Friend Breakups

I cannot be friends with you anymore.

“Hey, can we meet out by the steps in the parking lot after service?”

It was Sunday. The praise team was already gearing up to lead us through that morning’s playlist of Christian soft-pop worship. Pastor John was adjusting his tie at the pulpit. He would launch into his scripted opening prayer in a moment, so I leaned in to my friend’s ear and repeated,

“The steps. In the parking lot. Meet you there after service?”

“Friend” she was, at that moment. But at the conclusion of our rendezvous at the parking lot steps, she would exit my life.

Or, so I hoped.

I’d made the decision to break things off with her earlier that morning. In a terse conversation right outside the service room door, she’d interrupted me to call me “an idiot” for some purported oversight. This was her habit–openly deriding me for every infraction, small or large, real or imagined. Calling me “an idiot” in a public place (church), where many people (who knew us both) could overhear–those words had been a guillotine, beheading our friendship more effectively than a floaty “let them eat cake,” and she didn’t even know it yet.

While the decision–on its face–seemed spur of the moment, the truth was, it had been a long time coming. She wasn’t just in the habit of calling me names. She was also demanding–calling me 15 times a day (​thank goodness texting didn’t exist then​), requiring my presence practically around the clock. I was only in junior high, so the concept of “sustainable relationships” wasn’t something I could articulate. I just knew I couldn’t handle her much longer.

Omma had been coaching me through what to say for months–“just tell her ‘I’m sorry, I cannot be friends with you anymore.'” Yes, I knew it would be much easier for me to not say anything and simply fade out of her life; but I also knew I would never be able to look at myself in the mirror if I “ghosted her” (though that phrase didn’t exist at that time–neither did cell phones).

Even if she thought I was an idiot.

I won’t regale you with the “how did you guys meet” story. This is, after all, a story about how it ended. Suffice it to say, she obliged and met me at the designated meeting spot shortly after service. My heart thudded, sweat poured, and tears were streaming down both our faces towards the end. I said to her, just as Omma had coached, “I’m sorry, I cannot be friends with you anymore.” But I didn’t leave it at that. I told her I couldn’t handle the stress of it: all the name-calling, the constant telephone calls, the neediness. I expected her to disagree with me (which, I knew, from experience, she was amply and loudly capable of).

But, shockingly, she wiped away her tears and kept silent until all the words I could think of dried up.

“Is that all?” she asked quietly.

I nodded.

Without another word, she swiveled around and walked swiftly back to the sprawling brick building on Kimball Avenue, under whose roof she and I had met years earlier.

And with that, she was out of my life.

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At least for a while. I was 13 years old at the time. I would encounter her again years later when she was a senior in college and I was already in law school. She invited me over to her apartment. She made me zucchini jeon. I was cordial. She was overly cheerful. We’ve been Facebook friends ever since. I’ve often wondered about all the words she kept bottled up and unsaid on the parking lot steps. We never talked about it, though. And, to be honest, I was so relieved, I didn’t spend too much time mulling it over.

It wasn’t until 2022, when I was on the receiving end of a friend breakup that I started thinking of her again.

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In March 2022…

I was coming off the high of another finish line–the NYC half marathon (many of you actually donated to my fundraising campaign for that!)–and getting ready for a 3-hour flight back home to Chicago. After sliding into my seat on the plane, buckling up, I typed a quick text to my friend, letting her know I was leaving New York but it had been so great catching up with her a few nights earlier. “I finished the half marathon!” I typed into the phone, before hitting “send.”

Her reply was prompt. But clipped: “Congrats on the half. Peace.”

I felt like I’d been punched right in the softest part of my belly. All the wind whooshed out of me as my stomach curled inwards. The roar of the airplane engines, the chatter of fellow passengers, roller boards finding purchase in the overhead–all of it faded away and was replaced with a high pitched whine.

I showed the text to Anthony sitting next to me. He read it over. Shrugged. “What? It sounds like she’s just busy.”

I wanted to believe him. I looked back down at my phone. Right above our most recent exchange, you could see my friend’s propensity to end every single text with heart emojis and smiley faces. She used full, long, nurturing sentences. She’d never once ended a text with “Peace.”

A few weeks later, we would both learn that Anthony was wrong. My gut had been right. “Peace” had been more than a “bye, for now.” It was a “bye, for good.” She stopped communicating with me, uninvited me from events, discontinued interacting with me on social media.

And thus ensued one of the most difficult years of my life.

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Let me stop here a moment and explain that this “most difficult year” was not just because of the Friend Breakup. It was also the year my Rudy died. A month after Rudy passed away, I came down with COVID and was forced to isolate myself from Anthony and my family for weeks (I continued testing positive for 21 days). Grief is private, but I hadn’t anticipated having to muck through it so actually alone. I had a lot to cry about, and sometimes, when sad things happen in succession, you feel like you’ll never come out of the sad. Like I described ​last week​–a “chronic case of the blues.”

But back to the breakup. I have so many thoughts on this, I’m going to organize them into bullets:

The Friend Breakup affected me way more than I expected.

I was surprised at how much it affected me. In some ways, it hurt almost as much as getting dumped by a romantic partner. 2022 was also the year I packed up my entire life in Chicago and moved to California (like I said, it was a big year). I remember squatting on the kitchen floor to pick up and pack away a bunch of unplugged TV cables. Running through my head was the inner dialogue that had been looping on repeat since “Peace.” I burst into tears, white knuckling the thick cables, still kimchi-squatting in the middle of my half-empty kitchen. Anthony ran in, “What’s wrong?” he asked, alarmed. “I just wish I knew what I did to make her hate me so much,” I sobbed. “What’s wrong with me?” He pulled me off the ground and I cried into his hoodie.

It took me a full year to develop sufficient detachment not to cry every time I thought about the Friend Breakup. This was way longer than I expected.

I never learned what precipitated the Friend Breakup.

To this day, I do not know, with certainty, what caused the Friend Breakup. I have my theories, but they are, presently, just theories. Apparently, she determined that whatever friendship we’d had didn’t merit any explanation for its demise. This, of course, contributed to the hamster wheel of my emotions. I was obsessively picking over the clues (there was very little to go on), constantly playing over our last–very friendly–encounter, asking myself, “Was it when I did this?” or “Could I have done that?” or “Why the FUCK did I do THIS?” Even Anthony started to wonder whether he had done something to piss her off (“maybe I should have offered to pay for dinner?”).

The Friend Breakup became a full-blown existential crisis.

Part of the reason it affected me more than I expected was because, in a very short period of time, my former friend’s “ghosting” and the digestive turmoil it caused on the airplane exploded into a full-blown existential crisis. My ex-friend had, for some reason, judged me deficient in some important way–important enough that she was willing to not just exile me to the fringe of her social circle (low-lift maintenance friendship: annual birthday texts, a like here and there on Instagram, polite hellos should we bump into each other), but to totally cast me out of her life. You can get dumped and still believe you’re a good person (“he’s just not attracted to me,” or “he’s found someone else,” or “we’re just not right for each other”). But, implicit in her nuclear decision was that there was some profound moral failing in my character.

The evaluation that prompted her to cut me out was, of course, linked (in my mind) to those things that initially deemed me worthy enough to be her friend in the first place. Without belaboring (once more) the “how we met” story, she initially reached out to me because of my book. We shared a lot in common, including the fact that we both (in our own ways) advocated for the Asian American community.

I think that’s what made her judgment of me all the more powerful–I looked up to her. She was, in every sense of the word, not just my friend, but my mentor. And for the duration of our friendship, she treated me almost like a little sister. I don’t have enough time in this newsletter to go into the unique nature of an “unni-dongseng” or “sunbae-hoobae” relationship; but, for a culture that is very dependent on hierarchy, even in personal relationships, ours was not an ordinary friendship. At least, not to me.

I am the eldest sibling and cousin in the United States (on my mother’s side) and my mother is also the eldest sibling (also in the United States). I am the oldest child of my father, who is, in turn, the oldest of his family. I have, as a result, viewed myself as the safety net and “noonah” (older sister) to my generation of my family almost my entire life–particularly so as our parents have aged. Thus, I have trouble depending on people. I’m self-sufficient, to a fault. Discovering a friendship that allowed me, a little bit, to depend on an Unni (an older sister) was, in many ways, potentially life changing.

But because I assumed her rejection of me was also an indirect expression of her regret–an “Oh, I was so obviously wrong about all the good I thought I saw in you,” my mind automatically assumed I wasn’t a good writer, I wasn’t a good advocate, I wasn’t a good friend, I wasn’t a good person.

And of course, it was really hard (almost impossible) not to agree with the assessment of someone I still admired so goddamn much.

Thank goodness for Anthony et al.

Anthony is not a knight in shining armor. He’s not the kind of guy who would punch someone in the face if they called me a ch**k (that’s something his brother David would do). And, recall–he originally thought I was making a big deal out of nothing (a fact that, unfortunately, has made me far more skeptical of his read on social situations of this sort). But one of the best things about being married to Anthony is that I can take shelter in his abundant confidence.

I don’t know a single person on this planet who is as confident as my husband. I always joke, “my husband is extremely confident, borderline arrogant…?” Some people might say, “well, yes, he is a CIS straight white guy.” Fair enough. But he’s my CIS straight white guy. On one hand, I had my ex-friend’s evaluation of me. But I soon realized that her judgment of me was simply no contest for Anthony’s 1,000,000% certainty that I was not just a good person, but that I was good enough to be his person.

And I also knew that, in the end, he was not just very disappointed in my former friend’s behavior, he was ticked off. Obviously, it was heartbreaking for him to see me crying on our kitchen floor; but, he also deemed my friend’s behavior woefully deficient, independent of how it affected me. This kind of objectivity is precisely why he was never my knight. He doesn’t come to my defense when people troll me in the comments. He doesn’t get in anyone’s face if they get in mine. He’s fairly dispassionate about whether someone is out of line and he’s confident in my ability to handle it when they are. This sort of objectivity can be frustrating, sure, but man-oh-man, it meant a whole lot more when he reassured me, “There is nothing wrong with you, babe. But there is quite a lot wrong with her.”

In addition to Anthony, I had a few close friends who rallied. Some were terrifically angry on my behalf and I confess, I found it quite soothing at the time. Other friends quietly but firmly supported me through what was not just an obviously difficult time, but a horrible year all around–listening to me as I wobbled through the whole story, offering kind words, but, more importantly, just sticking around as they watched me fall apart–not just through the Friend Breakup, but through Rudy’s death. In one case, our close friends even invited me to grieve over both inside the sanctuary of their beautiful home for a few days.

Their friendship reminded me and taught me: “this is what real friendship looks like.”

My conclusion: It’s her, not me.

No matter how many amazing people assured me, over and over again, “it’s her, not you,” I had to find a path towards believing it. For me, that path was compassion.

I could spend a lifetime on that hamster wheel, playing the final scenes of our tragically cut-short story over and over again, never really sure about what led to its dissolution. Or, I could cut my losses and walk away. The only way I could do that was to assume that something was going on in my friend’s life–something that prevented her from being the kind, warm, loving woman I thought I’d known. I’m not gonna lie and say I don’t harbor any resentment towards her. It’s only been a couple years, after all, and it really stung that she didn’t even reach out to say anything when Rudy died. But until I was provided with evidence to the contrary, I gave myself permission to believe:

“I’m a good person, even if she thinks I’m not. I’m a good friend, even if she thinks I’m not. I am worthy, even if she thinks I’m not.”

Were there lessons I could learn from this situation about being a better friend? Perhaps. But, until she’s willing to talk to me about what it was that upset her so much, I am done playing that game. Plus, far more important were the lessons I learned about how to protect myself from ever allowing anyone to have so much power over my self-worth.

Although I’ve been open about my imposter syndrome here and my efforts to develop a “Joanne 2.0” who isn’t so shy and believes she deserves to occupy the space that she does, I hadn’t known I’d been walking on unacceptably thin ice. All it took was one Friend Breakup to shatter my confidence and, had it not been for Anthony and my friends who, thank God, were there to pull me out of my despair, who knows how long I would have wallowed in misery?

The Friend Breakup taught me that self-sufficiency is more than just having a tidy savings account or the ability to write my own legal contracts.

It’s also an understanding and belief that Joanne’s friendship—wow, it’s worthwhile and pretty darn special. And anyone who would so carelessly throw it overboard? Well, that person probably wasn’t as worthy of me as I had originally thought.

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Parting Thoughts

“We better get going,” Yemin said. The words signaled the end of Thanksgiving. All my cousins, my brother, and his wife rose slowly from their seated positions on the floor of my parents’ living room sectional and began to gather their things. Only my 6-year-old nephew, Liam, oblivious to the reshuffling of bodies around him, remained knelt on the floor, his small hands still gripping two of the fat markers my mother had given him a few minutes earlier. But soon, even that spell was broken when my brother announced, “C’mon Liam. It’s time to go.”

My aunt got up from the dining room table–the post-dinner “adult area” from time immemorial–where she’d been chatting with my mother, both their hands curled around now cool mugs of green tea. Her flannel skirt slid gracefully over the hardwood as she bent over to gather her aging shih-tzu, Eddy, who’d been dozing in the bed she’d brought with him. Omma, too, got up from the chair she’d been occupying for the past hour, as her guests began heading to the front door.

There, we all paused for the “reshodding” that occurs in most Asian households. I snapped a quick pic of all the shoes that had piled up over the course of the evening. I loved the sight of them so much, it almost brought me to tears. It always, always, reminded me of how my family showed up and helped me pack my things the morning I finally left my first marriage. Of course, at that time, the mini Nikes hadn’t been part of the pile, I thought to myself.

It was cold, but I stepped out the screen door wearing Anthony’s sneakers and my sweater-jacket. Omma and Anthony stayed inside with Lulu, but I wanted to stretch these final moments to their limit. Hyungsung and Cheemin were already warming up their cars. Jasmine was still packing up a few things behind me. “It’s snowing,” I called out to no one. Indeed, fat flakes landed on my outstretched hands, dissolved into the soft folds of my poofy jacket. “It’s snowing,” I repeated to myself as I looked up into a swirl of white lace falling delicately from the black sky.

“By Unni!” Young Jung called, as she packed Liam into the backseat of their white sedan. “Bye, Joanne!” Jaesun’s voice came on her heels. I waved with big, swinging arcs over my head. “Bye guys! Bye Liam!” I stepped onto the deserted street and swiveled around to face Hyunsung’s car. “Bye Hyungsung!” I called, pumping my arms over my head until I could see his small face in the dim light of his car, his hand waving through the windshield until he pulled away from the curb. I turned again to face Cheemin, Jasmine now safely packed in. “Bye guys!! Bye!” “Bye!” they called back, as they backed out of my parents’ driveway. Last to leave was my aunt, carrying Eddy in her arms. “Bye Eemo! Bye Eddy!” and she replied, “Bye, Joannie!” using the name her daughter Jasmine had given me when she was just learning to speak–a truncated version of “Joanne Unni.”

And before I knew it, the chorus of goodbyes concluded, the taillights of my Eemo’s SUV were winking out beyond the curve in the road. The big grapefruit I carried inside my body, the same one that appeared at the sight of my family’s shoes, swelled in my throat until my ears began to ache and I was standing there, still, with nothing but the snow pedaling their soft feet into my damp face.

Wishing you all the best,
Joanne