Invisible

I’m not sure if this totally counts as bullying, but here we go. I grew up in a school full of nice people, where bullies were few and far between. Elementary school years were great, and I even made it through middle school without incident. I had great friends, and I loved them. I had this one friend in particular – me, her, and this other girl, we were the inseparable triumvirate. But then in high school, sophomore year, she just stopped talking to me. When we hung out, there were usually other people around, and she would find anyone else she could to talk to. Anyone, even if she barely knew them. She would get into conversation with somebody, and I would be left awkwardly standing there next to her, feeling totally left out and unwelcome. Even if I tried to join in the conversation, she would barely acknowledge my statements or turn it around and make it about her. For a long time, I assumed she wasn’t doing it on purpose – she was a social butterfly who loved to talk, and I was a shy and awkward girl who could barely hold a decent conversation and tended to hide my emotions from others; she’d rather have a more interesting conversation and didn’t realize she was hurting me because I never let it show. And this went on for months. One thing that really bothered me was when I flew across the country by myself for a thing, and when I got back, the one person who asked me how my trip was was her new best friend’s boyfriend, who I didn’t even know very well. Not her. I felt so invisible and ignored and dissed at the time around her, but I didn’t want to make a fuss when everyone else was happy, and I thought she wasn’t doing it on purpose. Well it turns out I was wrong. Come Christmastime, my other friends ask me if I’m going to her Christmas party. I hadn’t even known there WAS a party. I asked who else was invited, and it turned out that the entire friend group was invited – except me. At that point, I knew that she was doing this on purpose. I stopped hanging around her, avoided her at all costs. But what I didn’t realize was that she had unintentionally cut me off from my other friends. See, she was the one who threw all the parties and planned all the get-togethers in our group, which meant that I was never invited to them. And while the rest of the group was hanging out and getting closer as friends, I was not. Avoiding her, as I came to realize, often meant avoiding my other friends, and we drifted apart. And I kept telling myself, I need to talk to her about this, and she’s a human being so she deserves to hear it face-to-face. And for months more, I could never work up the nerve to do so. Eventually, sick and tired of being invisible, I did manage to call her aside and sort of say how I felt, but I was totally panicked and couldn’t think clearly enough to get the right words out to get my message across. She told me that she was tired of me always showing up an hour or so late to her parties. I tried to explain that my mom doesn’t let me go unless my grades are good or I spend several hours doing homework in order to bring my grades up beforehand, but she didn’t understand. I was too panicked, and I explained myself very poorly, and she didn’t seem to get it. After that, I gave up on a face-to-face talk and wrote her a three page letter explaining exactly how I felt, which I delivered the next day. I waited for her to come talk to me about it, because I assumed she would, but she never did. I heard from one of my other friends that she was very pissed at my letter. At that point I gave up. I knew then that I could never repair the friendship we once had. I’m nearing the end of my junior year now, and I still don’t really have anyone I can call my best friend. I see her, and I just get angry and upset and hurt, and I feel this hatred towards her that I try to tell myself is just in my head even though deep down, I know it isn’t, and she has no idea. She acts completely indifferent towards me now, and she’s totally past it. I think she thought she was just “cutting toxic people out of her life,” but she never even talked to me, never gave me a chance to fix the problem I was causing her. She still doesn’t seem to understand just how much she hurt me, because I still get upset when I see her and I can tell she doesn’t think about everything that happened when she sees me. I guess 6 years of being best friends didn’t mean anything to her, because she just dropped me like that. I am still on my own, with no close friends I can depend on. I can’t wait for college, when it will be a whole different crowd and nobody has their own friends yet – maybe then I can finally have a best friend again.