Posted 18th November 2012 2528

When my former best friend and I became friends when we were 10, she was a very sweet, kind person, but she was terribly insecure and struggled with anxiety issues. This insecurity followed her throughout middle school, high school, and beyond. I always tried to encourage her, did what I could to foster confidence in her, but no matter what I did, her insecure nature always crept back up. In high school, I started noticing that whenever she started making a new friend, she’d always change her attitude, her demeanor, her personality, in what seemed to be an attempt to get that person to like and accept her. She just couldn’t be comfortable just being herself when it meant there was a risk of rejection. Over time, she fell into friendship with a few individuals who happened to have very malignant toxic behaviors. One of them had an extreme “woe is me” streak and craved constant attention, even if it was negative attention, from other people. The other seemed to find some kind of pleasure in tearing other people down, and would “dig” for reasons to bitch and complain about others, even once trying to make a roommate out to be an annoying, horrible slob for not brushing her teeth first thing in the morning (yes, that is honestly a REAL example). In my friend’s yearning for their acceptance, she started acting more like them, and before I knew it, she was a very negative, toxic person as well.

I pulled away from her because of it, and I only later found out from some other friends that she had indeed noticed me becoming more distant. Every time I’d see her, she’d be perfectly nice to me, but I learned she was talking about me behind my back the entire time. Instead of directly talking to me about it, she took my pulling away as an insult, like she thought I thought of myself as too good to hang out with her… She started telling people that I was jealous of her (for what? apparently she could never explain that one, but still insisted it was true) and that I had abandoned her in favor of my boyfriend, and she even told straight-up lies about me and my boyfriend in what I guess was an attempt to alienate me from our mutual friends… Little did/does she know that they all saw right through her… Sigh. I guess now I should just be happy that I know the truth.

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