Can I Say This Out Loud?

I chose not to sell my life. This is the part no one talks about: what that did to my friendships.

Deco Head Book Ends: Etsy

I’m very close with my friend Sarah. That isn’t her real name, but I want to protect her and the years of knowing one another that mattered to me. She’s a public name, a strong online presence, and someone people think they know.

We grew close in a gentle, ordinary way: phone calls, long voice notes and messages, the slow accumulation of trust. She told me about her business, her strategies, her relationship, the book she was writing, the ruptures in her family.

We named, more than once, how rare that closeness felt to both of us. She is selective about her inner circle; it’s small. Mine is too.

I’m a depth-over-breadth woman. I can talk to pretty well anyone, but I only build real intimacy with a few. It may be my neurodivergent preference for depth, my intolerance for small talk, or simply the way I’m wired. Either way, I choose closeness carefully.

Our friendship wasn’t visible online. People wouldn’t have clocked us as besties.

That invisibility felt sacred at first, something protected, something not for show. But over time, small cracks appeared, the sort that only register in hindsight.

I have a liking for acknowledging where ideas come from, wherever I can. If a friend offers an argument, a phrase, a way of seeing something that later becomes part of my work, I try to honour that. It’s probably the ex-academic in me. Years of treating plagiarism as unforgivable leaves you alert to the insidious ways people get erased, especially women.

So when I began to see my words appearing verbatim in her captions or posts, I was startled. Hurt. I told myself it was a slip. Our friendship mattered more than credit.

Then it happened again. And again. When household names contributed ideas to her work, they were acknowledged. When I did, I wasn’t.

I began to feel like a hidden resource, a private well, someone priming her public persona with language and insight — as if my thoughts were intellectual fuel that travelled outward without trace.

That alone might have been survivable. But what destabilised me even more was the split between the life I heard about and the life I saw online.

I would listen to her talk about deep unhappiness, exhaustion, a sense of being lost, and then, hours later, see a reel of sweeping landscapes and carefully captioned joy. A dreamy life. A fulfilled woman. Online declarations of abundant close friendships alongside long, repetitive conversations with me about how lonely she felt, and how few women she truly trusted.

It scrambled my sense of reality.

I wasn’t naïve. I know social media isn’t real. She would laugh and say, “You know it’s not real.” Yes — but then what is?

There is privacy. There is selectivity. And then there is something else entirely: misdirection. A performance that asks an audience to believe one reality while requiring friends to help maintain another.

I couldn’t work out whether I was offended on behalf of her audience or myself.

What followed wasn’t emotional drama but something more destabilising: a loss of orientation, a loosening of ground.

I no longer knew which version of reality I was meant to trust, and without shared reality, intimacy cannot stabilise. It becomes unmoored and psychologically unsafe.

What I began to understand, slowly and unwillingly, was that the performance was eroding my sense of who I was in relationship with.

I can tolerate complexity. I don’t need myself or people to be one thing.

But the chasm between performed vulnerability and her real one left me in a low-trust place, especially because her sense of worth, and her income, are tied to the polished version.

The woman who was going places. The role model. The one who would not get paid if she showed up as the snot-streaked, pyjama-wearing, unsure version I knew so well — unless those worries were positioned just right.

And this is the part that matters: this is deeply human. Naturally she wanted to be seen as capable while privately falling apart. Of course she curated hope. And I understood she feared that honesty would cost her.

That is why the friendship didn’t end quickly. It limped on for years.

But something was being eroded, and it wasn’t just trust.

It was me.

In accommodating values so different from my own, I diluted what mattered to me. I had chosen not to sell my life, deliberately and with care, and yet I was best friends with someone whose livelihood depended on doing exactly that.

That difference alone wasn’t the rupture. Differences can be bridged. I believe that.

What I couldn’t bridge was the cost of being complicit — of holding the fairytale in place, of knowing too much and saying nothing, of being intimate with someone whose public story required my silence and sometimes my erasure.

Was I close to a woman who trusted me with her raw truth, or to a strategist who understood intimacy as a resource?

It was both. And my heart could not live inside that contradiction.

I noticed too the questions I hadn’t wanted to ask myself.

How much did I hope she would support my work publicly, without prompting? How much did proximity to her success matter? How much had I tolerated because walking away felt harder than staying?

What I had to face instead was not what she was doing, but what I was agreeing to in order to stay in it.

I had suppressed my own honesty to preserve something that was already hollowing out. Walking away wasn’t dramatic. It was grief-laden but it was a refusal to keep cheating myself.

Years of friendship — her calling me when she began labour, celebrating tiny and big wins, sharing plans and dreams — laid gently as memories when I chose a line I would not cross again.

No more hiding behind an audience that was being played to. No more helping to maintain a version of reality I could not consent to.

And she was not the only friendship that ended this way.

As I cleaned the mirror and looked more closely at how I was co-creating closeness, I saw another version of the same pattern.

Another woman. Another large audience. A different aesthetic, this time wholesome, cosy, and aspirational. Her brand rested on a truly beautiful love story and a lifestyle product she no longer actually lived because motherhood made that life impossible.

Behind the scenes there was an affair, confusion, private unraveling.

Being a best friend often means holding secrets. Loyalty doesn’t scare me.

What undid me was the psychological split: the responsibility to protect a public narrative that no longer matched reality while being asked to show up inside the wreckage of it.

Sweetness appeared on screen, silence was expected from me, and the emotional labour of the friendship was no longer mutual.

When she began turning to AI for emotional processing, for immediacy, for answers without pause, something clarified for me.

Human intimacy relies on rhythm: the space to hesitate, to revise, and to sit with uncertainty. Zero-lag systems erase that space.

And I recognised the same logic at work in her public life: minimal mess, constant availability, with no fractures visible.

The online narrative stayed anchored to an amplified love story that was no longer current, old footage offered as present-day evidence, and a language of entrepreneurial momentum that no longer matched her lived reality.

I couldn’t keep holding both versions without losing my footing.

These are not bad women. They are women surviving a culture that confuses audience with intimacy, visibility with connection, performance with worth and leans on female friendship to carry the emotional load.

But I learned something I cannot unlearn.

What does it cost to love someone whose work depends on a fiction you’re asked to help sustain?

The cost always lands somewhere. And if you are not careful, it lands in your own body.

I didn’t leave because they were wrong.

I left because I was.

If this essay connects to something you’re thinking about or have lived — wanting scale without exposure, closeness without performance, integrity without judgment — I’m hosting a Hellfire Salon next Sunday, 25 January (4pm UK / 5pm CET / 11am EST / 8am PST). Sixty minutes. Free.

It’s a live, unrecorded space to think together about privacy, power, visibility, and the ethical costs of living inside systems that reward performance over truth.

If you want in, reply to this email and I’ll send over the details.

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