I Almost Shit Talked My Best Friend (But I Didn’t Do It)

My listless scrolling through Instagram is arrested by your smile. You look so happy, so carefree. Drinking at some event I wasn’t invited to. Lips parted in a laugh, as if a spectator just so happened to snap a photo of you listening to a joke, and it’s simply a coincidence that your guffaws are always photogenic. I gasp. Oh my God. It can’t be. It must be.

I zoom in. I pull the image apart, distorting your face, desperate for a closer look at your lips. Internally, I am shrieking in glee as the ugly sensation of catty schadenfreude bubbles up in me, more toxic and more addicting than any liquor or drug I have ever encountered.

“Are those… fillers?”

I can’t believe my eyes. You’ve always struck me as so confident, so poised, so powerfully, unapologetically feminist that it is frankly embarrassing to see you wearing such an obvious, garish, pathetic signal to the world that you care this much about what other people think of you.

But I am alone in my apartment, so there is no one around to respond to my question except my dog who 1) doesn’t speak English, 2) doesn’t have lips, and 3) was so startled and annoyed by my exclamation that he left his comfy, curled up position at the end of my couch to run into the bedroom where he could continue to nap in peace.

I need a second opinion.

With the lightning-speed familiarity of a digital native, I screenshot the image and hit the share icon. Natalie’s name and image pop up at the bottom of the window because my iPhone, my soulmate, knows me better than I know myself. I start to type “OMG do you…” and then I stop.

I hit Cancel. Exit. Done. Delete Screenshot.

I think about you. You’re not just some acquaintance from my sorority days that I still hate-follow (at least she gets pregnant because I have a strict No Babies policy on my timeline, no exceptions. All babies are ugly and boring. All of them. Yes, even that one).

No, you’re like, my actual friend. We go to brunch together. I send you memes. You dog sit for me when I go out of town for work. It’s one thing to shit talk people behind their back, but to shit talk a friend. About her appearance? I don’t want to be that kind of girl.

Still, the impulse pulls at me, harder and harder to resist. It’s not my fault my brain is wired like this. Humans’ desire to shit talk has been embedded in us through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. We are social animals, tribal creatures. It feels so good because in that moment, when we’re passing judgment on a person, we have created a little tribe of our own, even if it’s just two people. And if I am the one who brings the gossip, I am that one who—in that moment—is the tribe’s leader.

Plus, when we’re shit talking with someone, it’s the only time we can ever be 100% sure that that person isn’t currently shit talking us. It takes real willpower to resist this impulse, to wrestle it back into the lizard brain recesses of my mind. I am not a hunter-gatherer on the African plains, I tell myself. I am a good friend and a good person.

And there is always a chance that when I shit talk you with our mutual friend via text, those screenshots could end up in your hands. Not that I don’t trust Natalie—I do. But women can be bitches. You never know what they’re doing, saying, thinking behind your back.

And we’re friends, you and I. You have trusted me with your insecurities. Over a girls’ night cabernet sauvignon, in the Lyft home from the club, when you send me screenshots of your crush’s latest girlfriend’s Stories. I have glimpsed the self-loathing, given you the pep talk, encouraged you through all those years of therapy. We’re close. I would lose you as a friend if screenshots like that got back to you.

And I would hurt your feelings. It would break your heart. I don’t want to do that.

I know how sensitive about this decision you must have been, how you must have agonized over it. You always told me how much you hated your thin lips, and I have always told you that you’re being ridiculous. You are naturally beautiful. In fact, I’m more than a little hurt that you didn’t ask my opinion before going off and getting something like this done. I would have told you not to. I could have prevented you from becoming the laughingstock that you probably are right now.

You probably knew I would do that. Probably knew I wouldn’t be supportive, and that’s why you went and did it without telling me. Well, if you’re purposefully going to go off and make bad decisions, then you’re basically bringing this upon yourself.

I move my fingers back to the side buttons but hold off once more.

No, I tell that darker, primal side of myself. I know what it’s like to be on the other side of this. When I was in high school, I received AIM screenshots (that’s AOL Instant Messenger for any children reading this. You used to have to log on to a desktop computer to send text messages back in the olden days).

I saw my very best friend in the whole world, the one I did everything with, talking about me to a boy. Telling him all the reasons she secretly hated me. It broke my heart. The next day I confronted her about it at school, printed out copies of her conversation in my shaking hands. She denied nothing, took back nothing, apologized for nothing. In that moment, I knew what it felt like to be a hunter-gatherer cast out of the tribe, to know not what you did wrong but that it was something egregious and unforgivable. I made a vow that I would never be so careless and so vulnerable as to ever let that happen to me again.

But obviously now at age thirty, I am completely over it. It hasn’t affected me at all. Hasn’t left any deep scars of insecurity or mistrust. And I certainly don’t look up that bitch up on Facebook after too many glasses of wine, to find out that she is happily married with a family in a state that I have never been to and have no desire to ever go to.

I screenshot the photo again. I have a better plan. This time I’ll send it to my boyfriend.

I don’t have to worry about him betraying me. He would never talk about me behind my back, especially not to you. I have no uncertainty about his loyalty. I hit the share icon and click his photo. I start to type again (“OMG do you think…”) but I stop.

Hit Cancel. Exit. Done. Delete Screenshot.

Even though I can be certain that anything I say with him won’t make it back to you, I would still look like an ugly, catty, disloyal person to him. He knows that you and I are friends. If I am mean about you behind your back, he’ll see me as just another two-faced woman. He’ll understand why I can’t make or keep friends for very long. I don’t want him to see me like that.

So, I’m left all alone with your photo in front of me. I have only the mean voice in my head that I can’t get rid of yet am all too happy to turn away from myself and on to you for a change.

And in this moment of restraint, I feel a warm surge of pride—not unlike when I switch to water at a party or click “Exit Cart” without making any purchases. This is what it feels like to be a mature adult. This is growing up. This is what a loyal friend does.

I feel a calm sense of superiority wash over me, like I have just finished meditating for ten minutes without checking the time on my phone even once. Only this is an accomplishment that I can’t exactly brag to anyone about.

So, I double tap the photo, type a heart eyes emoji into the comments, and keep scrolling.