When we become friends with someone, it is very crucial to define and understand each other’s boundaries. Otherwise, there might come a time when one of the involved feels emotionally devasted. And that may or may not be intentional.
This incident happened to me at my university around eleven at night. I was going to take a shower in the public bathroom before going to bed. I met a friend there and waved at him and we talked and then I went inside the bathroom for a shower. After a few minutes of entering the shower, what I saw left me completely devastated. The friend whom I met earlier climbed into the bathroom beside mine and was recording a video of me! When I saw him, he started laughing like a demon and ran away.
I immediately put my clothes on and ran behind him. After I warned him that I’ll inform the authorities in the morning, he got scared and let me delete the videos. He even apologized later in the morning and showed guilt. But the question is, what if I had not seen him? What if my videos were circulating all over the place? Now I didn’t want to inform the authorities as that would have meant that his career is destroyed forever. I decided to drop a message in the class WhatsApp group without naming anyone just to say that “not all jokes are funny in the name of friendship.”
Now I don’t know the reason behind such behaviour of him. Maybe belonging to a privileged socio-economic background gave him a sense of entitlement over others or there could be many other possible reasons. But whatever the reason, we need to always keep in mind that our actions could have destructive emotional and psychological impacts on others, which could take a very long time to recover from.