WHEN FRIENDSHIPS ARE TRAGIC

I used to have this friend…

…the kind I shouldn’t have been friends with.

It’s a friend you have out of low self-esteem.

Not initially, oh no. Initially, you just find them funny, and they seem to enjoy your company, so you hang out share stories, videos and such.

Slowly, you gain each other’s trust and share horrible stories about childhood, like how their mother tried to commit suicide in front of them by overdosing and simultaneously threatening their child with a knife and how your father was killed, and you didn’t even see him for two years before his death and couldn’t attend the funeral. The moment when both of you think “yes, [my friend] gets it”.

You look after each other after horribly drunk nights, cook together, bitch about the same people…when…something shifts. When you start noticing that other people don’t like your friend, so you naturally defend them, but then, it gets harder to defend their actions.

Their anxiety and undiagnosed bipolar disorder, their mental health issues do not excuse what they do to other people. It doesn’t excuse the speculation and manipulation and outright sociopathy. And you feel angry, but at the same time, you still want to believe that they are inherently good, because they are your friend and even if you feel shitty about the situation, you still need to save them from themselves, because you need to save someone close to you.

At that point in time, you don’t know that your ‘need to save’ is your brain covering up your own flaws and just deciding that you need to focus on other people instead of figuring out what to do with your own problems. It’s like a mental procrastination equivalent to cleaning your house instead of working on a project that’s due very soon.

I realised that our friendship didn’t mean much to my friend when….drumroll….

When they started cutting themselves in front of me.

With a small, blunt peeling knife no less. Ridiculous.

At that moment in time, I talked them out of it, cleaned up and made sure they went to sleep. The wounds were on the wrists, but due to the bluntness of the knife and *kghm* lacklustre effort, they were just scratches albeit red and angry looking.

It’s a cry for help you’d say, it’s them turning their emotional pain into physical. You’d say to me, of course someone needs to be there for the person in danger of suicide. Of course this person is looking for support, for understanding, for help.

See, this particular person didn’t want my help. They didn’t particularly want me either, they wanted the idea of friendship. They wanted the world to revolve about them, they wanted me to cry about this, to beg them to stop and to do anything to make them feel important and needed.

How do I know this? Well, very long private exchanges about feelings and thoughts after the incident always boiled down to how they are “fucked up” and “broken” and they can’t deal with “emotions” and it’s my fault for being friends with them in the first place, and how they warned me and how I don’t have any right to feel bad for myself because they are the broken one.

And that is where my low self-esteem was brightly illuminated. Because I was told multiple times, how the friend is ‘fucked up’ and to stay away, but I imagined that I could save them and they will cherish me as a person forever. My fault is not in feeling bad about the situation, my fault lies in not listening. Not listening to reasons why I shouldn’t be friends with that person. They gave all reasons for me not to get involved with them, and yet I ignored all that covering it up with “oh, be we have so much fun on the good days and they seem like meeee…..”. It was selfish and desperate.

Luckily, it got to a point where enough was enough. Great learning experience, but shitty life experience.

At the end of the story, we drifted apart, the friend went on proper medication and got professional help, and a year later I met them very briefly on the street to exchange platitudes and to see that they are still very self-centered and still very much alive.