friendship of my teenage years I had to let go of, was my friend who we will call Pen. Pen and I bonded when I arrived to this particular school over Twilight. We both had a passion for reading and writing. We were inseparable. Almost comical in our height difference and appearance. She was a tall Samoan girl and I a skinny, short black girl. We both had a love of music. She was particularly great at writing and I was great at singing. One of her songs we performed at our school Talent show and that same song we actually had played on Triple J one time. Our friendship was a creative powerhouse. We both had religious leanings and straddled the line between our romantic fantasies and our beliefs that we couldn’t have many of the things we daydreamed about.

That is, until her family decided to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That was the beginning of the end, but the start of my intellectual interest with scrutinising religion. Well before I was ready to leave it, though I did within 4 years after this. At first, I adjusted to the changes. We could no longer celebrate birthdays together, Twilight and anything fantasy or romance was off the table. Especially the slightly saucy stories we were engaging in through the vehicle of vampirism and lycanthropy. Then came the debates. I wish I remembered her star sign, but we would have these debates where she would bring her new Jehovah’s Witness (JW) pamphlets to teach me about her new world.

I would ask her why they didn’t believe in Jesus being on a cross, and instead depicted him on a post with both hands pierced straight above his head. She would tell me how they had depicted it that way based on what would have actually occurred historically during Jesus’s time. In my spare time what she didn’t know was, I began watching videos on cults. Among them was this church. Her joining JW spurred on my interest in cults, which fed into learning about religious critiques and also lead me to start learning about mysticism. Back to those debates that I engaged in in good faith. I was approaching is like an Air sign. I love a debate and I am always open to learning I am wrong. I may double down during an argument but the point of debate for me is for you to convince me with your logic.

I had poor Pen reporting questions to her new Youth Leader or whatever they call them, and relaying to me answers to my questions. Eventually, she was instructed to cut me off and I reasoned that it was because the debates had gone nowhere. I believe they expected to tell me how reasonable their faith was. Hook me enough to attend a service. Then poach me from my present Baptist church. Instead they found someone who was perfectly happy yapping, while also (increasingly) silently hoping to deprogram Pen from their clutches. So they did the reasonable thing, and she started spending less time with me in favour of the other people who attended the same congregation.

I am not being hyperbolic when I say this broke my heart. When I love friends, I love them with the same intensity as romantic relationships. I do not think romantic relationships are above platonic ones. My love is equally expansive and heartfelt. I don’t think I showed it enough. I know from her perspective she thought it was her choice. She found solace in having other people her age in that church and finding a crush to fixate on. For me, over the years where we were no longer best friends, barely more than acquaintances – I watched a flower slowly wilt. Her decision-making tilted from everything that gave her childlike joy to things that had been parroted in those cult videos. Her future dreams also change, to morph with the teachings of the church.

I mourned our friendship for most of high school, silently. At 16, we were no longer friends but when she told me she was being baptised, I said I would go. A part of me hoped I would see something to convince me that she had made the right decision. That I would see something that settled that pit in my stomach. Two damning things happened. The first was listening to sermons where they talked about ‘living in the truth’. They emphasised how much they were loving correctly, and everyone else was essentially fucked. While this is still the message of any of the Abrahamic religions at least, I’d never heard it in my church be said so blatantly.

Hearing it phrased the way they did, brought up resistance within me. I realised innately in my body, and in my very soul didn’t believe that. Why would any God create a world like that? And if I have to live the way they do; unable to celebrate things whether they intrinsically mean anything or not, being unable to listen to secular music, having to marry only within the church… I would feel utterly suffocated. That was my 11th house screaming for freedom. It’s like I got a flash-forward on what it would be like to exist under those paradigms willingly and I just would rather be a sinner.

Secondly, I was sitting next to this lovely lady with a baby. Me and the baby slowly bonded (babies and children LOVE me), eventually I was holding her and playing with her. Once we had an intermission, this lady and I spoke. She asked which congregation I was a part of and I told her I was just here to support a friend getting baptised. Once she heard that she took her child away, refused to look and talk to me for the remainder of the time. If she could have requested a different seat or that I be escorted out she would have. That was the last time I ever spent time with Pen. I think about her often and I wish her nothing but happiness. And hopefully if I’m lucky, a return to her childhood joys. That friendship cracked something open in me. It showed me that loyalty without alignment is a slow death. And it was only the first lesson. Every friendship I’ve had to prune since then, has sharpened me into the woman I am today. In Part 2, I’m dragging every sign by its shadow and spilling the lessons that rewired me. If you thought this was raw, buckle up.