LogFAQs > #967875318

I'm not exactly a hit with the ladies, but I did lose my former best friend last year and that's been fucking me up ever since.

I ended the friendship over a girl, which is absolute pussy shit, but it was one of those things where it literally would have not been a problem if she had gotten with anyone else, and it was only such a massive deal because it was my best friend.

Like you'd expect me to be mad at her, but I was mad at my friend because I spent a year building myself up to asking her out - she lived somewhere else during a lot of this - and confiding in him about this crush.

He was upset that I didn't share more with him, like he knew that I had shit going on I wasn't telling him and he wanted to be let in. I'm a private person and I keep to myself, but he was getting worked up about it. So I let him in on this crush I had, because it was the most benign fucking thing I could think of and there was only one way for him to fuck it up.

I asked her out eventually once she moved back, and she rejected me and we stayed friends - that was fine. I have a long history of like intense jealousy and self-loathing when a crush doesn't work out, and I committed myself to breaking the cycle here. She's gonna get a boyfriend and it's not gonna be me, and I'm going to be okay with that because she's my friend and I want her to be happy. Then one day when I put the work in, I'm gonna find love and everyone is gonna be happy.

The one caveat in my brain is if that boyfriend ends up being my best friend.

At this point, I already feel inadequate compared to my former best friend. I feel like less of a person compared to him, in the way he can speak to other people in ways that I feel I can't and in the way I'm often made the butt of the joke around him. There's a bunch of stuff that began to fall into place around this time that made me realise how miserable I felt around him - i.e. how I let him in on this crush thing because he wore me down about letting him into more of my life - and after confiding in him about this girl, I can't see him getting with her. That's not in the sense of like "I can't possibly imagine this possibility ever happening", I mean that in the sense of "if this ever happens, it is going to break my spirit". The pieces were very much put in place for this to blow up in my face.

I've told him my history of crushes ending in like self-hatred and intense jealousy. I ask him, multiple times, to give me some sort of warning if he's going to pursue her himself. I get that I was asking for a lot with that last one, it's none of my business and he doesn't have to tell me shit, but I was asking so I could put some distance between myself and that situation so I could avoid being hurt.

And then it happens. I don't catch them kissing or anything, but I catch something damning and it snowballed into me lashing out and him eventually admitting it. And I had this long internal dialogue between my rational brain and my emotional brain, how I needed to get over it because I didn't want to hurt anyone but how I just couldn't overcome what had happened and how much it had hurt me.

I made multiple attempts to go back to that friend group. The only way that's gonna work is if I'm friends with them separately and never hear about their lovelife. That's incredibly selfish and unreasonable, so I try to come to terms with it. I get exposed to the relationship too soon and lose any progress I had been building up to. I had my first and only panic attack because I felt like I was on a timer and if I didn't come to terms with it soon, I was going to lose everyone I cared about. This friend group was an escape from a bad home life, and I was about to lose all my friends because I couldn't come to terms with this relationship.

But the tipping point - the part where I let my emotional side win and I committed to cutting these people out of my life forever - was when I thought back to when I first became friends with my former best friend. Specifically, the first time we hung out outside of school.

We went to the town pool and went swimming. And after a while, he gets out of the pool along with another friend, and I go to climb out - and he steps on my hands so I have to let go and stay in the water. I go to the other side, he's run over there so he can step on me more and keep me in the pool. He and another friend are having fun by stopping me from getting out of the pool, by treading on me for their own amusement.

And it dawns on me that this friendship was never built on respect. It was never a fair balance between equals. That's not to say that we didn't get along famously or were never friends, but it did establish a foundation of disrespect that had always been at the foundation of my friendship.

So I stopped trying to go back, and I left that friend group. And to be totally honest? I'm still incredibly fucked up about it. I tensed up multiple times writing this post, and I'll occasionally have like imaginary arguments about him trying to come back into my life and me having to explain why I didn't want that to happen. I just stand at work having these imaginary arguments because I need to get it out, because the thought of my former best friend trying to come back into my life is a fucking nightmare. I have to be prepared to shut him down totally and live my life without his backstabbing ass breathing down my neck. I owe him a lot, genuinely, but I can never repay that debt of gratitude and belongings because him being a part of my life in any way is going to fucking destroy me mentally all over again.

So long story short - my last "relationship", per se, ended fucking terribly. I became a really ugly person, and I learned how to be selfish in a way that lets me look after myself. I'm going to put my wellbeing first. I come first. I'm never going to let another person make me feel that shitty about myself. If that means hurting other people to do it, I will hurt other people to do it.