If you had met me in my first year of university, I would have confidently told you I was one of the good people.
Not perfect, of course. Nobody is. But I was kind enough, minded my business for the most part, and genuinely believed that if life were a movie, I would at least be one of the characters the audience liked.
Like many people entering university, I was looking forward to lectures, learning and everything university promised, but there was one thing I wanted just as much. I wanted lasting friendships.
My older sister had two friends she met in university and, years later, they are still doing life together. They had attended one another’s weddings, celebrated milestones together and have become family in every sense of the word. I loved that. So somewhere in my sixteen-year-old mind, I had already decided that university was where I would find “my own people”.
It happened surprisingly quickly.
As luck would have it, I met four ladies almost immediately. We became friends without trying too hard. We attended lectures together, ate together, exchanged notes, laughed over the most random things and, before long, I had quietly convinced myself that these were my people. Looking back now, we had not even known each other for that long, but at that age, a few months felt like forever.
Then life introduced the one thing that has probably tested more friendships than we care to admit. A boy.
He had initially shown interest in one of my friends. She was not interested, so that chapter closed almost as quickly as it began. At least, that was what I thought. A little while later, he decided that he actually liked me instead. Even at sixteen, I knew enough to understand that this was not a situation to entertain carelessly. It already felt awkward, and I had no interest in creating unnecessary drama within the group, so I turned him down and carried on with life, convinced that common sense had prevailed.
Apparently, common sense was working overtime alone.
Not long after, the atmosphere within the group began to change. At first, it was subtle enough to dismiss. Someone would stop talking when I walked into the room. A joke would be made, and everybody would laugh except me, mostly because I had no idea what the joke was about.
People I spoke to every day suddenly became “busy”.
You know that awkward phase where nobody has officially fought, but everybody somehow knows there is a fight? That was us. I remember lying awake one night trying to replay every conversation I had had over the past few weeks. Had I said something? Had I forgotten somebody’s birthday? Had I offended someone without realising it? It never crossed my mind that I was at the centre of the story.
Then one of the girls eventually asked the question that made everything make sense.
“So…are you and him together?”
I actually laughed because I genuinely thought it was a joke. When I realised it was a serious question, the pieces finally came together. Somewhere along the line, I had become the girl who “stole” a boy I had never dated, never encouraged and had, in fact, turned down. It honestly did not matter that I had said no. It did not matter that nothing had happened between us. Once they had settled on a version of events that made sense to them, the facts just became background noise.
The friendship slowly unravelled after that. We stopped moving around campus together as often and the conversations became polite instead of easy. Before long, the people I had imagined would be in my life forever had quietly become people I used to know.
Looking back now, I cannot even remember what became of the boy at the centre of all the drama. Funny enough, I remember losing the friendship far more vividly than I remember him. Time has also taught me that not every misunderstanding gets a neat ending. Some people will hold on to a version of you that you do not recognise, and there is very little you can do about it.
Sixteen-year-old me thought the lesson was about friendship. Adult me thinks it is about perspective. We all tell ourselves stories about the people we meet, but sometimes those stories are incomplete.
Before deciding who the villain is, it might be worth asking whether we have the whole story.
