Unreliable Narrators

Or, here's one more way of looking at things for the road I suppose.

Jacqueline Marie

I think about words a lot.

I know, how deeply profound of me.

Accuracy is very important to me. One of the things I consistently have to check myself on is not getting overly critical of people misusing a word. Once my girlfriend accidentally texted me “lighting” when she meant “lightning” and I had to take some deep breaths and text a friend that I was annoyed at how annoyed I was which is…indisputably a stupid reaction on my part! All of this to say, I care a lot about meaning what I say, saying what I mean, and I hold people to the same standard even more rigidly than it would (or should) ever warrant.

An adage I’ve long held to be true is that “there are two sides to every story and somewhere in the middle is the truth.” Even the most therapized version of ourselves is still inherently going to hold bias for our own version of events. There is no one on planet Earth who is equally as likely to hold themselves to task as they will others.

But it is interesting how differently people will view things and what it’s like to hear them retroactively or after the fact. The two sides can all of a sudden be written in entirely different genres, with very little (if any) crossover in plot points between the two.

On top of words and the meanings of them and the ones we choose, I think about friendship a lot. As someone with a complicated relationship to family, my closest people inevitably are my friends. Because of this when rifts occur or when there’s tension there, it probably hits me a little deeper than most.

Some years back I had to stop being friends with someone who previously I would have expected would have been in my hypothetical wedding. The circumstances I won’t go into too much detail here (…because I sold an essay about it watch this space or whatever lol 👀) but it was devastating. This was someone who was in a lot pain, no doubt, but she was utterly incapable at the time for seeing the pain she was also responsible for and actively causing.

Being in the throes of a friendship breakup, especially one with someone you thought was a Forever™, is a special sort of torture. I was so upset with her, so hurt by her, and so frustrated mainly because I felt deeply misunderstood and also horribly misrepresented. See: Accuracy and Friendship intersecting in the absolute worst way.

Which is why it was fully amplified and electrified when that former friend started going on podcasts and making content online and talking about things related to her recovery journey, but those things she was choosing to spotlight involved stories that featured not just her as a main character, but me.