It's A Scary World Out Here

• Lead image by me

True friendships have to be one of the rarest things you can have. The society is plagued with a bunch of unfriendly friends. The irking thing is that I see it occur right in front of me every time.

I wrote an article a few weeks ago about friends and acquaintances, about drawing a clear line or boundary. It can help us know our real friends and differentiate them from unfriendly friends.

But honestly, it's not enough. I think we need to come up with some bad friends filter system.

Something happened years ago where I live now, I was new there so I made friends with some of my neighbors. I thought we were extremely close until one day.

That fateful day, one of them came to inform me of my supposed friends' discussion with other people. They had not only been gossiping amongst themselves but with other people about some issues they had with me. The one that came to meet me probably thought I would be grateful. I later learnt that she was two-faced and was probably expecting me to flare up and talk bad about them too so she would inform them too.

I merely looked at her and expressed my gratitude for the piece of information. I was extremely grateful because I won't have known if she hadn't told me. I cut them off since then. Then they started telling everyone I was proud. It was a crazy period for me then.

Thank God I had my phone, I didn't need their company to live my life.

This article was triggered by something that happened this morning.

There's something I've noticed about gossiping, if you join a group of people gossiping, you never know when it's your turn.

Minus even gossiping with people, have you ever been in a gathering of people talking about other people that you know that once you leave that place, they gossip about you too?

It made me remember a set of roommates I had one year in the University, they were four friends, two of them were my roommates, the other two visited regularly and I saw a lot. They always gossiped about other people and it wasn't surprising to see them gossip about each other to the other roommates and me and each other in groups of twos and threes.

What they said about each other always shocked me, they said so many vile things that shouldn't even be said about one's enemies. They'll be trash-talking one of them and when the person enters, they'll be all smiles and cute. They would even be all over each other on their social media.

What kind of friend does that? Even if a friend did something, I feel talking to the friend is the best approach.

I'm the kind of friend that'll call my friend out on their bullshit and I can say anything I say about them in their absence when they're present. It's that simple. So I didn't understand why they did that.

I can understand if they weren't friends but they claimed to be besties, I was actually scared. I thought 'if they can say these things about their supposed besties, what are they saying about me?' I can't imagine what they would have said since we weren't friends.

This was the same thing that happened this morning, people who claimed to be as close as a family saying things that should not be said in the absence of the other. It's a scary world indeed.

We should really choose our friends carefully, if those friends can do that to their friends then they can do anything including physical harm.

I saw a post on Instagram about someone's death after being poisoned by someone everyone said was his best friend.

It's an extremely scary world.

I pray God protects us from friends that have worse intentions than strangers. I pray we don't make friends with unfriendly friends.

Amen!