Recently I’ve been struggling with conflicted feelings about my friendship with my best friend.

We met in high school as two people who didn’t really know themselves and suffered a lot of the same problems in childhood. We connected instantly and grew together. She related to my pain and struggles and is the one friend I felt like completely understood me, supported me and encouraged me as I did with her.

However, we also both have a pattern of bad relationships. I feel like this caused me to have to take a look at my life and find what had been missing since my childhood. I have grown so much recently and it seems like we are on two completely different pages now.

We did everything together and her family is a family to me. When she gets into relationships I never hear from her but I know she still expects me to be there when it’s all over. Lately she has not put any effort into the relationship but will text me about how much I do mean to her. When we are in person, she ignores me and puts on a mask around my other friends. She suddenly becomes outgoing and engaged and interested but reverts back to not talking when it’s just us again. She turns into a completely different person and often lies to me as well.

I’ve felt lonely lately and as though I’m being strung along in hopes we will have our old friendship back. At the same time I get angry about how she tells me one thing but her actions show another and how she has not been there for me lately as I’m dealing with healing from and abusive relationship and going to court soon. It feels like she holds me back sometimes and I realized I’ve held things inside for years that she’s done that really hurt me because I was always blamed when they were brought up. We went through so much together but I wonder if things would be less stressful if we weren’t in each other lives right now. At the same time I don’t feel like my other friends really understand me and bring out the same joy in me she does.