Dead to Me... In the Most Loving Way
My fresh experience with the friendship break-up of a lifetime
You’re dead to me, but not in a mean way. It’s a coping mechanism too cynical for my liking, but it’s a last resort. I’ve tried everything else, and now I try to think of you as philosophically dead, at least the idea of you when you were the most important person to me; the one who provided me with endless meaning and comfort. You’re dead to me, and this is meant with so much love.
Mourning is a messy process, I know all too well, as a therapist and human who’s dealt with loss professionally and personally. Psychiatrist Elisabeth Küber-Ross was the first to describe five stages of grief that we pass through in our post-loss process. These stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, and they should be seen as part of the framework that helps us learn to live with the loss; tools to help us label and normalise what we may be feeling, but (unfortunately) not stops on a linear timeline of grief. Hence the messiness. I’ve been in denial, jumped straight to bargaining, felt extremely down, had little bouts of anger, then I’ve bounced all the way back to denial, only to briefly feel what I thought was acceptance, back to a gruelling sense of depression, and currently I’m in this funny hybrid stage of acceptance, anger, and low moods.
Of course, there’s a particularity to mourning when the lost one is not physiologically dead, but very much around, and the flavour of a best friend brutally breaking it off might be especially sour. Especially when that best friend turns into a very different person than who I used to know. Or was I locked in an illusion? How did you become so heinous? Wait, wow, now I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s backtrack to the first stage of my grief, denial, which was pretty basic, as denials tend to be. I was sure it was simply a spell of cruelty that had come over you, that it was some kind of emotional overwhelm or a protective shield, because big parts of me provoke you, and for most people anger is more bearable and easier to access than sadness.
I was sure it was a phase, and that it’d be a short one, I was convinced you’d tell me, any day now “I’m sorry I accused you of being thoughtless and self-involved; I know that you are none of those things.” I was certain there must have been a misunderstanding, that you had misinterpreted something to suddenly have this antagonising stance.
And so I pushed for contact, over and over, and received more attacks, which didn’t jumpstart the stage of anger, but flung me directly into the bargaining phase, because I then started begging for you to meet with me, so we could talk it through, I mean shouldn’t that be possible, given our long history of being at each other’s sides?
I also started bargaining with my own integrity, wondering if I should give my personality a complete make-over, succumb to the shame, understand the rejection as an attack on all of me, take every aggressive word to heart, “yes you’re right, I’m terrible, I'll do better, I won’t ever fail you, I promise, if you just please tell me you still love me.” And I did apologise, I said “I’m sorry for having hurt and infuriated you.” You stared at me coldly, said thank you, and I responded that the ball was on your court, that I was ready to reignite things once you were. It’s been six months and you haven’t played ball.
There are three more stages typically involved in grief. Depression is what has taken up most space this year. Anger has shown its face, but in short spurts only, because once the door has been opened to sadness, anger just becomes a reminder of the deeper feeling of “blue" imbued with so much more importance. I would go so far as to say I’ve been wallowing in the stage of depression, but it has definitely been interspersed with feelings of acceptance and then sometimes rage and confusion; at you and myself. How was I this blind, putting you so insistingly on a piedestal for decades? How did I not see that I was probably always the one pushing for our friendship? How did you become so aggressive? Why do I deserve this level of hatefullness?
In a podcast I love called ADHD Chatter, I once heard a guest say that she only would cut out a friend if they had hurt or betrayed her with malicious intent. My offence is an Instagram story from April.
That this is the supposed reason for you disowning me, tells me that you’ve been looking for a reason. That there must be many layers of irritation having sedimented over time. You’re a rational man, who reads the printed newspaper every day and judges those who don’t, I’m an emotional woman who avidly consumes pop culture.
Trying to calculate the amount of time I’ve spent trying to get you to understand me through carefully crafted real-life messages plus conversations in my head, and obsessing over the reasons you don’t want to be my friend, I’ve come to the staggering result of 400 hours over 12 months. Though I know these hours will never become worthwhile, I want them to become worth something. This here is me working towards that. Call it post-traumatic growth, call it trying to connect with potential co-mourners, call it an act of defusion, putting all these chaotic thoughts into an essay, I don’t care, as long as it helps mend my broken heart even the slightest.
Something else that helps put the pieces of my shattered self together is hearing people’s perspectives. I’ve been told that you might never have been that into me, a theory which initially felt like a slap in the face, but that I eventually grew quite fond of, because it shifts attention from you rejecting me to the inevitable desillusionment I had coming from blindly considering you my loving saviour.
Then there’s the explanation entailing power as the main factor. I know that you‘ve told folks that you regard me as “not that intelligent”. You’ve warned those you regard as smarter than me, offered the intel that they’re getting into a relationship with someone ditzy. Hearing this awoke my deepest fear of not being good enough for those around me, but then it gave me comfort, because I realised that this might always have been your MO; considering yourself better than me, better than others. I’ve just been too infatuated to truly understand the implications of this trait, too naive to realise that eventually I was doomed to be a victim of arrogance. In fact, you probably have always considered me a suboptimal friend, someone who pulls you back from your extraordinary potential, like Colm felt about Pádraic in the Banshees of Inishiran. Or am I Birdy from Everything I Know About Love, and you saw me committing to an alliance with a rock solid partner – was it threatening that your dumb little supporter focused her energy on someone else?
One thing I’m certain of is this: You take me for granted. You’ve always taken me for granted. You know I will always love you, no matter what you do or say to me. You assume I’m ready to reignite our friendship with the blink of an eye, and I think you’re right.
Perhaps what you need is simply space? In that case, I wish you had just asked me for space, instead of being so violently rejecting.
Somewhere deep in me there still lives a hope that you will resurrect. I hope we’ll be like Fleabag and Claire, or even like Yasmin and Harper, finding common ground and reconciliation after toxic fights and a long dry spell of cold and courteous mutual acknowledgment.
Maybe we need years to pass. Maybe we need to do ayahuasca, or endure a perspective-shifting illness, to truly understand the value of a lifelong witness. Or maybe I need to befriend your ghost and everything it taught me about love and identity. Maybe I need to accept that you, as the do-no-wrong person I had made you out to be, really might be gone forever. Maybe I need to put this childish version of our friendship, of any friendship, to bed. In this way, it would help us all if you could just be dead to me.