I was a Girl Scout till I graduated from high school… yes, you can be a Girl Scout that long.

So I am very familiar with the song, “make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and other’s gold.”

But quite honestly, I didn’t know how complicated and confusing that act was until recently…

I was lucky to move to New York City with my best friend from college.  We shared an apt, explored the city and split a bottle of wine every night.  Having something so familiar was such a blessing in such a new and chaotic place.

As time went on, both of us naturally gravitated towards different interests.  I was becoming increasingly fed-up with my corporate existence in advertising, just as she started quickly, and happily ascending the ranks at a prestigious investment bank.  In the beginning I felt a void between us.  Though I didn’t know it at the time, was just because for the first time in the 6 years we’d known each other, we were doing different things.

At the beginning of my career as a self-employed nutrition coach, I was feeling lost.  In an attempt to “find myself” I signed up for Gabrielle Bernstein’s meditation group coaching course. And within 2 sessions, I found myself head-over-heels-in-friend-love with a new group of spiritually minded women.  Developing a friendship with these new women as an adult was amazing.  All they knew was who I was now, a self-employed, physically fit woman in a healthy relationship.  And amazingly, most of them were also entrepreneurs so they “got” that piece I had been missing in my other friendships.

Since my college friends knew me when I was a reckless party-girl who was searching for love in all the wrong places and fluctuated 15-20 pounds every 6-months, it was easy to gravitate more towards my new friends, merely so I could get a break from my past.

After a short panic of feeling like I “couldn’t relate anymore” to my college friends, I realized it was merely us not being able to relate to some of the changes we were going through. And after needing to explain for the third time to my “new” friends who my ex-boyfriends were, I realized how lucky I was to have a group of women who knew just about everything about me, because they were there.

Here in lies the balance: For me, I needed to accept that my sordid (but fun) past was not something I needed to run away from, and my friends who used to funnel beers with me, are definitely game for sitting around in our pj’s talking about religion.  I just had to initiate.

And just because I met my “new” friends sitting in a circle sending each other beams of energetic love and light, doesn’t mean we can’t dress up and have a night on the town. I just had to initiate.

Having different friends for different phases can bring so much happiness.  But remember that even though one phase in your life has started, does not mean your last phase never happened. It is so important to appreciate each friend who has been there for part of your journey, and to make sure that you don’t leave them behind, because you assume they don’t want to come.