Things have been rough lately.
I have lost a friend.
A close friend. Eight years of friendship just went out the window.
She wasn’t always the perfect friend. She would often ditch me for guys. She talked about me behind my back. She told my secrets.
I wasn’t always the perfect friend, either. I went away to New York and didn’t talk to her often. When I came back, we reconnected and were inseparable for a while. However, I hung out with her less when I got a boyfriend. And I talked about her too.
Still, I will say that I feel more wronged here than the wrongs I did.
Things particularly piled up towards the end of our friendship. I had a problem with the way she relentlessly used guys and threw them out when she was done and the way she only talked about guys; we rarely had a conversation that didn’t end up being about a boy. I also had a problem with the way I felt I couldn’t trust her with anything, big or small. She had a problem with the amount of time I spent with my boyfriend.
She dropped out of my life unless we were at school together. When the semester was over, she dropped out of my life completely unless we happened to run into each other. Things piled up more and more until she committed, what was to me, the ultimate betrayal.
She picked a guy over me. A guy she had previously compared to her abusive ex boyfriend. A guy she hadn’t even really been talking to for more than six months. She picked this guy she was seemingly using over me, and it hurt in more ways than one. It wasn’t even that she just picked him: it’s that she threw me under the bus for him. With much pain, I severed our friendship and walked away.
I had been working on confronting my feelings about losing her as a friend. I’d been doing a lot of yoga as I tried to work through all the emotions. I felt like I had sorted through a lot of my feelings about the toxic friendship that we had cultivated.
Weeks later, she texted me to ask if we were still friends. Initially, I wanted to do what I would normally do: run away. Instead I confronted all the issues I had with our friendship and we had a long talk about it. I told her about how I felt used, abused, and like I couldn’t trust her. She mostly ignored my problems with our friendship and used the phrase “if I did that.” It felt like she was denying everything that had happened, even the things she had previously admitted. I told her that I couldn’t trust her and that meant that I could not be her friend any longer.
She was a friend with whom I shared many deep, belly-aching laughs. A friend who I shared many heartbroken tears with. Together, we went through a lot of things - even some of the biggest moments of each of our lives. And while our friendship is something that I will always treasure, and it helped me learn a lot, it is something I have outgrown.
I told her I was grateful for our friendship and all the companionship we shared.
And I meant it.
