Direct messages are a great way to stay connected to your friends and followers, but what happens when someone uses DMs for evil? I found out last weekend when I liked someone’s innocuous DM to me and then they wrote back: “So, how are things?”
I can’t even begin to describe the feeling this put inside me.
I was in the middle of my workday when my childhood best friend dropped this huge demand of emotional labor on me. I was frozen in fear and indecision. Do I respond and keep this convo going, or ghost my childhood best friend who still lives in my hometown and look like a total bitch?
Now that I’m home, I haven’t stopped shaking in my apartment for about two hours. How could someone demand an answer to such an open-ended question when we haven’t spoken in 15 years? Is she some kind of psychotic monster? What did I do to deserve this?
After hours of soul-searching and acknowledging some painful truths about social media, I decided to respond, “Things are good, how bout you?” as a way to not take things deeper, but still come across as somewhat nice.
However, my plan was foiled when she wrote back: “Things are good! Would you wanna get lunch sometime soon? I live just outside the city and would love to come visit.”
No one should have to suffer through anything like this.
At this point, I had no idea what to do. What could I say? I didn’t wanna hang out with her because I saw on her feed that she now has two children, and I don’t need to hear about all that.
“I’d love to,” I responded. “But I’ve honestly been so tired lately. Zoom fatigue, am I right?”
While I didn’t get a response to this last message, I’m just relieved that the whole experience is over, even though I’m still recovering from the trauma of it all.
Maybe the next time this happens I’ll just leave the message on read. What’s the worst that could happen? They think I’m a rude bitch who doesn’t care about her old friends? Ugh, yeah, that sounds pretty bad.
