LogFAQs > #950621260

I was bullied throughout the entirety of school, and in the last year or two of high school I began to assimilate into a group of people. I became best friends with one of them in particular, and in the seven years since I left school, I've probably spent more days hanging out with him than I haven't.

I'm a pretty shy, introverted person. I'm a bit better than I used to be, in that I can actually be around people and get on okay by myself - but initially, I relied on people I felt comfortable around to act as a social buffer. They made headway, I supplemented their personality. There was a point where I needed that safety net, and my best friend was that safety net - for which I'm genuinely grateful. I couldn't ever repay him for that.

That's not to say that our friendship never had issues. He's always spoken over me in social situations. For what it's worth, sometimes I'll try to interject something into a conversation, and I understand that I might not be accepted into that conversation. That's something I need to work on, but it's not solely what I'm talking about.

What gets to me is the times where I've been talking in a group setting - whether it be addressing a group or talking directly to someone - and as I go to say something, my friend will just butt in ans say what he wants over what I was about to say. Something I can be guilty of, except I realise I'm being an asshole and I stop talking - whereas he just keeps going. And then he'll finish what he was saying, and I'll go to say what I was going to say before he cut me off - or build on what he was saying - and he'll start saying something else after I've started talking. This happens three or four times in a row - I'm trying to say something in a conversation I'm already in, and a few words into whatever I was gonna say, he just talks over me. And he does it multiple times, every time.

He'll stop as if he's finished whatever he wants to say, I'll even wait for a second to see if he's finished, and when I go to speak again he just talks over me again.

It's like, there was a time when I didn't have a voice and I was lucky to have someone who could speak up and make social situations easier. But now I've found my voice, and I feel like I'm being spoken over. I didn't mind being in other people's shadows to begin with, but now I'm trying to come into my own and stand on my own two feet, I feel like I'm being overshadowed by other people in response. Not everyone - there are people in my life who listen to what I'm trying to say, and who even point out when I'm being spoken over. It's mostly just this one person who's making it this hard.

Another thing is that my friend will deliberately try to make me uncomfortable for his own amusement. He'll touch me when he knows it'll make me uncomfortable, like grabbing my arm or touching my hair, and he'll yell at his family members or deliberately try to make them feel bad for his own amusement which stresses me out. His mother is a high-strung lady, and when he lived at home, he would intentionally upset her for his own amusement - and that would make me uncomfortable, so it would be even funnier to him. He'd even tell me that he was gonna make his mum upset before calling her into his room so he could watch me squirm before he did it.

And the thing is, our relationship has always kinda been like that. Being bullied for years made me painfully withdrawn, and even if they would tease me and make me uncomfortable at points, I was glad to have friends who seemed to actually like having me around and who could make it easier to come out of my shell and adapt to new experiences. There was some good aspects to our friendship right from the start - we've always made each other laugh, really fucking hard - and there were bad aspects that - to the credit of my friends - have significantly diminished as we've gotten older.

But as I've tried to grow and become a better person, aspects I didn't mind so much have become suffocating and toxic. And looking back, I think I always knew that those aspects were toxic.

I've never been truly comfortable around my best friend. Our friendship always involved similar aspects to the bullying I went through, just with the understanding that it was in good fun and that they still liked me as a person. I used to think that I would instinctively flinch around them because I was still traumatized from the 10+ years of bullying I had been through before I met them - and to be fair, I definitely was. But then my friend began to complain about boundaries that I had put up, that I wouldn't speak to him about stuff he wanted to speak about, and there was this feeling that because someone confided something private in me, they would expect me to open up to them to a similar degree. And I never would, because I just wasn't comfortable sharing privileged information with them. I think that's a legitimate boundary to have.

It's only recently that I've managed to put all of this into words - I never really felt safe around my best friend. And I'm not comfortable in his company at all any more - being around him actively makes me feel bad.

One reason I don't trust him is because of how he's gossiped about other people the entire time I've known him. He's good at getting close to people, and he likes those deep and meaningful conversations where you confide deep seated insecurities to each other. When he ran into privileged information, the sort of shit you're not meant to tell anyone else, he would tell me about it.

A mutual friend of ours confided in him that he had gay or bisexual feelings - my friend coped with the stress of that confession by bouncing it off me. He phrased it like that, too. I knew when people were having affairs and shit, because he'd find out and he told me. He even told me about how one of his hook-ups had developed a condition where she pulled her hair out and ate it. Shit I was not supposed to know - sometimes, shit he wasn't even supposed to know. And as a private person myself, it began to make me more and more uncomfortable when he'd tell me this stuff.

So I always knew that if I ever told him anything sensitive, he would tell other people. Because he didn't just tell me any of that stuff - I saw him tell two or three more people the same stuff he was telling me. We'd go to lunch with other friends, and he would tell them the same privileged information in the same way he told me.

He's tried to get better about this sort of thing. He's tried to treat me better, and address aspects of our friendship that bothers me. He even stated as much earlier this week - he knows I get uncomfortable, and he's trying to be better about it.

But the trust has been broken. I haven't trusted him for years. Maybe I never even trusted him to begin with.

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I can feel it in my bones, I'm gonna spend another year alone.
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