My Uphill Battle with Friendship

Since I was a kid, I’ve had trouble making and keeping good friends. Even in the first grade one day, everyone was writing one of those “All About Me” books and we were told to write about our friends. At the end of the project, when everyone read their books aloud, I was not to be found on this page from any of my thirty one classmates.

I’ve always been different, and I’ve always accepted this, I never felt like I’d be happier if I were like everyone else. However, this has made making friends rather difficult. I moved to my current school district when I was in the third grade, and when you live in a small town like I do, most of the kids have been going to school together since pre school. So when I arrived, everyone already had their best friends; nobody wanted to go out of their way to be best friends with the new, weird kid—except one girl, whom I’m referring to as S. S was also new. She was a stick thin little girl with crazy, curly blonde hair. We bonded over being new, and quite frankly, I don’t know how much we had in common. But how much does a little kid need to bond with another kid? S and I became pretty close. We spent weekends together, we had slumber parties, we were best friends. S and I went into fourth grade together, the same happy kids we were in third. But the middle of the year was when things began to go downhill for me. S started being mean, to put it bluntly. She would call me ugly, make fun of me for not having a boyfriend (hooty hoo kid, there’s a reason for it), call me fat, the basic mean kid type of things. I remember one day I wore a denim jacket that she didn’t like, and she got all of the girls around us to tell me that I was ugly and shouldn’t wear anything like that. I remember one day we were sitting together in music class, and I caught her talking to some girl about how I thought I was so much better than everyone else, and so, I decided not to talk to her anymore. I was not going to be friends with someone who was mean to me.

Breaking things off with her was hard. I was a kid and I had never been through something like that. The two years that followed were rough on me. I had no one to talk to. I found myself somewhat depressed. I felt as if no one understood me. But more than anything, I was left to marinate in the insults she had spat at me during that time. My self esteem suffered greatly. Was I really the fat and ugly girl she made me out to be?

As I went into middle school, I still didn’t have any friends, but during the fall, about the second semester ,I met Is. Is and I bonded over music at first. They wore a shirt of a band I was familiar with and I complimented them on it. The following night, I texted them and asked their favorite song by that particular band. The rest was history. We became best friends. Is and I were similar in that we were both the weird kid with no friends. We spent our first year of middle school inseparable; we spent weekends together, we spent the summer together, we were best friends, and I’d be lying if I said we didn’t make good memories. And then we went into our next and final year of middle school. At this point, I was expanding my friendship circle and becoming more aware of who I was. I had more than two friends, and I was starting to acknowledge that I wasn’t straight. I became close with a girl who we’ll call Sam. We texted almost every day and because she was in the grade above me, I didn’t get to see her a lot. So when I did get to see her at lunch or during free period, I would obviously try to be with her. I assumed Is would be okay with this, as they had a lot in common (music and such). Little did I know, me being so close with someone else lit a flame of jealousy in Is that spread from their heart to their entire body in a short amount of time. Is became so incredibly jealous, and when I decided I had feelings for Sam, this only made the situation worse. I sensed this and tried to make a buffer. I’d include Is when Sam and I were talking, and I’d to my best to make sure to do what Is wanted equally as much as Sam. This, however, was not enough for Is. On several occasions they tried to break Sam and me up or would run away crying at how “badly I was treating and not including them.” Of course at the time I didn’t know I was being manipulated into thinking I wasn’t allowed to have friends, so I felt horrible. This led to the inevitable splitting up of me and Sam as a couple.

I don’t want to go into too much detail on Is. Our friendship was an abusive one that lasted three years, and quite frankly, that could be a whole other story which I will most likely end up writing because I still have not fully found ways to cope with the aftermath.

The summer of 2017, the treatment I received from Is hit an all time low. They would make fun of me. On two occasions, I came to Is with extremely dark things, (my eating disorder, depression ect) and when I did, they disregarded me, or made the situation about themselves. Particularly, I recall when I was in the thick of my eating disorder they would tell me it was an insult to them since they weighed more than me. The manipulation and mistreatment carried on for three months, and then I met Flower. I say I met Flower like Flower was a stranger up until this point, which is not true. Flower had been a mutual part of our friend group for a while, we had just been indifferent. The first time I ever stayed at her house, Is texted Flower demanding to talk to me. Is proceeded to tell me I was a horrible person for not inviting him, that I was a terrible person for not telling him who I was hanging out with. On that musky summer night on Flower’s bed, she changed my entire perspective. She took her phone from me, told Is to back off, and hung up. Right after this, she asked me: “Wanna go eat some cupcakes my mom made?” As if nothing had happened. She didn’t dwell on it, she didn’t cry, she didn’t get upset that someone was mad at her. This outlook was the one that would eventually lead to the break off of Is and me.

Fast forward to my birthday, August 26th. Is had decided that he no longer liked me, and thus blocked all of my social medias and ways of contacting him and he did the same to Flower. As a result, I spent the day with Sam and Flower. We had a great time in town. We went to the mall, hung out, ate. It was a good day. We got home that night and ate ice cream and pizza rolls in my kitchen. Flower’s phone buzzed, interrupting our conversation. Flower looked at her phone and her brow knit into a confused V. She had received insulting messages via snapchat from a mutual friend. Flower had been posting pictures of our outings on her snapchat and our friend had slid up on every post saying something mean. The one that stood out to me was on a picture of Sephora where Flower had said “I don’t even wear makeup” and our friend had said, “You should.” We quickly came to the conclusion it had been Is that sent these messages from our friend’s phone. I spent the rest of the night crying on my bed, Sam rubbing my back while I sobbed over my mistreatment for the past three years of my life.

The months that followed, I tried to unpack all of the things that I had been manipulated to think, and what was true.

I was a horrible person that deserved to have no friends? Manipulation.

Everything that had happened to me was my fault? Manipulation.

My eating disorder was my fault and I was insulting others by struggling? Manipulation.

I did not deserve the abuse I received? Truth.

I was capable of making better friends? Truth.

To this day, I am still working to untangle myself from the web of lies I was taught to believe for years, and it is hard. I often wonder to myself, was it my fault? Am I the reason everyone mistreats me? Flower has been my number one support system. She has shown me the truth behind the lies, and she has introduced me to people that have truly changed my life.

Three years ago, I had one person I felt was my true friend, and today, I have roughly seven people in my life that I know I could go to any time I needed it, and that I will always be loved by them.

If you see far too many similarities in the people you call “friends” and the people mentioned in this story, I urge you to find people who care for you. I know it's hard to make friends, and you may have to spend years of your life alone, but you will eventually find your Flower, and you will be treated the way you deserve.