Best Friend to Bully

Anonymous

Ten years of friendship. First five best friends, following five still very close. So what changed? What changed for her to actively make my life a misery? What changed for me to end up here? Feeling alone, isolated, like no one understands. As if I’m a worthless, ugly person who doesn’t deserve anything. Meanwhile, she laughs at my pain, turning others against me. I cry myself to sleep; distraught from the pain she’d caused that day, scared of the pain she’ll cause tomorrow. And I cry, and observe her social media posts of her “amazing friends” or her drinking at parties. So I’m here hurting from her actions and she just carries on without a care, cause I don’t matter to her and she wants to hurt me.

What did I do wrong? Primary school, high school, everything is great. Three month long summer and everything has changed. And all I can think of is our GCSE results, mine were better than hers. But I never told anyone what I got, and she was the one who published them on social media. Yet still, I spend my life wishing I did worse and she did better, cause at least then I might have had the chance of feeling happier. But why should anyone else matter when exams are about doing your personal best, and not about having to do better than your friend. So why do I feel so guilty that I did well, like I don’t deserve my results, like she should have done better?!

It’s just every time I speak, she criticises me. I’m always wrong, even if I’m actually right. And if she knows there’s no way to prove me wrong when I state a simple fact, she ignores me. And then she gets the others to join in too. It’s like I don’t exist, like they wouldn’t realise if I wasn’t there. Sometimes I wonder if I should just disappear, cause none of them would probably care. But it’s just constant, like excluding me from group chats, and making snarky faces at me on the bus, and just making my closest friends go against me, leaving me with no one. And I tried staying away from her, but when we get the same bus to college it’s hard. All I want is for her to leave me alone, and admit what she’s done and say sorry. But that’s never going to happen. I just don’t know what to do anymore.

I tried telling my form tutor but that made everything worse and I nearly lost my other friends who mean so much to me. I could go to my form tutor again, and she’d have the fact she was a bully on her permanent record, but I’m scared that will lose me my friends. And I guess you could say what friends are they if they take her side over yours, but they’re just all scared of her. Maybe I was just never meant to have happiness.