One of my favorite manga is Fullmetal Alchemist by Arakawa Hiromu. It follows the story of two alchemist brothers who try to seek a way to regain their bodies after a botched alchemy experiment that they conducted to bring back their late mother. One of the overarching themes of the manga is an idea known as “equivalent exchange” in the alchemy world, in which you must sacrifice something of equal importance to gain something. While the idea seems reasonable, I have learned that it has no place in our realm of reality, outside a fictional universe.

There have been numerous times throughout middle school and my first two years of high school in which three girls who I considered my best friends tampered with this philosophy. During times in which academics and competition tore friendships apart, shattered self-esteem, and drove students to the brinks of depression, our friendship held on tenaciously despite my constant self-reassurance that we were going to last forever.

Those same friends who promised their ultimate support, their firsts and lasts, and the hearts on their sleeves, were the very victims of the academics and competition that my fellow students and I found ourselves drowning in. As I grabbed at thin air to keep the friendship that was fraying, they strayed further away from me as jealousy and spite consumed them. It definitely was not just them at fault; my consideration for their feelings was whittled away as standardized testing, orchestra auditions, and a list of A+’s took its place as the center of my focus. My complaints about my problems grew more audible as I turned down the volume for my concerns about their lives. My compliments for them dwindled as my desire for comfort and reassurance escalated. Soon, we were just clawing our way out of a spiral that continued to vortex until a solution was no longer visible. They separated themselves from me without notice while I continued to question the reason for the void beside me.

This all came to an acme when they spilled their inner turmoil to me as a landslide of anguish and hurt, and as I tried to futilely pick up the broken shards of our friendship with apologies that they would not accept, I began to realize that this had been going on for a long time. I was just too blind to realize my selfishness, narrow-mindedness, and insensitivity. I was being unkind, not giving back the consideration they gave me. Not respecting the law of equivalent exchange.

It was only after this talk that I began to think of what they said to me.

“You always teased me that I was ugly like I teased you, but sometimes I just want to hear that I’m pretty too.”
“You have a hierarchy of friends, but I just want to get to the top, to be close with your best friends.”
“Fine, if you say that this break in our friendship can find a fault on both sides, what did we do wrong? What we did was bad, but it definitely was not as bad as what you did.”

These were the words that they hurled at me like grenades, blowing up my walls and uprooting all the flaws that I was too afraid to carry. I conducted a thorough examination of myself, tearing myself apart to find everything little thing that was wrong with me, determined to wring out every little shred that committed a sin.

Some say that the most priceless treasures are found when one is empty-handed. Indeed, when I was empty of all prized character traits and filled to the brim with loneliness and self-hatred, I found the most precious treasure of all: truth.

The truth was something very simple: kindness and friendship are only true if and only an individual does not ask for anything in return. On the surface, it seems to make sense. Why, then, did it take me so long to emerge from the hole of guilt, that I was the only one at fault in this situation?

The idea of equivalent exchange, in essence, is something straight out of a chemistry textbook. Ever since middle school, I was exposed to the Law of Conservation of Matter, that no matter was created or destroyed. When something “disappeared”, it was converted to another form of matter, whether or not it was visible. When the masses of the different products of the reaction are added together, it should be the same as the reactants. I suppose that is where the idea for equivalent exchange came from.

But there’s more to our lives than just the conservation of matter. What about all the things that cannot be classified as matter? What about our actions, our words, our emotions, feelings, our character? How can any of these be quantified, and how can there ever be any equal to any of them?

It seems probable that kind words and actions should, and can, be returned. And they should. When someone does something kind for another, he or she should receive kindness, respect, and gratitude in return. He or she deserves nothing less than the kindness they gave.

Those three girls were right when they believed that I should have given them kindness when they gave it to me. However, they were not right in demanding it.

I believe that true kindness does not demand anything in return. If an individual is looking for a kind action in return for their own, they will be obligated to act kindly just to gain something from it. If an individual does not get an expected “something” back after doing something kind, they would feel as if the other person owed them something. However, if that individual does not expect a return, then the act of kindness they get after is just that much more precious.

Expecting something back and keeping track of these different exchanges quantifies friendship in terms of words and actions. Friendship should not be able to be tallied. How can one express emotions, bonds, and trust in numbers? How do they add up, subtract, multiply divide? How can they be calculated to the degree that they are forced against another person?

Bonds are priceless. Friendship is priceless. Once those girls put a value on top of our friendship and gave it a price, I knew that it was not just my ignorance that brought down our relationship. It was our philosophies. Because they used me for those acts of kindness they could get out of me, I was tossed aside, never trusted to the same degree that I trusted them. If our friendship had a price on it, and if I was the only one that took it seriously, then I knew by then that the friendship that I had been cradling for years was not the one that I wanted. The truth was simple: the relationship we had was unhealthy. It was not genuine. It was not pure, or real. And this was because it was built off of the foundations of the doctrine of the equivalent exchange.

Now that I am a junior in high school, I do think it is too late to find friends that will be as close to me as they were. However, I don’t think that it’s necessary to have friends that dominate your social life. I no longer want to repeat that social hierarchy, that twisted version of friendship, the feeling of being thrown under the bus and trampled on, knowing that I can’t be trusted. Since then, I have learned to cherish my friends and emerge out of my own selfishness, ignorance, and self-centeredness. But most importantly, I learned that equivalent exchange will never have a place in my life outside of the manga I read.