Kelly Given: Our real friendships can stretch across oceans

We met almost 15 years ago at Beveridge Park, a cornerstone of any Kirkcaldy-based coming-of-age story, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.

Being an entire day away from her is one hell of an adjustment, but I have never been more proud to be her right hand – and it has really prompted a reflection on my friendships, both as a woman in my 20s and as a neurodivergent person.

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She is the one human being I can turn to for anything, at any time. A place where I will always be met with grace and kindness, even when I am too poor in resources of any kind to repay the favour.

When I have engaged in the most brainless decision-making known to man, I am comforted in the knowledge that she is behind me. When life is cruel and feels insurmountable – I will always be OK, because she is with me. When life is good and full of joy, there’s no-one more fun to share it with.

She sees me, and I her. Neither of us a stranger to a questionable decision, a teenage scandal or indeed a widespread Twitter condemnation – we have walked hand in hand through life together for the last 15 years in the most unshakeable friendship. We’re no longer just friends, we’re family – family that we chose and continue to choose every day.

When I was filming Make Me Prime Minister, she took a 10-hour taxi from Fife to London to film with me for two hours. She showed up wearing a “Team Kelly” T-shirt and waving a placard with my face on it. A rare kind of friend that can be impossible to find when you grow up neurodivergent, especially as a girl – but that I was so very lucky enough to come by.

I’ve spoken quite openly about how challenging I found friendships in my younger years. I did my best to pretend I could fit in, but high school in particular is a shark tank for young women – let alone the weird, neurodivergent, socially unconventional ones – even if they are unwittingly trying to hide it.

I didn’t understand who I was, and that made it incredibly difficult to find “my people” – whoever they were.

Part of being a late-diagnosed neurodivergent is, famously, being confronted with your entire existence and presence in the world and subsequently being forced to unlearn almost everything you thought you knew about yourself.

Most of us realise that we generally do not yet have an authentic sense of self and instead, the version of us that exists is the culmination of whatever our external environment has taught us to be over the years.

We are who we have trained ourselves to be in order to survive, not who we actually and innately are. Friendships are intrinsically linked to this process.

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We often find ourselves post-diagnosis, surrounded by people we don’t have anything in common with – and we begin to question how on earth we got there. I shed many layers and drastically changed my identity no less than 500 times on my mission to find myself – and my best friend held me up like a steel beam through it all.

Since my diagnosis, my friendships have been turned upside down and called into question in ways younger me was never equipped to enact. I have made new friends who have been better friends to me in a matter of months than others I spent more than a decade on.

I have shed others that desperately needed to be shed and have finally found a solid foundation in the best of friends that the younger me could only ever have dreamt of. The kind of friends I could call at 3am, that want to share their lives with me and want me around. It’s taken me 27 years.

There has only ever been one constant throughout it all – and she’s just boarded a one-way flight to another hemisphere. And it’s perfectly OK because albeit painful and difficult, real friendship is built to withstand these challenges. It is purposefully curated, actively chosen and designed so that, if need be, it can stretch across oceans and still keep you warm.

Even aside from being neurodivergent, there’s such a gendered angle to friendships in your 20s. We’re so often taught as young women that we need to aspire to romantic love, that dating should be the number one priority. That finding a soulmate in a partner is what life is all about.

Actually, what I have come to recognise, particularly since entering the latter half of my 20s, is that it’s the friendships you forge that are the be-all and end-all.

They are the pillars of your existence in your youth above most other things, despite what we’re told. They have the power to weigh you down if you choose badly, and the power to see you through the best and harshest of times if you’re lucky enough to find the right ones.

Choosing your people wisely is one of the most important decisions you will ever make.

The love story I have curated with my best friends is the most fulfilling, joyous and life-affirming so far – anything I find beyond them will simply be a bonus, not the other way around.

As life goes on and becomes more messy and complicated, it is them that will guide you and that you will depend on more than anyone else.

If you’re really lucky, you’ll find one that will make 10 hours’ worth of small talk with a taxi driver just to cheer you on. And if she moves across the planet, you’ll still feel her friendship as if she was next door anyway.