Female friendship is complicated. I think anyone that has a friend group or at least one good friend can agree with me. On one hand, friendship is beautiful; they are the people that uplift you when you’re down, laugh with you when you’re happy, cry with you when you’re sad; they’re the people you can depend on the most when you need them. However, those same people can be the ones that put you down the most, and with the switch of a button, they can go from being your best friend to your worst enemy.
I recently went through my messiest friendship breakup that I’ve been through. I’ve struggled to make friends throughout my years in school, and I’d been through a lot of bullying, making it really hard for me to make many friends. It wasn’t until high school where I truly began to make close friends, the closest of them having been my best friend of five years. That friend was the one to turn her back and give me the pleasure of experiencing my messiest friendship breakup.
The only way that I can truly describe how a friendship breakup feels is a punch to the gut. Especially when you become friends with someone, tell them about yourself, get to know them well enough. These same people can be the ones that tear you apart from the inside out. Also, a friendship breakup, I feel, can be the equivalent of a breakup with a partner in a sense. It can feel like a roller coaster of emotions that I like to call the three stages of a friendship breakup. The first stage is pure and utter misery. You feel miserable because you lost someone you thought you trusted, and you feel upset because you couldn’t save the friendship. The second stage is anger. You’re angry because you wonder why the universe decided to take out its rage on you. You’re angry because you wonder what you could’ve done differently and what you possibly could’ve done to deserve this. However, the one feeling I remember — and the most important stage to me — is the third and final stage: relief. The relief that maybe this friendship was not meant to be. Heck, maybe they were never really that good of a friend to begin with.
Going into college, I’ve had the blessing of meeting and becoming friends with some of the most amazing women I know. These are women that lifted me up, women that really cared about me and carried me to my best, who I could truly give the label of friends. That’s where the relief stage of a friendship breakup comes in. I realized that the friends that I’d made were not only so much better for me, but made me feel special and gave me the respect I knew I deserved. I didn’t need to deal with the toxicity, the stress, and the fear of the breakup anymore, because I knew exactly who had my back.
Now I’m not going to sit here and say that going through these three stages is easy. It’s actually hard, and I personally think it should be comparable to an actual breakup in a relationship. However, what going through these stages and my messy friendship breakup made me realize is that you not only figure out who truly are your friends and who aren’t, but you realize that you’re the one that comes out on top. In fact, the people who ended things have absolutely no idea what they’re missing out on! Yes, it’s hard. Yes, it’s difficult to navigate things and get back on course afterwards. But what a friendship breakup does give you is the room to breathe and to be there for the people that truly care and love you as you are.