Link to original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/10xfoi9/my_23f_friend_25f_dug_through_her_trash_to_find/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
I’m 23F. She’s 25F.
The other day, we had a conversation where she told me not to give up on my dreams. I thought this was nice, but wondered where it was coming from. She told me she knew about a lot of my personal goals bc several months ago, I’d stayed over at her house, and I threw a couple pages from my manifestation journal in the trash. She fished them out of the trash, read them, and wanted to discuss them with me. I told her I didn’t want to talk about it but she insisted and said I shouldn’t be ashamed of what I’d written.
I got back to her after a couple days of not answering calls or texts (I am very conflict avoidant) and told her that I felt uncomfortable with that. She said that I shouldn’t feel ashamed of what I’d written, that she thought my goals were beautiful, and that when she saw them in the trash, she dug them out because she wanted to “learn more about me.” She didn’t apologize, and just said “wow, umm, I don’t know what to say, I’m sorry you felt like I was invading a personal boundary.” Like I was being unreasonable or some shit. How do I tell her why this is wrong? She doesn’t seem to understand typical boundaries humans have around that.
TL; DR-my friend didn’t apologize for digging through the trash for my journal entries, and said she just wanted to know more about me and thought my goals were beautiful. How do I educate her about basic human social interactions?
16 comments
You don’t, you’ve tried and she’s not willing to accept that she crossed a boundary.
>How do I educate her about basic human social interactions?
Reduce contact. Explaining doesn’t work for people like this.
Original post is deleted but from this update shd sounds insanely invasive and not respecting basic human privacy…
She has a serious case of Main Character syndrome. She is the main character of the story and you only exist as long as you are important to her. So her diigging through the garbage to read your journals isn’t a problem to her because you only exist as a support character to her. And her reading your journals allows her to “help you”.
What kind of mental disease does she have?
It’s not normal but if it’s in the trash it’s fair game. It becomes “abandoned ” property.
“Hey, friend. I know you have a good heart, but what you did, taking my journal from the trash and reading my thoughts that I meant only for myself. You can’t do that kind of thing. Not to me, not to anyone.
When we talked before, I don’t think you were actually understanding why what you did was so awful, so I’ll spell it out here:
You say you wanted to get to know me better — but that’s a really selfish reason for reading my journal. Your curiosity only benefits you and it hurt me badly in the process. I’m a person, not a tv show. My personal thoughts aren’t for your entertainment.
I don’t care if you think I have nothing to be ashamed of — I’m allowed to keep non shameful things to myself. And you had no idea when you started reading my journal that there wasn’t shameful things in there. The point is, I didn’t want to share those words with anyone, but you took away my power over my own thoughts.
You broke my trust. It’s going to be hard for me to come back from this.
Can you assure me that this will never happen again? You’ll never go through other people’s private things, even if they are in the trash? That you won’t let your curiosity lead you to break other people’s trust? Because if I can get you to do that, maybe there’s a silver lining to this.”
What the FUCK?!? This is not “not normal”, this is *batshit insane*. This is like serial-killer crazy. Please be very careful.
Ok, it’s plainly not normal to dig through the trash but hell, there is no way I would be discarding private writing into a friend’s bin without completely destroying it first. In fact, I’d prefer to take it home and dispose of it there. Maybe I’m weird… but that’s how you keep private stuff… you know, private.
I don’t have anything else to add about the behavior aspect but I highly recommend you buy a shredder. Not just for the journals you throw out, but also for any sensitive information such as financial info or things that may have information that you don’t want public (ie social security/credit cards/etc).
> How do I educate her about basic human social interactions?
Are you A) her parent or B) a professional therapist that she has hired for this purpose?
She’s 25. If she hasn’t learned basic human boundaries by now, why do you think you have any power to educate her?
Remove yourself from the equation. (In fact, remove the victim entirely from the discussion.)
Explain that the widely-held social convention is when someone crumples up some personal thing they’ve written and throws it in the garbage, you treat it as if it’s been erased.
If, despite that, you still find yourself rummaging through the garbage to read something not meant for you, 1) don’t get caught; 2) don’t pre-emptively confess to it.
People will think you are either a stalker, a narcissist or a socialpath.
I can understand wanting to be supportive of a friend, but this is like, *stalker* levels of supportive. It’s not healthy for the friend and it’s not healthy for the person doing it. Even if this was like best friends, never going to break the friendship, talks every night, if *my* best friend did this I would be like “but why..? That’s kinda fuckin strange.”
You say “I am uncomfortable with this boundary you are crossing. My journal is meant for my private thoughts. You going through them and wanting to reflect on them without giving my explicit permission for you to see them is very upsetting and I lose trust in our relationship as friends because of this. I have a right to my privacy.” If she gets bent out of shape because of that start randomly asking extremely personal questions and give her no time to respond fully and come at her like she’s a bad person. Privacy. If you wanted her opinion; you’d ask.
I quickly glanced through some of the comments and realize that many will look at this friend’s actions and being creepy and way out of line and say “why can’t she see she is being intrusive and why can’t she apologize?” Maybe it is just the way you wrote what you wrote, but I suspect that your friend is more than just socially awkward. Yes, she doesn’t know boundaries. Yes she should know better than to not only fish your writing out of the garbage, but then to proceed to question you as if this were a normal thing to do. Is it possible your friend is a little bit on the spectrum (Asperger’s?) It really doesn’t sound like some power play, or she was trying to embarrass you. A serious talk is definitely in order to make sure this doesn’t happen again. But this also did not seem nefarious, just someone trying to be (awkwardly) helpful. But maybe I got this wrong. Hard to tell from a few paragraphs.
> How do I educate her about basic human social interactions?
you dont.
you grey rock and let contact diminish to zero over time.