Recently, I began my sophomore year of high school. It’d been a whole summer since I’d last seen my friends in person and I was stoked to spend more time with the people I’d grown close to over the past year. However, when I got back, it became clear that we’d all changed.
After the first week of school, our group chat evolved into a passive aggressive conglomeration of condescending “roasts” and flat out name-calling. Our conversations would start off on a seemingly harmless topic such as our class schedules or teachers and then suddenly take a sharp turn almost fast enough to give me whiplash. It was almost like certain people were trying to find a way to cause drama over nothing.
Now, I’ve never been a big fan of “roasting.” I tolerated it at first because it was used in a way to let people know that what they said was out of line or contradictory to what they said before. These days, roasting just seem like a way to be totally rude to your “friends” without repercussions. Certain friends of mine would constantly harass other people, making comments about their physical appearance or weaknesses. People who were all about “equality” and “human rights” thought it was okay to allow a misogynistic, racist, comment pass, but roast someone else for not believing in a popular opinion. They would berate those who voiced their differing opinions and make it seem like the person’s opinion wasn’t valid.
You all know what I’m talking about. Those “friends” who live to simply bring other people down; they aren’t friends at all. They hurt people by crossing lines and overstepping boundaries and frankly, I was tired of it. Those first few weeks of school, I was being targeted for trivial personality traits or harmless opinions I’d voiced. I’m not even going to start on what level of disappointment I felt in my peers so I promptly left the group chat with a polite request not to be added back. I could elaborate on the whole situation, but my point is, I was sick and tired of the sheer amount of hate in the chat. There is a stark contrast between correcting your friends on offensive comments and actually making supercilious comments.
So stop roasting your friends. Aren’t you supposed to support them and help them see the best in themselves? Wouldn’t you rather spread love? Why bother being callous and making passive aggressive comments when you could just stay quiet and message them personally? I get it. There’s a certain rush of adrenaline you get when you call someone out, but is inflating your ego really worth losing a good friend? I don’t think so. If there’s an actual issue with someone, I encourage you to seriously talk to them about it, instead of banding together in an angry mob of hate disguised as false concern. And if you find yourself roasting someone about their physical appearance, I suggest you take a step back and reevaluate your life choices. We can’t control how we look but we can definitely decide the type of person we want to be. I for one don’t want to be thought of as that one person who never has anything nice to say. Do you?
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