Group chats, once lively with inside jokes and ridiculous memes, become abandoned as soon as my bags are packed and I’m on to the next apartment, job, or city. Moving over ten times in my short life means this has happened to me often—the loss of friendships has been a normal part of my life, something I’ve always seen as a negative.

Never being able to keep in touch while watching some of my greatest, loving friendships float away with the wind of my next whims has always felt like a travesty. Distance, time, and my own inane social anxieties meant I’d go from avid responder to silent bystander. Things only got worse when I ditched my smartphone for a few years. To me, these social faux pas were to be reckoned with in my future, leaving others to finally get sick of making friends with such a ghostly girl. After getting over myself, I begin to wonder: can we reimagine ghostly group chats as a benefit instead of a curse?

Friendship breakups are always heartbreaking, and that’s for a reason. There’s a real bond that comes with fostering a deep friendship, a chemical reaction that occurs when we become familiar with someone. High-quality friendships lengthen the human lifespan, improve our mental state, and even lower blood pressure, according to the American Psychological Association.

Any woman who’s gone through puberty-ridden war with their fellow friends could have told you those same scientific conclusions. Female friendships feel like having a partner in crime, a long-lost twin to wreak havoc right alongside.

Most women value these crucial female friendships, ones that are like hot glue, allowing you to be your whole, true self. These friendship beginnings, once rolled into handwritten letters and diary entries, have transformed in our present into DMs and group chats. From the blocky boxes of AIM and MySpace chats to group texts and calls right in our pockets, the ways of friendship have evolved, but the joy and solace they bring haven’t changed one bit.

My female friendships have been electric, but my male friends aren’t exempt from that either, including sad friendship breakups. I’ve had my fair share of brothers in arms who’ve come and gone in my life, providing perspectives always different from my own. Some days, my male friends felt like Martians with emotions exactly like my own, just manifested in different ways. Similar to my female friendships, the male friends I’ve made have catapulted my maturity.

All my queer friendships have been the same, pushing me to be more uniquely myself than I ever thought possible as a bisexual Jamaican woman. Every single one of these friends pulled back my curtains and helped me shed more layers than I could have ever removed on my own. Through it all, every tight-knit connection helped me grow more into myself, providing me the support I needed to take life’s next steps. Just having a shoulder to cry on in my past gay, male friends was a key to further treating my depression and anxiety.

It makes sense that the ends of such intimate friendships are eternally gut-wrenching. Studies even exist that prove a rise in physical pain comes with the loss of our friends. When we find ourselves in a friendship breakup, we’re grieving whether we want to or not. The question is, how do we turn that grief into something as powerful as the relationship we lost?

Although I still shiver often over my ghosting past, there has been research that adds a bit more nuance to the ghosting conversation. Supposedly, I’m not alone in my feelings of regret after ghosting friends, a phenomenon that statistically happens more than we think. According to a 2023 study by the Thriving Center of Psychology, one in two Gen Z and Millennials have lost friendships through ghosting.

Ghosting’s prevalence seems to permeate friendships more than it does romantic relationships, mainly due to ease. Still, more than one reason exists for great friends suddenly going ghost in group chats. A De La Salle University research article names a few different reasons for ghosting—escaping toxicity, self-preservation, and fears of overstepping boundaries being some of them—and even recognizes positive effects in subjects who may first feel guilty but then describe “a weight lifted off [their] shoulders” after committing the ghosting act.

Some of these reasons for ghosting I could easily relate to, especially as a self-declared, sensitive pushover still learning to set my boundaries. But at other moments, a melancholy would take over me whenever I thought of participating in a group chat with people I just may never see in person again. That anxious sadness would overshadow all else, and before I knew it, I’d drop contact without even consciously realizing it.

However villainous I sometimes feel for being a ghost of group chats before, there’s never a day I don’t see and feel all the influences of friends’ past. The same magical beginnings obviously come with shattering ends, whether we like it or not. I may never have those same connections with those same people again, and the guilt and grief will always press on my heart. But I’ll always be able to look in the mirror—however ghostly I feel—and see a strong, independent woman homegrown from the relationships of her past.

Growth can’t exist without the love, light, and life of friendship. Even the abandoned group chats are just proof of all the allies life has given us and all the ways we’d be a little less ourselves without our friendships, breakups included. So, the next time you’re grieving an old friend, don’t forget to forgive yourself for the end; you’d never be you without those ghosts in old group chats.