Hi all,

Just wanted to post an update. I feel like this friendship breakup has taught me so many life lessons. Some of them are conflicting in a way. I’m just feeling so extremely hurt and vulnerable. I ended up getting a Happy Thanksgiving text from this friend, and also a quasi-apology in an email the next day. I say quasi, because it started out as an apology then sort of went into a few more of her baseless accusations and by the end she was making passive aggressive jokes at me, trying to make light of it all. I was hopeful that maybe there was some remorse in there for what she had said. So I wrote back a long email that was very sincere and also explaining my side of things. I took 3 days to write this email to try my best to make sure it came across the right way, as compassionate, trying to make peace, but also not caving and letting her walk all over me. Well, the response was very volatile. She didn’t acknowledge my suggestion that we work things out and continue on in a more respectful away, and focus on the things that unite us rather than divide us. She told me I was gaslighting her, that my email was creepy and reminded her of a guy that “stalked” her, and basically poked even more fun of me.

I am mad at myself for opening up once more only to be rejected and made fun of. These kinds of rejections hit me so hard because it triggers those old feelings I’ve felt in my life so many times..of being ridiculed, of being rejected and abandoned. But even more so because this comes from someone who knows me well, and knows that I’m very sensitive and sincere. I feel like she took my sincerity and threw it in my face, after decades of friendship. I am so angry, and want to write nasty things back now, but it’s not my way. If I were a different person maybe I would tell her to F*** off. But I have this people pleaser way ingrained in me even when someone is so brutal that I just always want to be the olive branch, and try to fix it.

I’m finding myself rereading these emails multiple times a day and replaying this in my mind. I know I HAVE TO LET GO. I won’t contact her again even if she reaches out now. But it is just very hard for me to leave this mess as it is. I know my friend has some mental issues, and I’m not sure where she is at the moment with her mental state, but she seems to seriously have broken off from reality. It almost reminds me of a schizophrenic person who thinks there are conspiracies against them everywhere. My friend has become a bit like this, in accusing me of strange things that never happened, and even picking apart things I’ve said and twisting them into sounding some other kind of way. So I need to stay away, because her calling my emails to reconcile creepy just are a red flag shes’ in this “conspiracy” mentality that she sometimes gets into. I just have to wish her well and hope that she gets some help. In the meantime, I have to mourn this. It feels like a death in many ways.