The Female Friends Who Disappear

I know why girlfriends sometimes end things suddenly: I've done it.

One of the things I always thought I’d never write about was my fairly damning history with ending friendships. This tweet reminded me, and I spent all night, well, writing about that thing.

As someone who has a very hard time with social cues, talks a lot and is prone to uncontrollable bursts of Trump impressions—or as a child, Austin Powers impressions—I’ve never had an easy time making friends. I’ve written about that extensively on this Substack. But after a childhood full of being rejected by potential friends, I never imagined that a friend could break up with me.

At least until one day, in seventh grade. As silly as it is to talk about seventh grade when I’m now in my thirties, this one incident probably shaped my attitude about female friendship for decades, if not forever. See, I was part of a tight-knit group of girls. We regularly had sleepovers at my house, entered a talent show together with an a capella Nickelback-inspired song I had written, and had coordinating Halloween costumes which I crafted (seeing a pattern here?) I was, although I didn’t realize it at the time, the queen bee of the friend group. Everything we did was my creation or my idea. And I think over time my friends got sick of being my backup dancers.

I don’t blame them. I am a narcissistic person who is perpetually doing a bit, and at the time I had zero insight into my flaws. I figured if they wanted to come up with ideas, they’d…well, have ideas, and they never seemed to speak up. I got the sense that I was the leader of the group, but I thought they liked it that way.

What I didn’t expect was that they would never tell me they were mad at me, but one day they would concoct an elaborate scheme in which they suddenly voted me off our lunch table, Survivor style, using a code name for me that I didn’t know existed for extra dramatic flair (the code name was about my ass, by the way.) The ceremony started out as a game, and my heart sunk when I slowly realized the entire thing was premeditated to humiliate me. It was cruel, it was demeaning, and it was so traumatizing for everyone involved that several of these girls—now women—have tracked me down to apologize: one with a hand written letter several years later, another on Facebook during college, and another in an email in our late twenties, sent only because she heard about my book being published and was able to track down my professional email address from my author website.

I forgave them—we were kids, after all. But the incident stayed with me in a way I didn’t expect. I continued to make female friends, and some of these friendships were fairly healthy and happy. But I became allergic to the idea of having conflict with friends. My friendships were all or nothing. Either everything was fine, or I was going to disappear.

And as a result, I’ve disappeared many times. It’s been one of my greatest regrets.