Missing My Backbone

On losing friends and maybe myself a little too

By: Stella Mehlhoff

Friends are the backbones of our lives. They dictate how we spend our free time and how we feel when we’re falling asleep. They stand with us or scold us when we make mistakes. They guide the places we live, the jokes we find funny, the ambitions we savor, the narratives we imagine for ourselves, and even what we think we can accomplish. They recommend our favorite books, movies, and music, dissect our fears, and give witness to our victories. They are our physical contacts and our emotional attendants, reminding us to fasten our seatbelts before a night out or picking up the pieces when we don’t listen. They form our routines: we change our daily rhythms just to have lunch with them or walk them to class. We are obsessed with our friends, because we belong to them, and because they help us hold onto life’s currents. Or at least they do all those things for me.

So when we sit by the fountain at the mall, sipping our quintessential Orange Juliuses, it’s alarming that we don’t have anything to say to each other. We used to spend countless afternoons this way, jammed into dressing rooms and trying on clothes we couldn’t afford, using shopping as an excuse to prolong being in each other’s presence. I’d collapse into my bed at the end of the day, exhausted, cheeks flushed from the excitement of our mutual enjoyment. Now it feels like an exercise in accepting the end of an era, a familiar groove we are running once more in our minds for old time’s sake. Of course, I’ve always known friends “grow apart,” or whichever nice term we want to use, but I didn’t really think that’d happen to us. And it hurts, really hurts, to go home and blink at the ceiling, knowing our bond is a memory. 

The hardest part about friendship breakups, though, isn’t losing a person in your life—it’s the ambiguous, lonely convention we have for the process. With a romantic relationship, there’s a formula. It isn’t easy, but you usually know when it’s over. Someone calls it off, you grieve, and you move on. We know what that’s supposed to feel like because we’ve seen and heard it. It’s the central theme of hundreds of movies and the emotional heft of just as many albums. It’s something we can use as an excuse for a bad day: “Sorry, just going through a bad breakup.” But friendships are rarely ended as cleanly or taken as seriously. 

It’s like what happened with us. It wasn’t a sudden blowup of long-collected resentment. It was that we started waiting for the other person to text first and got sick of the roles we were playing in each other’s lives. I didn’t want to be the archetype you expected of me anymore. And I think I got what I wanted. I dare to hope that the people I’m friends with now don’t want an unchanging, uncomplicated version of me. But while these new relationships have allowed me to expand my identity, by losing you, I’ve lost good parts of myself too. I will never again be the girl who knew how to talk you out of an anxiety attack or who choreographed elaborate interpretive dances in your living room. I won’t be sixteen and free with you, laying on each other in the grass—and as frivolous as that may sound, this grief is just as poignant as if you’d been my lover. 

For anyone else who is letting go of a major friendship, I hope you give yourself permission to acknowledge the pivotal nature of the loss you are experiencing. If you’re like me and treating it a little like the end of a romantic relationship helps, I recommend “I Lost a Friend” by FINNEAS and maybe a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. It sucks, but we might have to chart our own roadmaps for overcoming this universal experience.