(you're probably not my target audience)
I could come on here and make some big apology. I could cry and explain how I never meant to hurt you. But that would be fake, that would be cheap, and that would quite honestly be a lie. Something I've been doing too much of, lately.
You see, the thing is, I got a little lost. High school had me finding a clique, and watching that clique dissolve the next year. Then high school disappeared, and I found myself reaching out to the internet for attention and friendship.
Bad idea.
You see, my former friends aren't bad people. They're actually incredibly nice. The problem is, we just weren't meant to be friends.
It all had to do with the Queen Bee, honestly. The queen bee wasn't a bad person necessarily. They just really loved power and hated when people disagreed with them. The internet is a world where if you don't agree with everyone, you're liable to be attacked. That extended to friendships.
So I ended up in that world. At first I found it a bit strange. Why was everyone trying to make me agree with them? It was so aggressive, so cruel. At the same time, I started counting my likes. I started judging myself based on how many people agreed with me.
I had fallen into the same trap.
So it should come as no surprise that I started acting badly. I had become the very thing I had despised: treating my word like a god's, criticizing those who disagreed, and hating the one person who disagreed with me on everything, and got all my friends to agree with them.
I said kind things to my friends' faces, then cruel things behind their backs. My friends who were beginner artists? I mocked their artwork in my DMs. I created a web of lies, telling my friends that they're great and amazing, and complaining about them to people they'd never talk to.
I thought it was okay to leak direct messages. And sure, maybe it's okay when people are hurting you. But when your conversations start to look like the four-way-call scene from Mean Girls, there's something wrong.
Truth is, I am the reason that things went badly with my friends. I mean, I'm not the one who decided to befriend and defend a bully who publicly harassed a friend. But I didn't handle the fallout very well, either.
I acted like I was above my friends, as if not being above them meant I was below them. I made decisions without consulting them. I went behind their backs, manipulating each person into telling their story, trying to get people to side with me as I felt myself sinking.
But of course I sank. I was never cut out to be friends with them.
My former friends needed people who didn't care about likes, who didn't care about what other people thought. They needed people with authentic interests. They needed people whose first reaction to a good thought wouldn't be "if you posted it in two weeks at this time, you could get a lot of likes."
I'm not there yet.
The thing about friends is that sometimes you have to grow without them. I hope they grow into something amazing, and I'll be cheering them on from the sidelines.
