A group of female friends

Riannon Chaplin

How do you break up with your best friend?

It’s not a question I ever thought I’d have to answer until late last year when I cut off contact with mine. Our friendship died slowly and painfully over a period of months. As I grieved the loss of what I thought would be a lifelong bond, I began to reevaluate my friendships as a disabled woman.

Female Friendship Is Everywhere

Female friendship is everywhere. Books, films, and TV shows proclaim its universality from seemingly every angle. Abandon those in favour of social media and you’ll see it there, too. Post after post, scroll after scroll, friendship appears ubiquitous. It feels like a unique failure to admit that you struggle with friendship.

It isn’t that I’m a bad friend or I don’t love the friends I have — I know I’m incredibly lucky to have them. But I have always felt like an outsider when it comes to forming and maintaining relationships. I feel adrift amidst the group selfies, the house parties and the endless reruns of Friends.

“As a blind woman, socialising has always been a minefield.”

Thankfully, we are starting to talk openly about the difficulties of adult friendship. Groups like The Lonely Girls Club and friend-finding apps like Bumble are breaking down the stigma attached to loneliness.

But it wasn’t loneliness that I felt when I broke up with my best friend.

What bothered me was that I had developed a toxic pattern of allowing my boundaries to be repeatedly crossed to avoid conflict. And, when the storm inevitably came, it was so fierce that I didn’t know how to escape it.

“How do you fit in at school when you can’t see others in the playground?”

What I finally acknowledged, as I vented, journaled, and devoured self-help books, is that ableism and my relationship with my disability were at the root of this pattern.

As a blind woman, socialising has always been a minefield. As a child, I wasn’t aware that my vision — or rather, other people’s misconceptions about my vision — played a role in my social life. How do you fit in at school when you can’t see others in the playground? When you struggle to play games that weren’t designed for you? When no one else seems to understand why?

I was often misconstrued as rude or aloof when I missed non-verbal cues. As a result, I worked overtime honing in on verbal ones instead. As a child, I became hyper-aware of my differences, even if I didn’t fully understand them. I internalised every mean comment, every social blunder, and every break time spent alone. I felt like my difficulties making friends were my fault. Something about me kept people away, making me either their second choice or no one’s choice at all.

As a depressed and socially anxious teenager, I came to believe I didn’t deserve the kind of friendship I saw around me. I isolated myself even more.

It didn’t help that many of the venues in which friendships are formed are inaccessible.

Crowded, noisy environments can feel unsafe and overstimulating when you rely on your hearing. It can be harder to advocate for your needs while those around you are drunk and carefree. Then, there are the mental calculations: does the bar have a disabled toilet? Which friend do I trust most to guide me in an unfamiliar place? Could I find an escape route if a stranger was making me uncomfortable?

Why Would I Embrace The Very Thing That Made Me An Outsider?

Most isolating of all has been knowing that no one in my life can understand my blindness. It’s a fundamental part of my lived experience that has influenced so much of who I am. But my friends will never truly understand it.

Erin Falconer, author of How To Break Up With Your Friends (2022), describes the core of friendship as seeing and being seen. But this is difficult when you struggle to be your authentic disabled self in an ableist society.

From a young age, I disavowed my disability. In any way possible, I lived my life as a sighted person — a strategy that only made me more miserable and exhausted. I didn’t use a white cane until I was fifteen. I read print that was too small and refused accommodations that would brand me as different. When people showed me images or videos I couldn’t see, I guessed the correct reaction. I didn’t talk about my disability, because I didn’t want to be disabled.

Why would I embrace the very thing that made me an outsider?

An Issue of Ableism

Without realising it, I had learnt to reduce myself to please others. Making and maintaining friendships meant suppressing my needs and dismissing my boundaries out of fear of rejection. It meant hiding myself, and struggling to be truly vulnerable with others as a result. I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

“No one wants to believe they have contributed to someone else’s marginalisation, let alone someone they care about.”

This pattern is one I have repeated throughout my life. But I’m getting better. A year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to break up with my best friend. Even if I knew it was for the best, I would have continued to be friends. Because the pattern of putting my friends ahead of myself is something I’ve learnt to do.

But this is not just an issue of my own assertiveness. It is a societal issue, an issue of ableism.

Without talking about disability, we will never fully understand friendship. No one wants to believe they have contributed to someone else’s marginalisation, let alone someone they care about. But if we want to make it easier for disabled people to form and maintain healthy, fulfilling friendships, we all need to speak up. And we all need to listen.

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Featured image courtesy of Noorulabdeen Ahmad on Unsplash. No changes made to this image. Image license found here.

Riannon is a trainee journalist from Essex with a degree in History from Cambridge University. She is especially interested in social affairs, particularly education, disability and health and wellbeing.

1 Comment

  1. Your article really made me reflect on the difficulties my daughter goes through. She is 18 and her social, school experiences and not wanting to use adaptions that would make her look different are very similar to yours. Thank you

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