The Dryer Story

Two winters ago, I went on an overnight hot springs trip with a group of women I’ve known and loved for decades. We stayed in an Airbnb, played Cards Against Humanity, laughed until our stomachs hurt, and ate this amazing Kahlúa cake that one of those women is famous for. In the past, we would have been drinking wine, but since I quit drinking, these ladies don’t drink in front of me. I keep telling them they don’t have to do that anymore, but they do. It’s one of the many beautiful and kind ways they have shown up for me over my life. They did, however, eat some pot gummies. I abstained, not because I am strictly sober. I’ll use THC when I’m struggling to sleep. But it doesn’t help me socialize with anyone outside of my dreams.

At one point, I went to check on the laundry from our soak at the hot springs. I was ass up and on my tippy-toes, reaching for a towel at the back of the front-loading washer, when I heard a dull pounding of feet coming toward me at a clip. Then I saw stars. In a second, I went from being the only sober person at the party to not knowing where I was.

One of my friends… let’s call her “Karen,” got a running start in my direction and slapped me on the butt. It knocked me head-first into the dryer that was stacked on the washing machine and stunned me into a stupor. I think she saw me with my ass in the air and thought it would be funny if she smacked it. That has always been my assumption; I have never brought it up with her. (“Ass” umption. Ha! I didn’t intend the pun, but now I have to point it out.)

I stood up and turned around, dazed. Another friend was looking at me with concern. She is a nurse, and she seemed to shift into professional mode. She said something like, “Oh… I thought she hit her head.”

I had this weird “coming to” kind of experience at that moment. I thought, oh, yeah… I guess I hit my head… that’s what happened… And then, slowly, I knew where I was and who was there with me. Then I became aware of the awkward silence. My nurse friend was on my left and still focused on my face. She was probably studying the relative symmetry of my pupils, now that I think about it. My third friend had come back from the bathroom and joined the circle. I’m not sure if she saw what happened, and didn’t say anything that I recall. The silence was mostly owned, in my memory, by Karen. She didn’t say any version of, “oh… I thought that would be funny… but maybe I shouldn’t have… are you okay… I’m sorry…” There were many things she could have said. She said nothing.

No one laughed, which I thought was strange. I kept expecting someone to laugh to break the tension, but it didn’t happen. I probably told everyone I was fine. And we went back to the card game.

The next day, I was back home, lying on the couch with a bag of frozen peas on my forehead, when my phone rang. It was Karen, and Karen was in a rage. She was furious with my other two friends for the way they behaved toward her over the 24 hours we were together. I was surprised because I hadn’t noticed anything, but also not surprised because this is Karen.

Karen is intense. She is fiery and passionate. She loves in a big way and lashes out in an epic one. She had a terrible childhood, and I know she is still dealing with that trauma, so when Karen does something volatile (like shoving me into a dryer and then pretending it didn’t happen), I ignore it. Rather, I used to ignore it. I told myself, “She can be unpredictable, but she is stable enough and… whatever… It’s fine.”

On the phone, I talked her down. I didn’t say what I thought, which was, “I was there the entire time, and the things you say happened didn’t happen, and even if they did, I would think you are overreacting.” I definitely did not ask, “Why did you shove me into a dryer?” I knew I couldn’t say these things to her, even though I was still operating from the belief that she was traumatized but basically fine. I had been on the hot end of her lash-outs many times over the years, and I wanted to avoid another one if possible. I also wanted to spare the other women this fate if I could. Karen has one tool in her conflict resolution toolkit, and it is a flamethrower.

So, I listened. I validated. And then I fell on my sword. I said, “I don’t think they were trying to make you feel unwanted or like you were outside of their friendship; I think they were high, and I was telling a long story about my two days of jury duty that even a sober person would have found boring. So, of course, they had a sidebar conversation while they waited for me to stop talking already. And in the car? That was my fault, too. I had the music too loud, so they disengaged from our conversation. No one ever sits in my back seat, so I didn’t realize the balance was off, but they told me it was too loud, remember?”

We talked it out. She hung up in a better mood. As far as I know, she never called them, and that was the end of it. I got a fresh bag of frozen produce and went back to the couch. Then I forgot about this and moved on with my life. Until a few months ago, when this story popped into my mind and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

Over the last year, I’ve come to believe that Karen likely lives with an undiagnosed (or unacknowledged) personality disorder—most likely Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). I say that with no malice. It’s not an insult. It’s a framework. And it helped me make sense of what happened to me—and around me—after our friendship ended.

The term borderline (coined in the 1930s) comes from an outdated psychiatric model that categorized patients as either neurotic (anxious, depressed) or psychotic (disconnected from reality). An emerging group of people with intense emotional instability didn’t fit neatly into either group, so they were said to be on the “borderline.” Today, we understand Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) as a condition marked by extreme fear of abandonment, black-and-white thinking, emotional volatility, and unstable relationships. The name stuck, but it’s a historical artifact—not a reflection of what the disorder really is.

People with BPD often experience intense emotional inner worlds. Their emotional pain is real and raw, and their fear of abandonment is central. That fear often manifests in extreme behavior—rage, emotional manipulation, and rewriting of shared reality. They idealize people and then devalue them. They split the world into black and white: you’re either safe or dangerous, beloved or abandoned. Some people living with BPD overreact in conflict. Without treatment, they often cannot help themselves. They say, in effect, “You hurt me, so I will destroy you. And if I hurt you, you deserved it for what you did to me.” Once you fall off the pedestal that they balanced you on, they bury you underneath it. The person you were doesn’t exist anymore. Only the betrayer remains.

That’s what happened to me. After I tried to set boundaries, I became the villain. My past behavior—especially during my years in active addiction—was dragged out not as an opening to reconnect or heal, but as ammunition.

Let me be clear. My behavior in those years of addiction was unacceptable. I was a danger to myself and others. I have deep regrets for the things that I did and the risks that I took. Quitting alcohol was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and Karen was central in my efforts to get past the most difficult part. She drove me to rehab and dropped me off at the door. I will always be grateful for the way she showed up for me back then. Karen had nothing but empathy and encouraging words for me until the friendship ended. Then, she weaponized my sins and “went scorched earth” with me (her words, not mine).

Why am I so hung up on this night with the dryer and the zero acknowledgment that what happened was weird, to say the least? Clearly, it was a red flag, covered in lint. (Sorry, I couldn’t help that one.) I think it sticks with me because it was a moment when our friendship was at its best. I wasn’t drinking. She wasn’t lashing out. That was us in a high-functioning moment. That was as good as we got, by the end. It wasn’t the end of the friendship, but it has become the symbol of it. I got knocked off balance. It hurt. I said I was fine. I played my role. I absorbed the impact. I made it okay. I protected the room.

But it wasn’t sustainable. And I can’t live in that room anymore.

This post isn’t about her. It’s about what happens when you realize you’ve been bending—ass up on tippy-toes—to accommodate someone else’s unhealed wounds for so long, you don’t even remember what it feels like to stand upright.

It’s also about the cost of stepping away. Because when you walk away from someone who lives in a fear-based narrative, they don’t just let you go. They cast you. They publicly shame you. They write you into the script of their pain. You become the abandoning mother, the judgmental ex, the backstabbing best friend. And they believe it. They tell others. And if those others haven’t experienced it directly, they may believe it, too.

For a long time, I accepted her stories at face value—about people, about conflicts, about betrayals. I believed her version of things because I thought she was just emotionally intense, maybe a little wounded, but fundamentally trustworthy. I let her tell me who was safe, who was selfish, who had let her down. I lived inside her emotional weather system. I aligned myself with her version of events, without questioning the source. I thought that was loyalty. In hindsight, I was being slowly trained not to question. Not to doubt her. Not to ask, “Wait, did it really happen like that?”

But that day, she told me a story—an emotional retelling of something I had witnessed firsthand—and I didn’t recognize it. The details were wrong. The emotional tone was exaggerated. The meaning was twisted. I still wasn’t ready to name her as an unreliable narrator; I excused it because of her trauma and the fact that I knew she saw everything through that lens. She was constantly on the lookout for threats and potential abandonment. It made her see betrayal and insults where they didn’t exist. I made it make sense, even when I knew it was based on nothing. Because I thought it would never happen to me. But when the friendship eventually imploded, and she started telling other people stories about me—stories that didn’t line up with anything I recognized as true—I understood what I had been part of.

Finally, I did question the source. I started talking to people she’d warned me about. I started revisiting moments I’d written off as “no big deal.” And I started to see the pattern. It wasn’t one friend or one incident. It was years of distorted narratives, rehearsed grievances, erased context. I had been living inside her version of reality and when I stepped outside it, I saw the cost. To myself. To my other friendships. To my sense of what was true.

Now I’m telling my side—not to win or convince, but to reclaim my own memory. To name the dream I woke up from.

So yes, this story is about a dryer. But it’s also about the moment I realized that being knocked off balance wasn’t an accident; it was a metaphor. It was the playbook. It was the whole friendship in miniature. It’s about the moment I realized I wasn’t just dazed from a hit to the head. I’d been emotionally concussed for years.

If any of this resonates with you, I see you. If you’ve lived with emotional volatility and didn’t have the language for it, you aren’t alone. If you’re wondering whether it’s okay to say, “That wasn’t okay,” even years later—the answer is yes.

It’s okay to say, “That hurt me, and you shouldn’t have done it.”

It’s okay to walk away from the scorched and blackened earth where a relationship used to be.

It’s okay to write your story down.