I Broke Up With My Best Friend Over A Natural Hair Tweet

Hey y’all,

So I did something exciting a few days ago….

I started a YouTube channel!

I’ve been producing Carefree Mag as an indie publication for the past four years now (whoa). I’ll always love sharing stories from Black women around the globe, but I wanted to start a channel where I could take allllllll the space to tell my stories—specifically on travel and navigating life as a Black woman in her 30s. I’m sure you’re thinking, why don’t you just publish your stories in Carefree? While I have done so in the past and will continue to in the future, this storyletter isn’t about me. Y’all get little tidbits about me here in the intro, but I’d rather let the writers and their stories shine.

Now, these two spaces won’t be completely separate! I’ll promote Carefree through this new channel by expanding the dialogue from some of the topics brought on from our popular stories (hopefully including live chats with some of our authors), and I’ll be sharing videos I think are interesting here in the newsletter. Here is the latest one:

Like, comment, subscribe, and allat!

This Week’s Story

Friendship breakups hit different. Some even consider them to be worse than romantic breakups. And are! Sometimes the friendship was just for a season, and so you see it coming when the slow fade begins. But what if it blows up out of nowhere? Oh, and it was your fault? In this week’s story, writer Marlo Lee shares with us how she lost one of her best friends and kinda regrets it.

Take care,

Anayo Awuzie
EIC of Carefree Magazine

I Broke Up With My Best Friend. I Was The Problem.

by Marlo Lee

How do you mourn the loss of a relationship with a friend when you’re the reason the relationship ended? In January 2024, that was the question that ran through my mind (along with “Why did I do that?” and “Should I send my apology now or later?”) as I navigated losing a friend I once considered my sister. I won’t get into the details of the fight, but our relationship ended with me blocking her on everything, including Cash App (yeah, I was that mad). When I felt dismissed in our last argument, the lack of respect for my feelings confirmed that we were no longer aligned. And just like that, I  lost someone I spent most of my life with so far.

My ex-friend and I first met in a fifth-grade math class. We’re both from a small suburb in Maryland, where we were both one of few Black kids and even fewer Black girls. The other Black girls in that class, including my ex-friend and I, stuck together for a few years after that initial meeting in the fifth grade. And as many childhood friendships do, the group started to go our separate ways. Whether drama had pushed us apart or a subtle drifting apart, my ex-friend and I were the only ones left from the original group. I thought we’d be friends forever. Our memories and the bond we’d created would sustain us, and we wouldn’t have any problems—ever. We spoke every day, all day n X, formerly Twitter, DMs. It was our favorite form of communication. Sending each other the Black Twitter controversy of the day, news, and threads about information we thought would interest the other was the highlight of my day. Truthfully, towards the end of our relationship, responding to her tweets started to feel like a homework assignment, but I continued like nothing was wrong. I wanted to stay close to her because some days she was the only person I’d speak to all day. 

However, in the last months of our friendship, we had a couple of small fights and disagreements. The underlying theme was the same each time: She hurt my feelings, and when I confronted her about it, she accused me of being too sensitive. I now acknowledge that my low self-worth made it easy for me to abandon myself time and time again, but the constant dismissal of my feelings and wants didn’t feel great. I didn’t trust my intuition and my fear of stepping out of my comfort zone and ending such a long relationship kept me stuck. 

The last time I confronted her about a comment she made, I didn't know it would be the final time. She sent me a tweet about a woman commenting how a lot of Black men do not like it when Black women wear their natural hair. She commented underneath it that she was so glad her father instilled in her and her sisters the notion that type 4 hair was beautiful. At first, all I did was like the message. She tended to brag about her life to me. But this didn’t register as bragging until it did.

I came back to this message about 45 minutes later, and this weird uncomfortable feeling overcame me. I sensed an underlying motive as to why she sent me that tweet with that message. I messaged her back saying that it was insensitive to say what she did to me because I did not grow up embracing my natural hair. My parents decided to relax my hair when I was around 6 or 7 until the summer before I started college at Howard University. After that first year there, I decided to do the Big Chop. When she told me she had grown up “loving” her natural hair longer I felt like she was trying to flex on me. I wanted to stand up for myself, so I did. She accused me of projecting, I stood my ground and wanted her to listen to my feelings. In the end, we didn’t reach an understanding and left things tense and awkward.

I left that conversation feeling disrespected, small, and subservient. In the following days after the argument, I researched narcissistic tendencies. What I found in Quora responses and Reddit threads were a lot of the descriptors that sounded like the relationship I had just ended. One of the last things I remember texting my friend was that I loved her and respected her and in the next moment, I was blocking her on any social media platform I could think of. In my mind, her constant lack of accountability and the diminutive feeling during conflict with her gave me a bad case of cognitive dissonance. At the time, I did what I felt was right. It was the first selfish act I had done in a long time and I felt horrible about it.

In the following days after The Blocking, after I had gotten my heart rate down and spoken to my therapist about the situation, I went into a deep depression. The depression was caused by the realization that maybe I had squandered the opportunity to fix this relationship like a healthy adult. A lost opportunity had slipped out of my hands. At that time, it felt like I had made an unredeemable mistake and lost a lasting bond.  The one person I was guaranteed to talk to during the day, someone who shared a similar outlook on life, and I had shared a large portion of my life, was gone. I told her my latest crushes, what went on in my other friendships, my family drama, and my dreams and aspirations. It felt like my whole world had been smashed with a sledgehammer and I was left in disarray while holding said sledgehammer. I acted recklessly by not feeling my emotions and instead let them overtake me.

I consider myself a conscientious person, thinking everything through and asking for advice before I make any decision. This was so unlike me, I didn’t recognize myself. So I reached out and texted her, asking if we could talk. That was on January 28th, and I have yet to receive a response from her. The lack of response hurt, but I understood. I didn’t push any further after the text went unanswered. I decided to move forward. In the following days, I had to ask myself a lot of tough questions: Is this grief? How do you deal with this grief? The shame? That loss? And ultimately did I make the right decision? 

I still catch myself thinking about the situation. Wondering if she was thinking about me and asking myself questions I knew I would probably not get answers to. I started attending therapy more regularly and acknowledged my faults privately. As of now, I’m in the process of making new friends. In the end, this was a lesson I had to learn sooner or later. This was a lesson I will take with me forever. I spent a lot of time self-loathing and wishing I could take back what I did. Only radical acceptance of the situation and grace to myself was the thing that helped me not stay stuck in rumination. I practiced meditation and I got back into reading for fun. I even read a book on complex post-traumatic stress disorder. Taking a step back from that all-consuming relationship made me realize that I had abandoned my hobbies and sense of self to stay in this relationship. I felt such a massive void in my life because there was one. All the time we spent talking to each other, I didn’t do anything outside of her because I thought we’d be friends forever. Looking back on the relationship, I ignored all the times she would also get passive-aggressive and jealous when I would hang out with people besides her. So to diminish the immature reactions, I rarely hung out with others. That was a mistake and I am so excited to get back to hanging out with people that don’t care if I have other friends outside of them.

Now, a couple of months removed from the situation, I’ve found that the best medicine is time. Time allows you to wallow and let the feelings (like sadness, regret, and anger) move through you. I leaned on my community and went back to weekly therapy sessions. I have a mind that loves to ruminate and fixate on what could’ve been done differently. But that only kept me stuck, wallowing. I had to shift my focus to “What can I control right now?” In this case, I could only control myself. I focused on and controlled myself for the first time in a long time. 

I’m in the process of managing my codependency and learning to set clear boundaries. It’s just me, myself and I after all. I even got a tattoo that reads, Baby girl, it’s just me and you. It feels apt for where I am in my life. I struggle with isolating myself and using hyper-independence as a coping mechanism for these icky feelings, but this tattoo was meant to be a message of empowerment. To say, “You may be alone, but I’ll always be by your side.” I still miss my friend a lot and have struggled with feelings of loneliness. To combat that, I’m attending social clubs and events in an attempt to make new friends. A slew of new friends so I won’t end up in another codependent relationship. 

In the end, I’m happy with my decision. Was the decision to cut my friend from my life hasty and immature? Sure, but I wasn’t happy in the relationship. I had to put myself first. For the first time, I chose me. Looking back on the relationship, I abandoned myself for her and I never want to do that again. I finally feel like I have autonomy in my life. Our relationship was not a safe place to communicate my issues with her and that is not healthy. I’m now aware it wasn’t fair for me to assign narcissistic traits to her. I may have made up narratives to soothe myself about how things went down. 

It also wasn’t fair for her to not get the chance to explain her side, and I regret not giving her that opportunity. Even though we’re still not speaking, I always want to be fair about my role in the relationship. I’ve learned there’s a difference between giving someone grace and knowing when someone doesn’t have the capacity to be the type of friend you need. In an alternate universe, maybe we could’ve worked through our differences, but I’m okay with never knowing. Or maybe all the previous times I confronted her on an issue and she blame-shifted were all the answers I needed. With time, you find that you didn’t ruin your life. You pick yourself back up, dust yourself off, and move forward bravely. 

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Marlo Lee is a journalist, writer, and poet from Bethesda, Maryland. She graduated from Howard University with a degree in Biology, but transitioned to journalism shortly after graduating. She is currently freelancing part-time for the fact-checking website, Lead Stories. She has two pet rabbits named Almond and Cookie. Her favorite musical artists are Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, and Hozier.