Being so far away from so many friends for so many years put me in this unique (and undesirable) position in which all these people who all knew each other already, or who became friends through me, dumped all their trash talk on me. Everything from one friend thinking another friend’s jeans were always too tight to two to three friends consistently calling to discuss the sexual orientation of another friend – I heard it all. Often, unsolicited information about the lives and looks of people I knew but hadn’t seen in a while were chucked my way. Mean stuff, too. Really mean.

I don’t know why I became the repository for their trash talk. Maybe because I, too, had at one time been pretty mean, when I lived in an area of the country where, arguably, many people are mean because that’s kinda how you get by. It’s an aggressive place and we used to get together and kinda all be mean and aggressive together and get our way. We were bullies. Plain and simple.

Things changed when I moved to slower-paced region of the country and my aggression and nastiness were not only frowned upon, but called out – called out by people whom, I would like to point out, are still good friends.

Maybe the old, mean friends deposited their meanness with me because I was sort of out of sight, out of mind. Almost like what they were telling me was akin to writing something down on a piece of paper, sealing it in an envelope, and burying it. I wasn’t going to go out and get drunk with any of those people any time soon and blurt out all the crap they talked. I was half a country away, living a very domestic life, years before they followed suit.

While I kept all their secrets, one by one, several of them turned on me. One or two just straight up unfriended me on Facebook around the time of my wedding. No explanation. No confrontation. They’d been invited. They didn’t come.

So, what the hell happened? Liability issues? Couldn’t keep me around?

It was 2009 and while I’d been on and off Facebook since its widespread adoption on college campuses, I was thrown into this weird, new space: a space in which someone could publicly throw you out of their lives without explanation. Arguably, this happened pre-social media, too – someone just stops calling, showing up, or writing, and ostensibly, your relationship’s over. But social media seems to make the process so damn personal while making it seem so damn impersonal too. Social media: just one more forum through which someone can hurt you. And lots of people can see it, too – people you have in common.

Since then, seeing all or some of those people from my past gather as best friends and post their happy times on Facebook – wow, what a mind*ck, man. It really showed me how duplicitous people are and social media really gave them a forum through which to be even more two-sided than I thought we could get. All the things all of them have said about each other through the years – just, wow. I wish I could be more eloquent than that. I suppose I’m basically saying it’s a lie.

Welcome to social media, y’all – straight up rotten in the middle, and glossy on the outside.