I can't stand seeing my ex-best friend thrive on social media

How do I get over it? - With help from Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection

Dear Emma,

I broke off a very close friendship about four months ago. She was my closest woman friend at the time, but we had been growing apart for months at that point. It ended very suddenly after having some pretty intense fighting, ending with her saying malicious things about my person and character. I will admit, I am not completely in the right in the situation, but some damning points were brought up during our fight which made me not want to pursue a friendship further with her.

We run in some close circles (we went to the same university residence, so all of our friends know each other) but I haven't come across her in the four months since we broke it off. However, recently I have been seeing some of our mutuals post on social media hanging out with her. These mutuals are people in the past that I aspired to be friends with, as they seemed like 'cool' people who I believed have very similar interests to mine. My ex-friend had never really hung out with these people when we were friends.

I don't have a problem with her being friends with them. I am honestly happy that she has been making new friends. However, whenever I see these posts, I spiral a little bit. I am more so worried about not experiencing these things she is doing, not having friends to do fun activities with, etc. even though I now have some wonderful new friends who I love. A part of me is also worried that she is talking to these people about me, or saying what she thinks my character to be to these people. I don't want them to look down on me for what she is saying.

I sometimes have a similar feeling when seeing what my ex-partner is doing. I feel fiercely jealous- even though I don't want back into their lives, I am protective of a sorts and almost possessive- even though I have no right to be. I was the person who chose to not be in their lives anymore, yet I am domineering over their experiences. I know a simple solution is to delete them off social media, but with our networks so intertwined it would be hard to scrub them completely. Why do I get this feeling of possession/ jealousy? How can I detach myself from them and stop feeling so jealous over their new friendships/ relationships?

Thank you for reading Fictional Therapy, an advice column that uses insights from literature to shed light on people’s modern-day dilemmas. If you’d like to receive new posts and support my work, please hit subscribe!

Brace yourself. I’m going to do a Fictional Therapy first here, and open with a quote - dive straight into literature, before I’ve even taken your metaphorical hand to tell you that it’s all going to be okay. Are you ready? This is a passage from Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection, a slim but thrilling novella about a digital-nomad-millennial-couple whose coming-of-age perfectly aligns with the rise of social media, and so end up leading lives besieged and illuminated by the advent of Instagram et al. Here, Latronico describes what it is like for his protagonists Anna and Sam to spend their days scrolling a perfect, terrifying stream of endless content:

It was like walking through the world’s most hectic street market on cocaine. It was like channel hopping an entire wall of TV sets. It was like telepathically tuning into the thoughts of a stadium packed with people. But really it wasn’t like anything else, because it was new.

This passage made me think of you, not just because it captures the overwhelming nature of social media apps; practically designed to make you spiral (as we all know) - but also because of the tension it explores between the familiar and the incomparably new. Because on the one hand, your problem is as old as time: you are scared of being kicked out of the tribe; worried that new allegiances are forming behind your back, and that gossip will lead to your excommunication. On the other hand - as Latronico says - your problem is like nothing that has come before, because it is new. No generation has ever been so constantly reminded of everything that they are not doing; of the lives and goings-on of people they have actively chosen to separate themselves from. Of course this is strange and anxiety-inducing. Why wouldn’t it be?

I know your pain. I am a writer and an actor, so I’m intimately acquainted with the jarring jolt of a social media update that reminds me of someone else’s success, which always feels a bit like my failure, no matter what’s really going on in my life. And while it’s not a complete fix, hiding ‘triggering’ posts certainly makes my day-to-day easier. I know you said it would be hard to scrub your ex-friend and ex-lover from your Instagram completely, but a partial scrubbing is still miles better than no scrub at all. And if their faces really do feature consistently in your mutuals’ posts, then a more radical solution awaits, my friend: you could delete your Instagram altogether. Why not? Do it for a month, just while you’re healing from the break up and settling into your new life. You wouldn’t have to tell anyone why. Just say you want to live offline for a while; and people will assume you are mysterious and deeply content, rather than privately unravelling.

I know that avoiding the problem isn’t as good as tackling it, though. So if you really want to face your demons, and try to reach a place where you can look at your ex-friend’s posts and feel only the merest tickle of emotion, then here is the first thing you have to internalise: the images you are seeing are not real. Yes, everyone knows this intellectually; everyone understands that celebrities and influencers curate their lives; but - as Jia Tolentino points out in her excellent essay on self-optimisation - emotionally, ‘it is harder to suspect images produced by our peers’. But suspect them you must, because an image is necessarily an illusion, and ninety-nine-point-nine times out of a hundred a person’s styled social media presence captures nothing, really nothing at all about their internal world.

This truth is one of the central tenets of Latronico’s novel, which I mentioned at the start of this piece. The book’s clever opening gambit is to describe an apartment in luscious detail - in fact, the first five pages are a kind of object porn for millennials (which I read, as intended, with my mouth open in covetous but uneasy rapture): there is an ‘exposed lightbulb with a twiddly filament’; a ‘Danish mahogany armchair upholstered in petrol blue textured cotton’; and of course ‘mason jars filled with rice, grain, coffee’ in the kitchen. The reveal is that Latronico is actually describing a picture - a picture advertising the apartment for rental; a picture that promises a life that is ‘clear and purposeful, uncomplicated’; a picture which entices Anna and Sam to begin an ex-pat life in Berlin, just as it has enticed us.

In the next chapter we learn that ‘reality didn’t always live up to the pictures’. The mess and clutter of living in a human body frustrates the couple; their ‘chargers, receipts and bicycle pumps’ upsetting the aesthetic dream they were mesmerised by. Yet Anna and Sam continue trying to pursue this idea of a life; of a life that looks good on the grid. The hollowness of such a pursuit is the novel’s second major theme. Anna and Sam build their social world around trendy art gallery openings, despite knowing that ‘they didn’t actually get it’. They appreciate the shabby-chic visual of ‘crumbling or graffitied stucco’ apartments in former East Berlin, but have no interest in exploring the history behind these quasi-ruins. Ironically, it is their sex life which dissatisfies them most, because it seems to be the only area of their life that borders on instinctual and unscripted (and therefore, perhaps, truly enjoyable). To rectify this, Anna and Sam force themselves into more performatively interesting erotic experiences at Berlin sex clubs. Do they like their lives? It is hard to say, hard even for them to say, but their old friends back in Southern Italy certainly express their approval, ‘through likes of [Anna and Sam’s] pictures of the canal, the abandoned airport, and the honey-coloured floorboards’. Just as Jia Tolentino reminds us, it is hard to suspect images produced by our peers - and, as she goes on to argue, ‘nearly impossible to suspect the images we produce for ourselves’.

This is the great tragedy of the social media age, as

Pandora Sykes

and

Ochuko Akpovbovbo

point out in their own, excellent review of Perfection: that you are in danger of spending your time not just envying a friend’s life the good ol’ fashioned way, but envying ‘things and people that don’t even really exist’. What’s more, you are in danger of spending your own life trying to pursue that imaginary existence; chasing a mirage of what looks good through the Vivid filter (the best one, admittedly) until you are no longer sure if it was the picture or the experience that made you happy. And if you consistently run toward what looks good before you even stop to wonder if it feels good, then you are in danger of living a life like Anna and Sam, who have traded instinct for appearance so comprehensively, that they do not even realise they are play-acting anymore. A grammatical conceit that contributes to the slow-burn horror of Latronico’s novel is the way Anna and Sam’s lives are narrated entirely in the conditional - ‘they would spend a few minutes wandering through the gallery space’; ‘they would lie down to doze and drink cold-brewed Yerba Mate’ - as if the events that fill their days are just suggestions for what a hipster couple might do; as if they are stage directions in a play - which, in essence, they are.

This is why I suggested earlier that you should delete your Instagram altogether. You see, I detected in your message a hint that you might be the kind of person who gets hoodwinked into pursuing a looks-good-on-paper sort of life. You mentioned a group of people you ‘aspire’ to be friends with because they seem ‘cool’. We all get friend-crushes, and perhaps I’m reading too much into this. But, personally, I have never experienced a meaningful friendship with anyone which was built on the idea that I could get something out of it (beyond authentic connection). This is probably why I am so resistant to the concept of networking - I have an occasionally self-limiting, often self-preserving desire to avoid relationships in which I fear I might slip into performance mode.

But in almost every other way I am entirely susceptible to the gram-life, and so I relate to you deeply, and hope it doesn’t sound like I’m judging. All I want to do is remind you of the incandescently brilliant truth that is being obscured by your anxiety: you have real, new, wonderful friends who you love hanging out with. This means that the solution to your problem is actually very simple to say, although harder to do: turn your attention as much as you can toward them. Each time you see a photo of your ex-friend surrounded by her aspirational pals on Instagram, and it fills you with that strange bubbling mixture of desire and disquiet, remind yourself that the real thing you are craving is love, security, and community. You can’t stop yourself feeling the jolt, but you can use each of these moments as an invitation to seek out meaningful connection with the embodied world. So each time it happens, force yourself to text one of your new friends, and make a plan to meet up in person, or get on the phone with them and have a chat. Force yourself to step outside into the sunshine and go for a run, talk to a stranger, or do whatever it is you do for joy, and not for likes (if you don’t know what this is, then you really, really do need to delete Instagram). This won’t stop the FOMO from occurring, but it will dampen the feeling over time.

As for your second fear - that your ex-friend is talking about you behind your back - this is very disquieting, I understand. It is horrible to know you can’t control what is said about you or how you are perceived, especially if you are a person who tries very hard to be liked and to do good. But - in all of my experience of the world, ALWAYS, truth will out eventually. If your friend is able to discuss your fall-out with the same degree of accountability and empathy that you showed in your message to me, then no-one will judge either of you. But if she is spiteful and damning and hyperbolic, then in the long-term, anyone worth knowing will not take her opinion seriously anyhow. People who share savage gossip with strangers get their just deserts in the end, as I discussed in my first ever Fictional Therapy, through the lens of Pride and Prejudice.

And give yourself some grace. You’ve just ended a friendship, which means your social world is reconfiguring itself; an anxiety-provoking time - well done for navigating this with the compassion and sensitivity that is clear from your letter. I think the acute fear that ‘everyone is having fun without me’ and ‘everyone is talking about me behind my back’ will inevitably fade, as you rebuild social structures that feel sound. In the meantime, try to focus on what’s real: not what is said about you, or what is presented online. Delete your Instagram, walk to a bookstore, and buy a copy of Latronico’s Perfection to read in a coffeeshop. Resist the urge to post a picture of you doing so to the grid, even though the cover of the book is so deliciously aesthetic. This adventure is only for you.

Thank you for reading Fictional Therapy, an advice column that uses insights from literature to shed light on people’s modern-day dilemmas. If you would like to receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And - if you want to reflect further on the line between the authentic and the manufactured - you need to go and read

Will Storr

’s phenomenal essay on how to spot AI-generated writing on Substack. It’s one of the best things I’ve read in ages.