You introduced someone to me as a friend, and then in the next breath warned me not to tell him anything important. I want to gently point out what you've done: you've used the word and voided it in the same sentence.
I'm not criticizing you. We all do this — we have a large population of people we call friends and a much smaller population we actually treat as friends, and the gap between those two groups is where most loneliness lives. The word has become so diluted that it covers everyone from the person you'd call at three in the morning to the person whose name you remember only because you connected online. This matters because the dilution isn't neutral. It lets us feel we have more than we do.
Here's the distinction I actually mean: a friend is someone you trust as you trust yourself. Not completely without discernment — you shouldn't trust yourself with everything either — but without the holding back, the performance, the managed version of yourself you present to people you're not sure about yet.
The sequence matters, and we usually get it backwards. Most of us make someone a friend and then decide whether to trust them — which means we've already let them in before we've done the work of knowing them. The right order is harder: you study a person first, you take your time, you watch how they behave when things are difficult and when they're easy. And then, once you've decided — you go all the way. No half-measures, no strategic omissions, no friendship with an asterisk.
Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul.
Once you've made that decision, suspicion is corrosive. The person who trusts no one teaches others not to be trustworthy. If you treat a friend as a potential betrayer, you give them permission to betray you — you've already written that script and handed it to them.
There are two failure modes here, and you should watch for both. The first is the person who tells their secrets to anyone who will listen — who unburdens on strangers, who has no real filter between what's private and what's public. The second is the person who trusts no one, who keeps everything sealed, who wouldn't confide in themselves if they could avoid it. Both are forms of damage, though they look opposite. The first has no protection; the second has no nourishment.
The same pattern runs through everything. Constant motion is not energy; it's a hunted mind. Constant stillness is not peace; it's inertia. Nature made day and night both. The person who has learned to act and to rest, to open and to hold back, to judge carefully and then to trust completely — that person has found the real middle, which is not a compromise between extremes but something of a different quality entirely.
Find one or two people who deserve the word. Then use it correctly.
Yours, without reservation,