This is a story of how I left a close friend. It is the story of how I met him and what our relationship was like, the difficulties I encountered with him, and what I did to try and resolve them. It also details why I decided it was best we went our separate ways. I spent many years trying to understand what I was going through. It wasn't until I had learned to see the world without my friend in it that I dared to leave. It's awkward around my family who think I am in the wrong, but I can't go back. Here is my story of how that happened, and why.
  

 
My friend has always been with me. He is a family friend, and growing up I couldn't help but get to know him. My family shaped my relationship with him. I liked him. Every one of my friends knew and liked this guy. We talked about him and what he was like. We were fans of him the same way some people are fans of sports stars. Even the other adults in my life loved this friend. Everything in my life revolved around my friend in some form or another. My schooling revolved around him. I never hung out with people who didn't like my friend.

My relationship with the friend was a long one. I wanted to know everything I could about him and devoted a lot of my time to understanding him. I read and re-read the letters he wrote, looking to gain as much wisdom and insight as I could. I discussed the letters with friends and family. I delighted in trying to interpret the letters differently than the people around me. I always hoped to find a fresh insight when viewing the letters from a different perspective. In difficult times I would lean on my friend for help and courage. He would listen when I needed to vent my frustrations. When deciding what path I would walk in life, I asked for his advice. I considered him a close friend, and he was a central part of everything I did.
  

The adults in my life encouraged me to consider and apply my friend's teachings. They would take different parts of the friend's letters and apply them to issues of life. They pointed out how following the wisdom of my friend leads to good outcomes. Not following would lead to bad outcomes. They would follow my friend's advice and show how the world was a better place for it while encouraging me to do the same. Sermons about a particular section or theme from my friend's letters were common. Leaders in the community would challenge people to apply the lessons to their life.

When I tried to apply my friend's advice, I found a lot of problems. The advice in one area contradicted the advice in another. That was often part of the wisdom. Different contexts afforded different opportunities, but it was more than that. The way my friend described the world didn't match up with what I saw. There was a gulf between my experience and what my friend was telling me.

My friend made promises, and they didn't seem to be coming to pass. He promised his help in times of trouble, but I couldn't see any help when the trouble arrived. He promised to be with my family in hard times, but I never saw him. I pleaded with him, but only silence answered. There was much anguish in the gulf between what I thought my friend meant and what happened. My friend made statements about the way the world worked, and when the world didn't work that way, I grew confused.

I noticed people interpreted what my friend said in different ways. They got into fights about who was "right". Sometimes the disagreements were simple; other times they were complex. Some disagreements were about the nature of my friend. Others were about what he meant by what he said. Some thought my friend always meant things in a literal sense. Others thought his words were best understood as metaphors. Nobody agreed for long.

Much of the insight people got from my friend's teachings was a matter of perspective. Why was one perspective better than another? Everybody had their answers, but nobody could prove them. I tried to reconcile the differences between people's perspectives. I tried to find the grain of truth amidst it all. But I only grew more lost and confused.

People outside my community had friends like my friend. They claimed their friend was right and mine was wrong. Their friends also wrote letters and argued for believing in them. They were so convinced their friend was the correct one.

How did they decide their friend was right and mine was wrong? What if my friend was right? How did they know that wasn't the case? While trying to understand them and their point of view, I had a stroke of clarity. I glimpsed my beliefs from the outside and finally asked the most important question of all: how did I come to believe my friend was correct?

There was an elderly lady in our community who needed my friend's help. Without it, she would have to move from where she lived. She asked my friend many times for help, and those of us around her supported her in this. In the end, she had to move anyway. My friend did not come to her aid, and it crushed her.

As the people around her tried to help her move, she was in a state of complete surprise and shock. Why didn't my friend help? Everyone in my community would agree: my friend is the kind of person who would have helped. I was sad for the lady, and as I was helping her move I had a sudden and shocking revelation. I wasn't surprised.  I could state all the reasons why my friend should have been there. But in the end, I (and the people who were helping her move, I realized) did not expect my friend to help. The lady believed my friend. She didn't only believe in him. That's why it was surprising to her, and not to me. Did I not believe my friend then? Contemplating these questions I felt lost. I was wandering through a maze of fog with edges I couldn't see.

I had the standard and conventional answers to all the questions. I had studied how to defend my friend from attacks from the outside. I knew what I believed. I knew why I believed it. But no one had asked me how I got the reasons I did. I held things to be true because they must be if my view of the world was to be coherent. But I kept getting cut by the sharp edges of reality that my beliefs didn't expect to be there. I could feel my hope and faith bleeding out of me. The answers began to seem more and more trite and unfounded. They relied on assumptions that I hadn't questioned before. I was questioning those assumptions now, and I needed answers.

I questioned my mentors and other adults in my life about what my friend said and the concerns I had. Sometimes they got flustered, other times they had answers. They encouraged me to keep searching, confident I would find my friend to be correct in the end. I was glad to find others who were willing to question and search for the answers. After all, that's where new wisdom and insight lie.

I tried my best to question the underlying assumptions of the answers I got from people. It was rather frustrating, both for me and for the people I was questioning. I found it difficult to express why a given answer didn't explain my question. People thought I was refusing to accept their answer because I didn't like it. When we did get to the bottom of why they believed what they believed, what did we find? They didn't have reasons that ground out in reality. Some didn't think that was possible.

Questioning people wasn't working, so I found books from people trying to answer the questions I was facing. What kind of person was my friend? How did he make decisions? These were questions I had my answers to, but what did other people think? There was a lot to learn from people who had known my friend longer. I searched for the best books I could find, from authors who had different perspectives. I began to notice patterns in the books I was reading, places in their arguments where they did not go, and conclusions they drew that didn't follow from their premises. I needed something more solid.

The answers I got from my search were not satisfactory; they didn't explain enough. I questioned parents, mentors, and friends. I read many books about the subject to learn more. Yet, I still had questions. A lot of the answers I found boiled down to learning to be comfortable not knowing, trusting that my friend had a good plan, and hoping it worked out well. I didn't understand how that satisfied people. These were the most important questions a person could ask! Trusting in my friend won't be enough to save me if he's wrong. How did people not see that?!  

The answers only addressed the immediate problem, not all the consequences of it. Or, the answer would fail to consider other hypotheses. The answers would address what my friend thought, but not why. The answers didn't help me generate my own answers for similar questions. I was like a toddler always asking, "Why?" It never seemed to bottom out in anything real. Answering why required questioning assumptions. Those assumptions required their own why's. The chains of logic had to end somewhere; they had to be standing on something solid, right? I couldn't find one that did. They always fizzled out into people acknowledging that they didn't know. They couldn't see how a paradox could work, but they trusted my friend anyway. Their beliefs didn't ground out in reality, so they believed in their own belief.

I was starting to see a pattern in the flawed answers I was getting, something consistent they got wrong. When I tried to see what that void was, I realized I was looking at my beliefs from the outside. From here, everything looked cobbled together- all smoke and mirrors to distract me from facing the horror that my friend might be wrong.

I had gone searching for answers to my questions and found them wanting. I couldn't undo that. I couldn't trust what my friend said anymore. I had trouble realizing how much this affected me. My friend was a part of everything in my life, from my hobbies to how I decided who to marry someday, or if marriage was what I should be aiming for. All my internal thinking was now unfounded. I needed to halt, melt, and catch fire; rebuild how I thought about the world and myself. I didn't do that well. It was more of a slow, burning away of old reasons and thoughts that didn't hold weight as I found them.

I must be missing something, right? Were my family and social group wrong about my friend? I must have mistaken something somewhere. I wanted my friend to be right. There shouldn't be a difference between what I saw in the world and what he said was there. I scoured every resource at my disposal for a scrap of hope. I cried for my perspective to be wrong. But the more I looked, the larger the gulf grew. I lived in that agonizing gulf.

I was afraid to leave my friend. If my friend was wrong, all my family and social circles were wrong about him. I would risk losing that community. I didn't want to leave my family. I didn't want my family to think of me as an outcast. I hated the thought of not belonging anymore. So, I continued searching for a way out. Some way that my friend could be right had to exist, right?

My friend gave me answers to existential questions. In questioning my friend, I was now questioning those too. What was the point of life? Why bother struggling in this world full of suffering? Did anything matter? I had lost my confidence in the answers I had and I grew suicidal. There were a few close calls as I pleaded with my friend to give me some kind of answer that made sense. I didn't want to die, but I couldn't see a way out of my despair. I had lost faith in my friend, but I was afraid to let go and follow this path to the end. I needed to learn how to live without the assurances of my friend.

I stumbled across a series of lectures that I found very interesting, given by someone who didn't believe in the letters, but could show me why people found value in them. I found this rather helpful. This person helped me differentiate between truth and value. He gave me the tools I needed to re-evaluate my friend's teachings. I could understand why the valuable parts of the letters were valuable.

I still needed to figure out how to discern whether something was true or not. I looked at philosophy, as it seemed to be asking similar questions. I found philosophers frustrating. They argued abstractions up into the clouds where I needed something more concrete. I was stuck in this phase for a long time. Lost in a fog, certain that what my friend said was wrong but unable to prove for myself what was correct.

I finally found a community of people devoted to answering the kinds of questions I was asking, such as "how do you know what you think you know?" I delved into what they had to say and found more than I could have hoped. I wasn't given answers to my questions, but a toolset to find my own and encouragement to use it.

Applying these tools to my relationship with my friend was hard, but necessary. The value of our relationship reduced as I discovered what the truth was for myself. My agony evaporated as the gulf between reality and what I expected reality to look like went away. Each step I took gave me the confidence to take the next step and I found myself running free.

I had to learn to face reality without my friend. This was easier than I thought it would be. At the moment, the idea of doing life without a guide seemed awful. Turns out, I am more capable than I thought. I learned tools for understanding my world and grew confident in my abilities. Without the tools I now have, I'm not sure I could have left my friend and the security he provided.

Interacting with family is weird. They like me and I like them, but there is a definite loss of intimacy. I am a visitor and a guest, an outsider in my own home. It is harder to communicate now; there is a set of assumptions that are no longer shared. It's not impossible, but it requires a lot more work. As a result, fewer conversations are had and they center on less important topics. There is a natural drifting apart that I don't like but I'm not sure it's a bad thing.

I can respect the value of a relationship with my friend, even if it's not for me anymore. He provides answers, imbues the world with meaning, and provides a framework to view the world. I can see why I was so reluctant to let it go, but I'm glad I did.

I have a clarity in my life that I didn't think was possible; a surety in my answers that comes from having a sound process for changing them. I have a direction in my life to pursue; goals and ambitions that I can endorse without feeling reserved about them. I am not concerned the assumptions will bottom out into nothing because I have done the work. I have built them from the ground up.

 I am glad to have faced my trial and come out the other side. It was one of the most difficult things I have ever done, and I don't expect most people to decide the way I did. I had people beside me who supported me during my questioning, and I am grateful for them. Looking back now I can say with confidence that leaving my friend has been one of the best choices of my life.

I hope other people know they can have answers. They can have clarity. Be warned that new knowledge arrives by the death of old knowledge. It will be exceptionally difficult, but the answers are there. The reward is worth it. You are strong enough to bear it should you seek it out. All you need is to keep asking that little question, "Why do you believe what you believe?" When you have an answer, ask the question again of that answer. Follow the path to the end. You never know where the adventure will take you.