Somebody I used to know

Friendship; the big, beautiful, scary, necessary thing and what happens when it ends.

Dear friend,

I hope you’re sitting down because this one is a little heavy.

I’ve been thinking deeply about three women who I used to know. Two of them were my friends since childhood and one was a lifeline who found me during some dark days later in life and helped me find my way out. Before any of the events that unfolded in recent years, I never could have imagined a day when I wouldn’t be speaking to any of them.

Three years ago, I made an Instagram Story about something I was experiencing while I was in Nashville to visit family. Everywhere I went, whether a coffee shop or a public bench, when I sat down anywhere near a white person or group, they would get up and move way. It happened to me so often, and so pointedly, that I couldn’t help but joke about it on my Stories. I don’t remember the “joke” in detail, but knowing me it was probably biting sarcasm laced with a lot of bitterness. This was the catalyst for the dramatic, tearful friendship breakup with two women who have known me since before high school.

I won’t go into the details of how I learned about what and the confrontations that ensued, but what I learned that day was that these women decided, among themselves, that I was a “reverse racist.” Does she hate us because we’re white? is the text exchange between them that made its way to me. I truly couldn’t fathom the fact that these women who have known me forever could be talking with each other behind my back about how racist and angry they think I am, so I decided to ask the instigator of the text a direct question: what are you talking about? She went on to tell me that she felt attacked and unsafe as a white woman, because I am always talking about race. Apparently, talking to your white friends about your experience with the major and minor aggression of racism is in itself a racist, angry, scary thing to do because they feel attacked. The racism I experience is not the problem here. I’m just angry. That was one of the most eye-opening, heart-breaking, and influential conversations of my life. I not only ended the friendship with this person, but with the person who was talking with her about me, instead of, I don’t know, maybe defending me?

For weeks and months after that, in various conversations with my therapist and other friends, I struggled to understand what happened and how I could have been friends with people for years and not know that this was lurking just beneath the surface. Was the friendship ever even real? And, most troubling: is it not possible to have a deep, real friendship across racial lines? Can I ever expect a white person to align their loyalty to me, their friend, over their allegiance to white supremacy? I asked and asked and realized in the end that the answers can’t be applied to everyone in every situation. And, more importantly, I learned that if I start to view my friends by their race and not by who they are in my life, I would be doing pretty much what these two women did to me. But nothing prepared me for the shattering I felt by losing these friendships, even though I knew that they were not people who should ever have been in my life.

That’s what happens when we lose friendships, isn’t it? If the friendship was real, then that person knows you in deeper ways than most. In my case, my friends are the ones who know me more deeply than anyone else. And it is a tectonic shift in your life when that person who once held you and your secrets is now just somebody you once knew. It is a breakup of a major relationship, yet in our culture there’s very little outlet for exorcising that pain. Breakups, it seems, are only real when it’s a romantic relationship. Where are the songs and movies about the end of friendships? And, as I found myself asking a couple of years later: where are the guides for how to recover a friendship that is losing its footing?

Remember the third friendship I mentioned earlier? This is that story, and I am the villain.

Over the course of the previous presidency, I grew more and more mistrustful of white evangelical Christians. I felt like their allegiance with a leader of an angry political movement deeply rooted in racism made them hypocrites and I became personally offended by their insistence that they’re following the teachings of Christ, a famous socialist and advocate for inclusion. It was around this time that my friend fearfully told me that she’d joined a church. After years of searching for a place to belong and a purpose in her life that felt bigger than herself, she had found something and she was nervous to tell me about it because she knew how I felt about that branch of religion. Was I a kind and accepting friend who assured her that my misgivings on the institution would not impact our friendship? No. I was an opinionated, judgmental dick about it. There was no dramatic confrontation. Nobody said this friendship is over. We went a few days without speaking after I picked a fight with her about how I felt that Jesus was being slandered by the people who attend her church. And then a few days became a few weeks. And now they’ve become a couple of years.

I didn’t have the tools for figuring out how to find a way back to a trusting and open friendship so I let us apart. Could I have apologized? Probably, yes, but I didn’t see the point of an apology when the facts of what I was saying were still true to me. What we needed, I think, was the kind of therapy that couples attend when there’s a fundamental disagreement between them but they still want to save the relationship. Why doesn’t this exist for friendships? How is it that our friends are our strongest, most trusted allies and yet when there’s a disagreement it’s normal for us to just stop talking to one another?

There are a lot of questions here and not much insight, but I think they’re questions worth asking ourselves and each other. How can we keep each other close if we aren’t willing to sit down and say I love you but I am struggling with this thing between us and I want to work on it together. Anyway, that’s what I wish I would have done instead of letting my pride write a check that my heart absolutely could not cash.

Something to read

I came across Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close years ago, but it really didn’t resonate with me until recently, when I have been thinking about my own friendships, the ones I mentioned here, yes, but especially the ones I have right now. If you’re the 3 people remaining on this earth who still haven’t read this book, do so soon.

As an aggressive and angry racist, I am currently reading You Sound Like a White Girl: The Case for Rejecting Assimilation. The author is an immigrant woman who came to the States as a young girl and grew up with the silent but impossible-to-ignore demand to assimilate. I know it well, having spent my early years striving to be liked and accepted by people who made my otherness very apparent to me until I became more like them.

That’s all I have for you today. I hope that you are well and that you know how to tell your friends not only that you love them, but also that you’re still thinking about that one thing and want to work it out.