Divorcing a Friend

As we grow and evolve, some tethers to the past must be cut

Battling a head cold, I have no bandwidth to complete the post I was writing this week. So instead, I am expanding my viral note about severing a friendship. If you’re one of the 1,100 people who have liked that note, feel free to go ahead and “like” this right away! A like is totally free to you, and invaluable to me.

Three years ago this week, I severed a 25-year friendship. She had been my closest friend. We had lunched every Friday for over a decade, workshopped each other’s poems, had weekends away at poetry festivals, sharing bedrooms and sometimes beds. We’d been drunk together more times than I’ve cooked my second husband hot dinners. I knew secrets she hadn’t even shared with hers. But our friendship had become toxic.

She’d saved me in my darkest hour—offered sanctuary when I was frankly a nightmare to have around. I owed her everything. How could I possibly walk away?

But since her bulimia crisis ten years before, every time we met, I felt I was taking collateral damage. Comments about my weight, my clothes. I’d sidestep, she’d press. I told her more than once, PLEASE don’t comment on my appearance or diet. She knew that my battles with weight were due to autoimmune hypothyroidism. A stupidly low metabolism, and a resting heart rate of 38.

I had compassion for her struggles, her own body demons, which made her as obsessed with my weight as she was with her own (she preferred me larger; it soothed her). But I didn’t appreciate her denial of my reality. When you’re four stone over your average, “You’re not overweight” isn’t kind, it’s annoying. I don’t want to be provoked (as I was once) into shouting, “I’m OBESE BY BMI!” I don’t want to be pressed into joining her in having a dessert — go on, go on, shall we, let’s, look, they’re delicious! —only for her, the minute she put her spoon down, to excuse herself to the toilet, where she would (I discovered) throw hers up, leaving me to process mine onto my thighs.

Three years ago today, after months of avoiding her, I risked a lunch date. She asked me what I was wearing to a wedding and why hadn’t I bought it yet. “What do you mean you’re trying to lose another dress size? You’re not fat!” She’d just told me that she was fat, and she was two stone lighter. We’re the same height. No, I am not “big boned.” I explained, again, about my thyroid disorder.

“Oh, someone I know takes thyroxine for that, you should try it!”

The medication I’d been taking for over two decades. Which I had, no question, told her before.

I woke the next day with vertigo and a crushing headache. Couldn’t work for days. Those toxins from friendships gone sour are very real.

They say friendships are for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. Our season was over.

I wrote her a long explanatory email. Because ghosting is cruel. And to be honest, for the last ten years, I’d been a little dishonest. I’d been keeping her at arm’s length, delaying any request for coffee or a catch-up for weeks, sometimes months. It was time to come clean.

The tone was compassionate, but firm. I explained all the ways that our friendship (and our last conversation) had been painful for me. All the ways we had grown apart. She meant enough to me — or our history did — that she deserved to know why I was cutting her out of my life. Because I’ve been the dumpee before. I know how it stings. It’s even worse, if they cut you off, with no right to reply.

She replied, agreeing, and feeling mortified. And this was our final exchange.

I want to clarify a point or two. The friendship had become “toxic,” but I wouldn’t put that label on my friend. She wasn’t harming me on purpose. She was simply deep in her own demons and unable to control how they manifested between us. I spent many years in dysfunction. For a very long time, I was the nightmare friend. She was never as awful to be with as I was back then. When she was the only one who stuck by my side.

When we met, co-teaching a poetry course, we were both in the same kind of darkness. I might even say that she was the more functional one. But neither of us functioned well without wine: we bitched and drank, we drank and bitched. We were deeply unhappy, and wine was our drug of choice.

My drinking eased off in the early 2000s. Then my body assisted: first an allergy to red wine, then to white. Gradually, as I’ve tuned up the vehicle of my meat suit, it has told me with ever greater precision that alcohol is poison. There’s very little I can drink these days without a physical backlash. I’m abstemious by design now, and my friend? Her progress, when I broke from that bond, stretched as far as Dry Januaries.

The happier I got the less happy about it she seemed. Five years into my second marriage, she would say this was our “honeymoon period” and predicted it would soon go sour (we’re still together). Then in 2007, I discovered EFT tapping and my journey to the light began in earnest. By 2023, my meditation practice had reached the point that I conversed with spiritual guides; I was deeply read in peer-reviewed consciousness research. And she’d offer me potted advice from “Psychologies” magazine. We weren’t on the same wavelength. At all.

And this is the concept I want to highlight: wavelength. It’s a saying, yes, but like all of our language, it gives us a clue to what’s real. Humans are amazingly good at coding reality into words. Not being on someone’s wavelength isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a real thing, too.

We are these complex arrangements of electrical charge, and every part of our being is (at the quantum level) simultaneously particle and waveform. As we clear our old traumas, we shift our dominant wavelength and frequency. And the energy of people we were close to before, which was once coherent with ours — would match and magnify ours — now runs interference. It doesn’t do us any good.

The cost of personal growth is losing connection with those who are stuck (more or less) where you used to be. Where once we slotted in to dysfunction, now there’s a widening gap. Recognising that, and letting go, is good.

I realised when I let her go that what I was clinging to — the sense of a really close friendship — hadn’t actually existed for a decade. I’d kept hoping it might re-emerge. But I was kidding myself. Every day that I tapped and meditated my old pain away, I was killing that friendship. Healed trauma by healed trauma, with every extra ounce of peace I found inside myself, our friendship died.

And that’s okay.