Spilling MORE Tea, Part 2: A Meme Ruined My Friendship

Hello hello, dear reader! Welcome back!

How has your week been? Have you been giving yourself grace? What about turning off the news and giving yourself a break from politics and other current events? It’s okay friend! You’re allowed to disconnect from those things, because let’s face it, seeing that kind of content over and over again can be mentally, emotionally, and physically draining. However, for myself, I use my tea blog as a way to disconnect from the chaos of the world, and to have a moment of peace to myself.

However, what happens when that peace is disrupted and our bubble is infiltrated?

Well, we can only curate a personal bubble for ourselves to a certain extent. For most of us, ignorance is bliss but we can’t always choose to be ignorant. 

As for myself? When the 2024 election rolled around, it was all anyone was talking about. 

Now, without getting into a political discussion (which is not the point of me telling you this, dear reader), I’ll be forward in telling you that this election was relatively scary for me in particular. After coming out of the closet as gay at age 19, I’ve run into a sleuth of issues regarding my sexuality including becoming homeless, having a gun pointed at me, and being fired from my job over being gay… I even detailed it more in-depth here in my pride essay titled ‘If Gay Means Happy’ (link here).

With media frenzies and fear over losing more of my rights, including Project 2025’s initiative to revoke federally protected equal marriage, I had a lot of anxiety surrounding the election. When expressing this to my grandma, she said, “Why are you worried about your right to marry? You aren’t getting married anyway!” 

lol.

Love you too, Grandma.

Anywho. 

This is where we’ll introduce one of my longest-running running tea friends. For the purpose of this story, we’ll call him Mother’s Basement Incel.

Mother’s Basement Incel and I have had a long-running friendship within my freelance career in tea. We met over social media, and when starting my blog journey, Mother’s Basement Incel was incredibly funny, and in fact, that was one of the main reasons why I admired him. He was, and still is, one of the main inspirations for adding humor to my blog. 

However, despite my long-lasting friendship with Mother’s Basement Incel, I started to notice a pattern with him: Every year or so, he’d get into drama with other tea people, would get kicked out of various discord channels, and would eventually continue to offend multiple other people as well. At one point or another, I started to question my connection with him myself and begged the question: How much longer until we have a falling out?

After all, given how frequently it happened to him, it felt inevitable. I almost experienced this earlier last year when I told him I wrote a book, and it took a year’s worth of hard work to complete. He responded and said that he was writing a book and was using AI to do so. 

For the record dear reader, using AI to write a book is not writing a book. It’s the equivalent of driving 26.2 miles and claiming you ran a marathon because you traveled the same distance.

As much as I wanted to argue it with him, I decided to let it go. After reflecting on last year's ‘Spilling The Tea’ series, I was admitted to not starting any arguments with any friends — regardless if I felt justified or not. 

However, that didn’t last long.

One morning, coming up on the election, I opened my social media feed to see that Mother’s Basement Incel posted a meme, of an AI photo of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump sitting at a table by each other, debating if soda can be served in a teacup or not.

Instantly, I became irritated. Not only was tea my mental block away from politics, but was also irritated because the election wasn’t funny. In fact, the potential that my safety as an individual rode on this election, was more than upsetting.

While irritated, I left a comment under the meme and said something along the lines of, “I don’t think this is funny, there’s too much going on in this election to make it humorous.”

Then, almost instantly after, Mother’s Basement Incel sent me a private message that read, “Hey, I deleted your comment. Don’t EVER do that again or our friendship is over.” 

In an instant rage, I replied, “Ok then, consider our friendship over.” 

I then immediately blocked him.

While trying to calm down from my spike of adrenaline, I received a message from two separate friends, who said, “Hey, we just saw Mother’s Basement Incel’s Instagram story. What happened?!”

While not wanting to involve other people in the drama, I replied, “I don’t know, what does his story say?”

One of my friends then sent me a screenshot of his Instagram story, which read something along the lines, “Well, Cody blocked me. I’ll look forward to showing up in his blog series!” 

It was safe to say, this was annoying.

So many questions were running through my mind. Was I wrong to comment that I didn’t find the election funny? Should I have just unfollowed him? Or, did he antagonize me to just get a reaction out of me, and manipulate me to write about him on my blog? Or yet again, is this another instance of someone wrongly perceiving me as someone who is angry and ready to fight because of a parasocial relationship he had with me? 

In last week’s post, I detailed how I struggled with various people in my life taking the wrong thing from my blog, and cherry-picking how they view me. Now that one of my longest tea friendships has crumbled, did he push my buttons just to make it on my blog?

Well first, congratulations to him. I let him become a self-fulfilling prophecy on my blog by posting this.

Second, was I being overly sensitive over politics and inserted myself where I shouldn’t have? 

Well, I might have been extra sensitive to politics, but for good reason. However, I was already anticipating that he’d pick a fight with me eventually, so was I unintentionally provoking him knowing that it was inevitable?

I wasn’t. I probably shouldn’t have commented anything at all. However, is it really worth keeping someone in your life if you can’t have open dialogue with them, such as finding their politics tone-deaf and insensitive? 

After thinking on this, I’ve concluded that any strong friendship can withstand anything as minimal as a criticism on a meme, much less political viewpoints. 

Although I’ve gone back and forth on this, I’ve concluded that the friendship had already been over by that point, and if I really didn’t like seeing what he was posting, I could have unfollowed him and moved on to avoid any drama.

However, I was already put off by this friendship by Mother’s Basement Incel’s boasting of their use of AI. Given I was already apprehensive about this friendship ending, maybe it wasn’t worth it for me to keep my mouth shut anyway. Perhaps it wasn’t worth it for me to keep this friendship any longer…

However dear reader, our friendship is not typical — it’s not a friendship that can easily be rattled by politics, much less an AI meme. I know that I can come to you with anything, but just know that you can come to me with anything, even criticisms, and we’ll still be friends at the end of the day.

I hope you have a great rest of your week dear reader, and hope you have a wonderful tea. 

Until next week,

~Cody Wade

Aka The Oolong Drunk

“Blissfully Tea Drunk”