Being a friend is one of the most extraordinary things we’ll do in our lives, and while you might read that and scoff or think I’m channeling the girl who wants to bake a cake with smiles and rainbows from Mean Girls, hear me out — we are not meant to do life alone.
Life is better with friends, and being a good friend is a gift; not just one you give to the people in your life, but one you invite back into your soul. So when a TikTok video went viral for highlighting people being terrible to one another, it goes without saying that people were upset.
A TikTok user named Kellie was having lunch when she overheard a group of women talking about a “friend” named Sarah; only it was quickly realized that these weren’t Sarah’s friends, they were her frenemies (at best), and they were saying awful things about her.
Kellie decided that the women wouldn’t get away with that, and she started getting ready to shout Sarah out; she captured the essence of the gossipy not friends and had a field day with it. In fact, we want a Kellie of our own; everyone needs a Kellie.
Now, we’ve got a Sarah of our own in our lives that we adore; she’s kind, hilarious, brilliant, and quick-witted, so maybe when we heard that people were bashing a woman named Sarah, our defenses shot up immediately, but we’re not the only ones. No, they weren’t trash-talking our Sarah, but it felt like they were hurting someone we cared about.
Everyone on TikTok was ready to ride for Sarah, and that reflects a few things about us as a society: we don’t like injustice, we’ve all felt like the “Sarah” in this situation before, and we’ve all watched someone we love as they go through the heartache of betrayal. Feeling betrayed and then watching someone you love go through hurt is enough to make us band together to ensure that someone else doesn’t have to experience it alone.
Science of People shares the following information on what that looks like in a day to day life:
“Psychologists theorize that talking about other people is a habit that likely evolved as a safety mechanism. Thousands of years ago, when humans lived in small hunter-gather societies, people’s survival depended on them knowing who they could trust and who they should avoid. Gossiping helped people keep tabs on who was the most volatile and likely to betray members of the group, who was the most dependable and whose families’ were the healthiest and best to reproduce with.”
Gossip is as much human nature as putting on a jacket when it’s cold or grabbing a pumpkin spice latte when the leaves begin to fall, but the lines get blurred when we gather to speak negatively about people. That’s when gossip changes from something we all do to something we should know better than to do.
Some of the stitches with the original video are hilarious and might have made us laugh so hard that the corners of our lashes had to be re-glued, but we digress. It really hurts to learn that people you love think negatively about you; it hurts worse when they’re willing to say it to anyone but you.
Navigating friendship can be challenging at any age, as another TikTok video just a few months ago proved; it is hard to get through life without friends, without people who feel like they’re on your side. So while we’re giggling at how Sarahs everywhere are responding to the video, a very real piece of our hearts goes out to the Sarah being bashed by her “friends.”
This comment pointed out that a stranger was more loyal than a group of friends, and we all hoped that Sarah and Kellie would find one another, and it turns out — they did.
Dr. Sarah found Kellie’s video, and she reached out to her, noting that she went to school with the women a few years ago. An update video tells a bit more about the story, and we’ll link it for you here.
May Sarah recognize that supportive friends are out there, that she’ll find them, and may we all treat each other with a bit more kindness than condemnation. While her story has become quite a “hot-off-the-presses” story in the social media realm, we imagine there’s got to be some hurt there, and we hope that is counteracted by the thousands upon thousands of people willing to come together to be Sarah’s newest friends.