The pain and blessing of friendship breakup

I went viral completely by accident this week. One morning, I woke up with it on my heart to share more about the most painful friendship breakup I experienced at an already painful time in my life. Honestly, I don’t know why it came up. It has been 6 years since this happened, and so much more life has happened since then. But it stays with you - I think mostly because there are still so many times where something happens that my nervous system tells me I should share a thing with my best friend, until I realize that I don’t have that best friend any longer. It’s a grieving process for a person who is still alive, but no longer there for you, and we are simply not equipped with the tools to handle it.

I shared on Twitter because I felt like it’s something we don’t discuss as a culture. We have made space for more people to share about romantic heartbreak, but friends can break our hearts too. The responses have been overwhelming, heartbreaking, and validating. People have shared literally thousands of stories in response over the last couple of days of the trauma and the heartbreak that they have experienced as friendships end. I knew this was an unspoken undercurrent of life, but I truly had no idea just how much. In writing this blog post, I want to expound a bit on my story, and also talk about what helped me from the therapy that I was pushed into afterwards to cope with it all.

Below is the story I shared on Twitter:

“So, we talk a bit about friendship breakups, but not enough. One of the most painful things that ever happened to me in my LIFE was when my best friend of 20 years completely ghosted me. Less than 2 weeks after I served as the maid of honor in her wedding.

We met in 5th grade. We'd been friends since. In high school, I moved away, and we were so close that our families discussed actually letting me stay and live with her fam so I could finish high school. We both went to college in Atlanta.

I LOVED her to death. She got pregnant the year after college graduation, and I planned her baby shower from London, calling in favors and even having my mother drive in-state to cook and help since I could not afford to fly back for it.

I am her son's godmother. I routinely flew back to Atlanta (while broke and in school) just to spend time with my godson and with her. She called me the week that she was getting married (it was a last min wedding) and asked me to come be her maid of honor. And I didn't hesitate.

Now, to add color to this - I was going through the worst break up of my life (at the time). My ex and I lived together, were under contract to buy a house together, and were planning to get married - when I found out he was lying about his life and money and was an alcoholic.

I had to put him out the house and come up with his portion of the money to buy the house, or I would forfeit the earnest money that I had already paid - which was more than $30k. I was SO stressed out, just a crying wreck all the time. I still came to her wedding for her.

A week after the wedding, about 2 weeks before my house closing, she calls me crying and asking for money. She said she was facing eviction (which she never told me before even though I'm a lawyer and could have helped). She told me she would pay me back within 3 days.

I told her I HAD to get my money back to close on my house because everything was falling on me alone now. She told me she took a 401k drawdown and it was on the way. I gave her the money (a few thousand dollars) because I couldn't bear to think of my godson on the streets.

That was the last time I had a real conversation with my best friend. She stopped answering calls after that. Her husband paid me back part of the money, the rest is still owed today. That was in 2018. In 2020, she texted me an apology. In 2021, I saw her for about 30 min.

That was it. That was the end of my friendship with my best friend of 20 years. Me loaning her much-needed money that I really didn't have because I loved her and her son, and her subsequently ghosting me so as to not pay me back. It hurt so bad at the time.

Honestly, the breakup of my relationship paled in comparison. I had been with him 2 years. I had been with her for life. I couldn't BELIEVE she would do that to me, and just cut me out like that. The money was one thing, but the ghosting. Whew. I spent TIME in therapy on this.

I felt for years like I could never trust anyone again. No one had my back. The only people I should ever deal with had to be related to me, and even still. I was a paranoid and depressed wreck.

I also battled that natural inclination I have to help people because I viewed people as fundamentally bad, takers, who would never do for me in return (which, tbh, many people are). Like...this friendship breakup had my mind WARPED. I hate thinking of it till today.

And as I think about all the bad things people have done to me in my life, that one hurts the worst, still. My mother has always encouraged me to forgive her and think of her point of view (likely embarrassment at not being able to pay me back). I try. Truly.

I think I've mostly gotten to a place of forgiveness. Her father passed away last year, and I called her to check on her multiple times and also contributed to the go-fund-me for his funeral expenses. I genuinely felt for her.

But I do still mourn that closeness we had, or that I thought we had. That lifelong friendship that I assumed would be there. And the person that I was who just gave and trusted and loved and wasn't so damn jaded before that period in my life.

I will say that since then, "no" has become deeply embedded in my DNA. And I say it frequently. I'm sure that lesson had saved me from other, potentially harder ones. But yea, moral of the story is, those friendship breakups can be worse than romantic ones.

I highly recommend therapy and grace for YOURSELF first and foremost, and then for other people. We are all flawed and learning as we go. And everything happens in divine order, just as it should. ❤️❤️

I'll add that I have recently been struggling a LOT with guilt. Esp. since her father passed. I really want to there for my godson and I feel guilty that I've spent 0 time with him since this happened. It's not his fault, and I'm his godmother. I don't know how to handle that.

A lot of folks are asking, so YES, I got my house and I don't know what the people who wronged me got except gone from my life too.

Amendment: 1 IMPORTANT thing: I'm seeing several replies saying this would drive you to su*cide. PLEASE, NO. Thank God that things never got there for me. If you are going thru it & feel this way in the least, please open up to someone you can still trust. Don't let them take your life too.”

A bit more color here: when my former best friend reached out to me to apologize a couple of years later, I did respond and say thank you and let her know I wished her the best. The next year, I saw her very briefly. I was in our hometown, and I was coincidentally in the neighborhood where her parents lived. I decided to drop by and say hello to her mother - her mother had been like a mother to me growing up, had done SO much for me when my family could not afford to do it, and I loved/missed her. My heart nearly lept out of my chest when I knocked on the door and my best friend answered it. I had no idea she was living with her parents again. What really almost sent me into a tailspin was that she was holding a baby (the cutest, fattest baby) that I didn’t even know existed. She and her husband had had another child and I had no idea. That hurt me so much, to know that our lives were so separate and apart by then that she had created another life and I didn’t even know. I don’t even remember what we talked about in that time, but it was a very short reunion, because I had an appointment to get to. I just remember feeling so detached from reality in that moment and the rest of the day. The appointment I was going to was a photoshoot that I had scheduled so I could have collateral for what was the biggest upcoming announcement of my life - I had sold my first startup to Diddy. That circumstance also compounded the feeling, because this was a major life milestone that I couldn’t share with her.

We spoke again via text a few times after that, but never addressed what had happened in 2018. There is no closeness between us, and as much as I have forgiven and healed, to be honest, I don’t think the dull ache of missing who I considered my soulmate for decades will ever go away. That ache gets worse when I remind myself that she let go of our relationship over a couple thousand dollars, and potentially the shame around it - because she should never have ever had shame with me, her sister.

The double whammy of breaking up with her and my boyfriend overwhelmed me. Essentially, just a few weeks before closing on our home we were purchasing together, I found out that he had NONE of the money he was supposed to contribute towards the house, which should have been about $30k. He confessed to me that he had spent the money on “Uber, going out to eat, and the strip club” (big fucking yikes). Not going to lie, I slapped the shit out of him and packed all his things. Another post for another day on that.

But the therapy sessions were long and a mixture of tears and numbness for a long time. My ability to trust was shattered. First, I spent time working through the guilt and the self-doubt. I had to understand that I wasn’t to blame for others’ bad actions, even if they had their own demons that led to that behavior. I then had to work on forgiveness and understanding. Finally, I had to be realistic about the things that I missed or glossed over in my need to love, help, and be loyal. There are always signs. The line between protecting yourself and loving your people can be very fine, and I have not perfected it at all, but these experiences helped to build my muscle in that department.

The comments and responses to my Twitter thread made me so emotional to read. People’s experiences, some even more heinous and hurtful than mine, underscored something that I have come to truly understand in my 30s; we are all flawed, we are all hurting in some way, and inevitably, it is the people who are closest to us who have the greatest ability to hurt us. But that doesn’t mean don’t love. It doesn’t mean don’t trust. My community and the love of the my friends and family have brought me through so many storms, including the one described above. We are all just figuring this shit out!!! Give yourself grace and love, and don’t be afraid to give others grace and love again eventually as well.

Love!

Khadijah