So Your Best Friend got Canceled...
A guide for what to do when chickens come home to roost at the farm next door.
I want to start by acknowledging I have been super absent from the substack for the past 6 weeks or so. Things have kind of reached a fever-pitch in my personal and professional life, and it’s hard to not feel like what I’m writing doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the horrors™️.
Recently a person I was good friends with for about a year was exposed for some pretty bad dude behavior. Several very young women came to me and over the course of the past two weeks a single post of this dude at dinner with a friend spiraled into numerous losses culminating in him ghosting the entire internet. It’s as if he never existed. I hate that even now what I’m writing asks more questions than it answers, but it’s what I’m comfortable with at the moment.
It’s complicated, right? Because on the one hand this was someone I was very close friends with, and very publicly. But on the other, I stand with young women who were wronged and feel that they are owed justice. Hell, even I’m owed justice in all of this, but I prefer to just charge it to the game. I thought I knew someone, no one knew that someone, and now I no longer know that someone.
My blood pressure has never been higher, and sleeping gives little return on the investment. As mentioned, creativity has been underwhelming as of late. If I’ve learned anything about how to process this (and please expect a follow-up in six months when the wounds have scabbed over a bit), it’s that healing isn’t linear. That it can all just be sad, actually. Like there is no triumph in someone losing opportunities, at least not really. I would have rather had him be a decent person who didn’t ruin his own life. Why couldn’t he be accountable before it came to this?
All of my memories feel like Baldessari artwork with the dots on the faces. Like if I can just imagine that person didn’t exist maybe I can scrape together some positive feelings for my memories. Maybe when I finally have the energy to drag myself out of bed I won’t associate all of the places (bowling alleys, coffee shops, baseball games) with this person who, like I said, no longer exists. There’s a convenience in already being in mourning, seems like it’s the perfect time to just add to the pile.
Maybe one day I’ll have more to say. I just feel sad. That it’s all a tragedy; a tragedy of potential, a tragedy of broken trust, a real nightmare.
The guide part of this…I don’t know. I guess you have to go through it to go through it. In the words of Michelle Obama, “It is what it is.” Try to mitigate damage and direct your feelings towards the correct people. Try not to lash out or be too flippant when minutiae crops up in the middle of all the pain. Give yourself the grace that the world won’t, that he didn’t.
I don’t know. I promise I’ll be back. We still have to talk about Cowboy Carter, after all.
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