This is a chapter from my most recent book and devotional, Walking in the Wilderness with God. This devotional walks with the reader by hand through a season in the wilderness where friendship can be more like a bear attack. This chapter/mile marker is about a falling out I had with a friend and having to make changes to a very important tradition we shared.
The most pivotal and longest part of Sydney and I’s friendship was over the internet; typing bubbles and blue light glow. We didn’t bond over classes at college, and mutual friends didn’t bring us together, but Taylor Swift did.
We would stay up until midnight to listen to new Taylor Swift albums together, theorize over who the songs were about or how one lyric could mean one hundred different things. We dreaded track fives (IYKYK……) and even had a shared Taylor Swift fan account on Instagram where we talked to other Swifties and were also bullied by some.
Our friendship was built upon five holes in the fence, stray threads, and putting pieces of the puzzle together. We weren’t just two fans who had found something in common, but two girls who shared the mutual love of Taylor Swift and could unravel the ugly parts of our hearts to each other, trust one another with hidden stories we had never told anyone before, and share midnight confessions.
There was an invisible string that connected us across state lines and time zones. And though many people in our personal lives laughed at what we shared, we knew that friendship could most definitely be made over the internet.
When Taylor Swift’s album, Midnights came out, it was especially important. We planned our first time meeting to this album, coordinated our outfits as we sang our hearts out to You’re On Your Own Kid, and as I drove to the airport to pick her up, it became the soundtrack to one of the best memories of my life.
This Taylor album shaped our first time meeting, and we listened to it every day Sydney was with me, in my home state. Singing lyrics in between Disneyland rides and getting ready for the concert. I remember before Sydney left to go back home, at the end of a magical and exhausting week, she penned this “our album.” And that still, to this day, is the reason I clench my fists while listening to songs from the album. Although Midnights isn’t coined a heartbreak album, it’s the most heartbreaking album out of Taylor Swift’s discography for me.
Every high note, voice quiver, and addicting bridge echoes the memory of someone I no longer talk to. I never would have imagined the girl who stayed up until late hours of the night with me, analyzing every lyric, would send my calls to voicemail, like my messages, instead of answering them, and get up and walk out of my life, as if we had only shared the same order at a coffee shop and not nine years of friendship.
I remember how You’re On Your Own Kid comforted us like a blanket. The lyric, “take the moment and taste it, you’ve got no reason to be afraid,” had convicted our hearts as we both lived through friendships that hadn’t been the nicest to us. We had this friendship now. The friendship we swore up and down wasn’t going anywhere, the sisterhood that we built ride or die on, the person I thought would be here during the hard and the good for the rest of my life. I had her, and she had me. But our friendship that was supposed to last forever turned out not to last that long.
Maybe these next words are words your heart has been waiting to hear, even though you may not want to believe them. Sometimes the person who promises you forever promises you a short while. Maybe the friend who felt like home will leave without any explanation.
But here is something I can promise you: you aren’t alone in this kind of heartbreak. There are many girls out there crying into their pillows, girls who feel foolish for caring so much and hurt so deeply because of a friend.
Society tells us friends are just people we have numbers for in our phones, people we go out to dinner with, or people who show up to our twenty-first birthday party. But I can tell you that friends are safe harbors, keepers of secrets, people we can be our most vulnerable, unedited selves with. Friends are the gentlest whispers of God’s love; friends are the steady when life gets shaky.
They aren’t the boyfriends, the fiancés, or the husbands; they are drastically different but equally important. Friendships aren’t stepping stones to our romances. They aren’t training wheels that we take off and throw away when we find a guy. Friendships shape us, carry us, and remain prominent pillars in every part of our lives.
Friends are the first to teach us about loyalty; they help us build our emotional muscles to apologize, to stay, forgive, speak up, and share our hearts.
A boyfriend, a fiancé, a husband may promise forever, but a true friend has and will live a thousand little forevers with you – wiping your tears when the guy breaks your heart, late-night drives, crisis calls, quiet mornings, and each piece that makes up our hearts.
God didn’t design husband and wife to live a life, just them, together. God designed community and fellowship – a part of His divine plan. Friendship isn’t the ground of the ladder that romance sits upon but stands beside.
Sydney turned “our” song into a painful prophecy. She turned the bridge around and made it come true in the cruelest way possible. And in a strange but truthful way, because of Sydney, I have been changed for the better.
Taylor Swift said, “Everything you lose is a step you take.” It took a bajillion therapy sessions and a heart reconstructed by God to understand exactly what Taylor meant by that, but now I do. Sydney was a step. A painful one, but a necessary one. I begged God to just give our friendship more time, give me more time, more messages, more inside jokes, more listening to Taylor Swift with the girl I called my best friend.
For a long time, I felt like God was ignoring me. It felt like He disappeared from my life. Like Heaven turned Her face while I was losing the person I thought was my forever friend. God didn’t answer my prayer; He enhanced it. He gave me my therapist during a time when I struggled to form any type of relationship with anyone. I can just picture the divine moment in His divine timing where God whispered to my therapist, “Hold her. I’m doing something that she won’t understand yet.”
And maybe, even knowing that I would be scarred from Sydney’s actions, maybe God showed Sydney the way out. He opened the door, smiled, and sent her on her way. Then He returned to me; He hurt with me, He comforted me.
See, friends, God knows intrinsically what will happen if He answers prayers the way we want Him to. In this case, I was asking Him to resupply the poison that was killing me only because I had become used to it. He knew that if He had set in motion Sydney texting me again, I would have started apologizing; I would have apologized for her actions. I would have enabled her, and I never would have begun my healing journey.
So, everything you lose is a step you take? I used to think that was a comforting line, but now I know it’s a surgical one. It cuts, it carves, and it burns like salt in the wound. I sometimes wonder if I ever ran into Sydney (my bet at a Taylor Swift concert), she wouldn’t recognize the person God rebuilt. And given the chance, I don’t know what I would say to her, if anything. Because doors that God closes should remain closed. He sees, He knows, and He protects.
When Taylor Swift announced Life of a Showgirl, I didn’t have anyone to celebrate with, anyone to text, anyone to theorize with. Thank God I had a therapy session booked.
I fidgeted. I thought I was healed. I said, “I’m avoiding listening to the new Taylor Swift album. This is something I used to do with Sydney.”
My therapist encouraged me to still listen to it, even if it was painful. Taylor Swift was my favorite artist before Sydney, and she still is after Sydney, too.
So, when the clock hit midnight, Spotify crashed and then came back up, and I hit play. It hurt. It stung. Especially since I had just spent an hour cleaning out my camera roll the week prior from the screenshots as Sydney and I listened to The Tortured Poets Department: “THIRTEEN MORE MINUTES!!!!” and “Did she just? Yup, she did.”
Maybe some friendships aren’t meant to glitter forever. The truth is, Sydney didn’t know the life of our “showgirl” friendship. She took the backstage passes, the inside jokes, the midnight playlists, but didn’t bother staying for the encore.
When I went on stage, I didn’t see her face. I cried, I wished, I prayed. But here I am, still standing, making it my mission to speak about good, healthy, and toxic friendships. And how only because of God that healing can happen, and it will.
Trailside Prayer for What God Rebuilt:
Heavenly Father,
Thank you for each friendship in my life, the ones here and the ones that haven’t lasted. Thank you for the friendships that held laughter, late-night conversations, songs, memories, and moments that felt like cloud nine.
There are friendships that I still carry so tenderly in my heart, though they are no longer here. Some memories still sting; some songs transport me back to places I cannot return. When these memories come, let me see them for what they are: good times that I can still smile at, but guide me forward and don’t let me linger in the past.
Help me release this friendship that is still deep in my heart, but not in my life anymore; help me to stop knocking on a closed door. Give me peace about the chapter that you have put a period in and let me experience gratitude for the good that existed in the friendship.
Thank you for not leaving me when I was wounded; thank you for loving me when heartbreak tried to destroy me; thank you for rebuilding my life and continuing to do so until I am with you.
Amen.
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