The People Who Stay

I’ve never been particularly good at having a big group of friends.

For a long time, I thought maybe that said something about me. Other women seemed to have these huge circles of friends who had known each other forever, traveled together, celebrated everything together, and somehow maintained a group chat with seventeen active participants without anyone committing a felony. Meanwhile, I have pretty consistently moved through life with two people. In high school, I had my two. In college, I had my two. In young adulthood, I had my two. The names changed as life changed, people grew apart, and we all became different versions of ourselves, but the pattern remained. I’ve always been much better at loving a few people very deeply than belonging to a crowd.

Then I found the women I call my soulmates and future lesbian wives, and somewhere along the way they became home to me. Alex and Mae have seen versions of me that most people never will. They have known me when things were wonderful and when they were very much not. They have watched me succeed, fuck up, fall apart, put myself back together, make good decisions, make terrible ones, and occasionally need somebody to lovingly ask what the actual fuck I was doing. They know the difference between supporting me and agreeing with me, and I think that distinction has completely changed the way I understand friendship.

Because anyone can love the easy version of you.

It is incredibly easy to be someone’s friend when life is rainbows and sunshine. It’s easy when everybody is laughing, careers are going well, books are selling, posts are getting shared, and being associated with each other feels good. It’s easy when you can help each other, promote each other, introduce each other to people, trade opportunities, and generally make each other’s lives better. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that. I love celebrating my friends. I want their books to explode. I want their dreams to happen. I will scream about their accomplishments until somebody takes my phone away.

But I’ve learned that friendship built entirely in sunshine can be very difficult to distinguish from convenience until it starts raining.

I’ve found that kind of friendship in the book world too. I’ve found people who seemed genuinely happy to know me when things were good, when I was useful, when the friendship was fun, or when there was something mutually beneficial about being in each other’s orbit. I believed some of those relationships were much deeper than they apparently were. Then life got ugly, because life occasionally does that without bothering to check whether it fits into your content calendar, and I discovered how quickly some people can stop seeing you as a friend once you become complicated.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not interested in pretending I’ve always been the wounded party in every relationship I’ve ever had. I haven’t. I have fucked up. I have hurt people. I have reacted badly when I was overwhelmed. I’ve said things I shouldn’t have said and handled situations in ways I later wished I could redo. There have been times when I’ve had to sit with the deeply uncomfortable realization that regardless of everything else happening in my life, I was wrong about something and needed to make it right.

I actually think being able to say that matters.

There was a period of my life when I was in one of the darkest places I had been in for a very long time. My life outside the internet was messy and painful, I wasn’t functioning like the best version of myself, and then I made mistakes on top of it. I remember reaching a point where I knew I needed to fix things. I needed to apologize. I needed to figure out what accountability looked like when I barely knew how to handle everything else happening around me. I thought I had people I could turn to and say, “I fucked this up. I know I did. I don’t know how to fix it yet, and I need help figuring out how.”

Finding out that I didn’t hurt more than the original mistake did.

Not because I expected anyone to tell me I was right. I wasn’t asking for that. I wasn’t asking anyone to excuse bad behavior because I was struggling, and I don’t believe being in a terrible place gives us permission to hurt other people. Explanation and excuse are not the same thing. Sometimes understanding why you behaved badly is necessary precisely because you need to make sure you don’t do it again.

What I needed was the kind of friendship I know now: someone willing to say, “Yeah, you fucked up. Now let’s figure out what you do about it.”

Instead, I learned how quickly friendship can disappear when you are no longer the bright, bubbly, useful version of yourself someone preferred. Worse, I learned how quickly everything that came with the friendship can disappear too. The privacy. The trust. The assumption that things shared during vulnerable moments would remain between the people who shared them. Suddenly things you said because you believed you were safe can become ammunition after the relationship ends.

That part has stayed with me.

There is something uniquely painful about having a vulnerability weaponized by someone who only knows where to aim because you once trusted her enough to show her the wound. Maybe when you originally told her, she held it with genuine care. I would like to believe that is true in most cases. But when a friendship ends badly, sometimes people begin treating everything they learned during that friendship as evidence they are now entitled to use.

I don’t think ending a friendship should retroactively revoke confidentiality.

There are people who are no longer part of my life whose secrets will still die with me. There are things I know about people I don’t particularly like anymore that I would never repeat, because they told me those things when we loved each other. The relationship changing doesn’t change the conditions under which they trusted me. I can be angry with someone and still recognize that her trauma is not mine to distribute. I can decide I never want to speak to her again without handing pieces of her private life to anyone willing to listen.

That shouldn’t be extraordinary. It should be the bare minimum.

Unfortunately, the book world can make broken friendships particularly ugly because very little stays between two people once a social circle gets involved. Suddenly there are sides. There are group chats. People who have never met you know exactly what kind of person you are because they heard someone else’s version of something that happened. People you have never spoken to block you, dislike you, or treat you strangely at events. You can walk into a space and feel that bizarre shift in the room where you realize everyone has apparently attended a meeting about you that you weren’t invited to.

Nothing transports me back to high school quite like being a grown woman and realizing there is apparently still a table where you are not allowed to sit.

Maybe that sounds dramatic until you’ve experienced it. Authors have. Readers have. Influencers have. Bloggers have. Fanfiction writers have. I have heard enough stories from enough corners of the book community to know this isn’t unique to any particular group. Wherever humans gather, apparently we eventually reinvent the cafeteria.

What makes it worse now is that the cafeteria has Wi-Fi.

A friendship ending badly used to mean people around you might hear about it. Now it can become content. Someone posts something vague. Someone else knows what they’re talking about and adds a little more. Screenshots start circulating. A person with no involvement asks for the tea. Another person makes a post about it. Before long, strangers are discussing a human being’s life like they’re covering breaking news, and everybody wants to be the person who knew first.

I hate what that has done to us.

I hate how quickly curiosity disguises itself as accountability. I hate how easily “I want to understand what happened” becomes “I am entitled to every private detail necessary to satisfy me.” I hate watching people decide guilt or innocence based on whichever post reached them first. I hate the idea that a screenshot can somehow contain the entire history of a relationship, or that one person’s experience automatically gives thousands of strangers enough information to understand another person completely.

There are absolutely situations where public accountability matters. There are dangerous behaviors that should be discussed. There are people who use silence and the fear of “causing drama” to avoid accountability, and I am not advocating for that either. Sometimes speaking publicly protects other people. Sometimes receipts genuinely matter.

But accountability and spectacle are not interchangeable. There has to be a line somewhere, and I think we have gotten terrifyingly comfortable crossing it.

I have watched people demand information that would have been unthinkably private before social media convinced us we were entitled to constant access to one another. I have seen people questioned about their health because someone decided they didn’t “look sick” enough. I have seen demands for diagnoses, documentation, private conversations, family information, and other deeply personal evidence because strangers decided someone needed to prove herself to the internet. I have even seen situations go so far that people tried to contact medical providers in an attempt to verify someone else’s health information.

At what point did we decide that was normal?

You do not become entitled to someone’s medical history because you don’t believe her. You do not become entitled to someone’s trauma because you’re curious about an argument. You do not become entitled to every ugly detail of a person’s life because someone made a post about her. Strangers on the internet are not a jury, and another human being’s private life is not discovery material.

There is also something particularly painful about watching this behavior come from people who build their public identities around kindness, acceptance, mental health, women supporting women, love, light, and found family. I don’t say that because I think people who talk about kindness are required to tolerate everything anyone ever does. They aren’t. Boundaries matter. Friendships can become unhealthy. Some relationships need to end. Nobody owes another person unlimited access to them in the name of being nice.

But you can leave without trying to destroy someone on your way out.

You can decide that a friendship is no longer healthy for you without recruiting everyone you know to hate the other person. You can say, “I was hurt by this and I don’t want this relationship anymore,” without emptying the vault of everything she ever told you in confidence. You can hold someone accountable for something she actually did without turning every mistake she has ever made into proof that she has always secretly been terrible.

Most importantly, you can acknowledge that someone hurt you without requiring the entire world to hurt her back.

Maybe this contradiction bothers me so much because of the stories we all claim to love. We read and write books about deeply imperfect people constantly. Our characters fuck up spectacularly. They hurt each other. They misunderstand each other. They carry trauma into relationships and make terrible decisions because of it. They apologize. They learn. They grow. We write hundreds of pages about redemption, second chances, forgiveness, friendship, and found family, and readers underline the passages about grace.

Then an actual person fucks up and sometimes we seem completely uninterested in any of those things.

Real growth is nowhere near as satisfying as a fictional redemption arc. It doesn’t happen in three chapters. The apology might be awkward. The person might not immediately understand everything she did wrong. She may have to apologize more than once. The person she hurt may never forgive her, and that is their right. Reconciliation is not always possible or even healthy.

But if we genuinely believe people can grow, there has to be some space between “you did nothing wrong” and “you are permanently defined by the worst thing you ever did.”

That space is where my closest friendships live.

The people I trust most are not the people who believe I am always right. God, that would be disastrous. I need friends who will tell me when I’m being an asshole. I need someone willing to tell me to put my phone down, sleep on it, apologize, rethink something, or admit that I handled a situation badly. I don’t want unconditional agreement masquerading as friendship.

What I want is safe accountability.

I want to know that I can walk into the room and admit that I fucked something up without wondering whether the most painful things I have ever shared will be forwarded to a group chat by dinner. I want friends who can be disappointed in me without becoming dangerous to me. I want people who will hold me accountable without humiliating me, because humiliation and accountability are not the same thing.

The best way I can explain it is this: when someone you love is in a dark place, sometimes she needs a flashlight and sometimes what people give her is a spotlight.

A flashlight says, “I can see that you’re lost. This isn’t okay. Let’s figure out how you get out of here.”

A spotlight says, “Everybody look at her.”

I know which one helped me become a better person. It wasn’t the spotlight.

The women who stayed beside me didn’t excuse everything I did because they loved me. They gave me somewhere safe enough to be honest about the ugly parts. They let me say I was wrong without making the admission itself dangerous. They helped me work through what happened, figure out what I needed to fix, accept the things I couldn’t fix, and become more aware of myself so I could do better going forward.

They also let me be a person whose life wasn't always inspirational. That matters more than I can explain.

We talk so much about supporting mental health until someone’s struggle stops looking like a motivational graphic. Sometimes people struggling aren't pleasant. Sometimes they're withdrawn. Sometimes they're angry. Sometimes they communicate badly. Sometimes they make mistakes. Again, none of that means other people are obligated to accept harmful behavior. But I think there is a profound difference between having boundaries with someone who is struggling and punishing her for failing to struggle prettily.

I have been bright and bubbly. I have also been the person standing in the dark saying, “I don't know what the fuck I'm doing right now.”

The people who loved both versions are the people I keep close. Maybe that is why my circle is still small.

I used to wonder whether I should have more friends in this industry. Maybe after this many years I should know everybody, be in all the group chats, have a giant author circle, and walk into every event with twenty people waiting for me. I don't really want that anymore.

I have my little nest.

I have Alex and Mae. I have people who have stood beside me long enough that I know their love isn't dependent on my usefulness to them. They have seen me succeed without needing something from my success. They have seen me struggle without treating my struggle as an inconvenience. They have seen me be wrong without deciding wrong was the only thing I had ever been. They have given me grace when I needed grace and a reality check when I needed that instead.

More importantly, they've made me want to be that kind of friend in return.

If one of my people comes to me tomorrow and tells me she fucked up, I'm not going to tell her it was fine if it wasn't. I'm going to tell her the truth. I'm going to help her figure out whether she owes someone an apology and what she needs to change. If she's hurt someone, I'm not going to pretend the other person's pain doesn't matter simply because I love her.

But I'm also not going to drag her wounds into the town square. I'm going to turn on the flashlight.

I don't think the book world is ever going to become one enormous supportive family. Honestly, I'm not sure it ever was. There will always be cliques, broken friendships, jealousy, competition, misunderstandings, bad behavior, and people who simply don't like each other. We're human. Put enough humans in one room and eventually somebody is going to start a group chat about somebody else.

I just wish we remembered the humans a little more often.

We are an industry built around stories. We spend our lives writing, reading, reviewing, recommending, and obsessing over characters who desperately want to be understood. We love found family because there is something beautiful about the idea that a person can finally find people who see all of them and stay.

Maybe we could practice a little more of that when the characters are real.

Not blind loyalty. Not silence when someone is genuinely causing harm. Not forgiveness without accountability and certainly not the idea that everyone deserves continued access to us simply because they once had it.

Just grace.

Privacy.

Context.

The humility to admit that hearing one side of something does not make us omniscient. The maturity to end a friendship without turning it into a public execution. The understanding that sometimes a person can do something wrong without being everything wrong. And maybe a willingness to stop treating someone else's darkest moment as the most interesting thing that happened on the internet that day.

I don't need a giant table anymore. I don't need everyone in the room to like me, and I definitely don't need to contort myself into someone everyone would want sitting beside them. I'm happy in my little nest with the people who have shown me what friendship looks like when life stops being useful and pretty.

They're the people who stayed. They're also the people who taught me that real friendship isn't promising to believe I'm always right. It's promising that when I'm wrong, you'll still care whether I find my way back. And if I ever have to choose between a room full of people applauding me and two people willing to sit beside me in the dark with a flashlight, I'll take my two every fucking time.

xoxo,
Lila