How being kind of a whore got me banned from my favorite nail salon

You know when you meet someone and you just know — like instantly — that you two are going to be too much together? The energy is big, the fun is real, and somewhere in the back of your brain a tiny voice is whispering that this is not going to end quietly.

That’s the friendship. The nail salon is just where the evidence ended up.

So what actually happened at this nail salon?

This place is not your average strip mall nail spot. I want to be really clear about that before we get into any of it. They are good — like, the kind of good where you drive past three closer options just to get there. And they have a bar. An actual Pinterest-worthy bar where you can get a little drinky drink while someone does your pedicure. That’s not a nail salon, that’s a lifestyle.

Which makes being banned from it considerably more tragic.

Does a friendship implosion count as a reason to get banned from a business?

Here’s the thing — it wasn’t a fight with the salon. It wasn’t a bad review or a dispute over a gel color. It was a friendship that blew up, and the shrapnel landed everywhere, including there.

When you’re in the middle of something really dark — the kind of dark where someone has to point out to you what’s happening because you can’t see it yourself — you don’t exactly have great aim. You’re not making clean decisions. You’re just moving through rooms and hoping you come out the other side.

She was the one who pointed it out. That’s the part I couldn’t figure out how to hold for a long time.

Why do the best friendships sometimes go down the hardest?

The friendships that implode the loudest are usually the ones where both people were actually showing up. That’s the part nobody tells you. It’s not the surface-level ones that take you out — those just quietly fade. It’s the ones where someone really saw you.

And when your whole life is in the middle of reorienting — when you’re doing the actual ugly work of figuring out which way is up — sometimes you lose people in it. Not because they were wrong. Not because you were wrong. Just because the timing was a casualty.

It makes sense because healing isn’t a straight line. It’s more like a wrecking ball that you’re also somehow riding.

What does any of this have to do with being a whore, exactly?

Look, the title got you here. I stand by it. There’s a version of this story — the version that makes sense from the outside, from the perspective of the nail salon — where I look like exactly what the title says.

And honestly? In that chapter of my life, I don’t fully blame them for the read.

The things we do when we’re surviving don’t always translate cleanly to strangers. That’s the part I’d go back and tell myself about that whole season if I could.

Is the nail salon still worth going to, banned or not?

One hundred percent yes. If you are not banned from this place — and statistically, most of you are not — you should absolutely go. Get the pedicure. Get the drinky drink at the bar. Let someone take care of you for an hour in a room that looks like it came from a vision board.

I’ll be outside. Fully healing. Reflecting on my choices. Occasionally glancing longingly at the window.

For what it’s worth, I’ve been doing a lot of work on figuring out what self-care actually looks like when you’re rebuilding from scratch. The nail salon thing was a symptom. The diagnosis took longer.

The moral of the story is not about nail salons. It’s about what happens when you finally start to see clearly and realize the mess you made on the way there was actually just proof that you were moving.

Some of that mess got me banned. Some of it got me better. I’ll take the trade.

And if you see me in the parking lot of a really nice nail salon just sitting in my car — mind your business. I’m healing.

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