Your oldest friendships are the ones that survived you changing. That’s worth thanking them for.

An old friendship has already absorbed several versions of you. Every real friend has watched you change your mind, your personality, your plans and possibly your whole crowd, and stayed anyway, which is harder than liking the current edition because they kept choosing somebody they did not sign up for. That flexibility goes unmentioned. It is the actual achievement of the friendship.

Tell one long-standing friend that you know they stuck around through a version of you that was hard work. Be specific about which version. Then extend the same patience when they turn into somebody slightly different next year.