LogFAQs > #962460392

Quick note, I just realised how much I wrote. I post long walls of text over plenty of stupid bullshit, sure, but this is a post that got way out of hand - like I didn't set out to write this thing. Feel free to skip, I had kind of an episode the longer I wrote and it's not worth reading.

A friend of mine did something that I wouldn't have done to him, and that set off a chain reaction where I realised how little he actually respected me and how much his presence in my life had been driving my self-destructive urges and general shitty emotional wellbeing. And it sucked, because he was a real port in a storm - my home life has been pretty shitty the entire time I've known him, and I came to rely on him a lot during the real low points. Even now, a friendship without the baggage that tanked everything would be preferable to where I'm at now in my life.

But it's like, sometimes one thing happens that's like the straw that breaks the camel's back. Cutting someone out for just that one thing can be extremely selfish and self-centred, and I've chosen not to shy away from that - if I'm selfish for doing what I did for the reasons I did, I'll gladly be as selfish as I need to be to get out of this situation and protect myself from further harm. I'll be the bad guy in all of this. But on top of the inciting incident, I remembered times when I'd do something kinda silly but totally innocuous, and it'd get used against me to like belittle me and make it into a joke. There was a point where he yelled my name at strangers out of moving cars, telling them to add me on Facebook. He kept starting this persistent rumor with any new people we met that I had a kid with my first girlfriend, and despite it always upsetting me and fervently denying it he'd go so far into this bit that whoever we'd just met wouldn't know if he was actually joking or not. When I'd go to add to an open discussion in our friend group, he'd just talk over me and say what he wanted to say, even after I gave everyone a grace period of a few seconds to make sure I wasn't butting in - I genuinely don't think it was intentional, because he'd just do it intrinsically without thinking. Without realising I was even talking. Getting surprised when other people told him to let me speak after he interrupted me five times in a row.

And it's like I'm thankful for our friendship, I would be less of a person than I am today without that relationship. I simply wouldn't be where I am today without him - not even looking at this through rose-coloured glasses, this friendship was critical to my personal development at the beginning. But saying that, for about half of our friendship I began to feel like less of a person around him, and one reason I fell into binge-drinking the way I did was to numb myself to anything that made me feel bad about myself, like people making me the butt of the joke. In hindsight, he was the better option in my life to be around, but I had to be drunk for that relationship to be bearable and that wasn't tenable at all.

Our friendship came with good parts, but eventually it got to the point where we'd be standing in line at the store and he'd go and make small talk with the cashier offhandedly, and I'd go up and just blank out and feel like a human potato - and I would feel like less of a person than my friend was. That wasn't something my friend intentionally cultivated in me or whatever, it's not his fault that I felt that way, but it's telling that that's how I felt about our friendship in the end. It's telling that when I drank myself into a health problem and had to go sober, I wanted to spend less time with him the longer I spent sober. Something about him just made me feel incredibly unhappy about myself in a way that other friends didn't, like I was a broken vase who had to suck all the pieces up and hold them in place whenever my friend was around. And in hindsight, I feel like it's because I was his friend out of obligation, out of a sense of owing him financially and emotionally for all I had taken up during our friendship, not because I liked being around him or how he made me feel. And that culminated in a scenario where he did something where he didn't want me to be hurt, but the fact that he did it at all was such a slap in the face that it ruined our friendship. He didn't want to rock the boat after doing a running leap from the bow to the stern.

I didn't trust him for a lot of our friendship because I noticed the way he treated me, how small and overshadowed I felt even when I began finding my voice and stepping further into the light. I especially didn't trust him after he confided other people's secrets in me and gossiped about them. And after months of badgering me to be more open and vulnerable with him, he used the one thing I felt comfortable talking to him about to stab me in the back. He might not have meant to, but he did.

The worst part is that most of my friends were through him, meaning that I lost most of my wider friend group, and the mutual inner friend group we did have are so entangled in what went on that when I left, I had to leave everyone behind. I went from having a solid 4-5 real life friends and like 15 acquaintances total to having zero friends and zero acquaintances, because I chose to disassociate from this guy after what happened - not that I begrudge those people, because I chose to leave knowing the consequences for doing so and the reason I left is so petty and selfish on the surface.

We were so inseperable that for the first month after I stopped being friends with him, people who weren't aware there had been a divide would say hello to me and ask how my friend was doing before they'd ask me how I was doing. It really sums up how much of a cog, an accessory, I was in this friend's life - not just to him, but to everyone else.

I didn't want to write this much, but when it comes to this situation I tend to spiral into these episodes where I have to process everything all over again. Like a couple of times, I put my phone down and had to like process how I was feeling, less like a flashback and moreso just thinking about how unhappy he makes me in my daily life whenever he comes up. This is one wall of text I wanted to avoid, sorry.

tl;dr I realised how much less of a person I felt compared to my best friend, and in the aftermath of a traumatic event I began to realise how little he actually respected me as a person. He basically did the worst thing he could have done given the circumstances and expected everything to go back to normal, and I realised the severe effect that this friend had on my personal development in the aftermath, so I chose to leave all of my friends behind and start again from square one because I would rather drag my balls through a mile of broken glass than spend the rest of my life being a subservient accessory to a person who fucking hurt me as badly as he did.