Was I Really Their Friend At All?

Discussion in 'Brainbent' started by VintageBear, Sep 9, 2016.

  1. VintageBear

    VintageBear Active Member

    I was debating on posting this in my vent thread since my feelings regarding this situation are relevant to things I have said there but I guess this is a specific enough situation I want to talk about away from that. I hope no one minds that.

    But here we go.

    I have been dealing with the effects of a fallout with someone I have been friends with for almost three years. I feel like my involvement in it was more than it should have been, and the ways I'm reacting to them are more severe than they should be.

    Although, I have known of this person since before I personally knew her, and I was seeing red flags back then! At that time, she was a friend that one of my best friends knew and occasionally hung out with online. I should have known better, I really really should have know better now than to be her friend as well.

    I will mention Ex-Friend and Best Friend a lot specifically in the following spoilers, so hitherto they will be called Silver and Panzer respectively (not actual names of course, just parodies of online usernames to maintain anonymity.)

    Im sorry if a lot of this is confusing to read or understand. If you want to ask specific situations you all may. guaranteed in my spaced out mind I have forgotten many details that may have contributed to us falling out. I just....really want to be witnessed by more people, and hear from others who have had similar situations.

    This just tears me up and I want to move on. It's getting better, but it is still really hard because I am in a lot of denial about how serious a lot of these situations were.

    Panzer and I have been friends for a long time (since 2009 at the time of this writing) when I first started hearing them talk about Silver. My memories are fuzzy of their first mentions, but I remember at some point these interactions becoming more....strained in a way. Panzer would reluctantly vent about how their new friend Silver was a bit controlling when it came to the roleplays they did on a game they played together, but it was decently offset by chatter of them doing equally fun and positive things together. This must have been mid-2012, so a full 1.5 years before I interacted with Silver for the first time.

    They were good friends nevertheless, despite each one's shortcomings. When you're a group of socially awkward nerds, it wasn't hard to be accomodating to quirks and ideas. They met once or twice in person at a large con cosplaying characters from a digital comic series they both were obsessed with at the time. I was a bit envious but I was happy for Panzer, since they didn't have very many local friends to hang out with, let alone friends in their country at all since myself and her other friends were long-distance.

    I didn't think too much about it at the time because I hate feeling hyper vigilant and concerned about someone's qualities. After Panzer and Silver's convention shenanigans however, details get fuzzy for me. I remember a few times where Panzer would rant to me about how insistant Silver was being about planning roleplays and how everything had to be perfectly planned out. That any kind of wibbly wobbly detail was wrong and should be shunned. That anything that deviated from her idea of what "proper structured rp" should be, was wrong and should be shunned. Panzer disliked that Silver was not more open-minded to being spontaneous, and disliked being guilt-tripped even more for openly saying this towards her.

    I remember telling Panzer on more than one occasion that Silver was a toxic influence on them and that they should distance from her if they felt that tense around her. I admit my judgement on these occasions may have been harsh to a certain degree, because Panzer DID tell me about good things Silver did too! Silver organized thoughts that would have been lost to their short-term memory, and Silver was a good archivist of WIP art and documents and RP that Panzer lost in power-failures in her home or other miscellaneous situations. Silver was smart and cool! and yet these niggling qualities of controlling behavior was enough for Panzer to be worried and tense around her.

    I remember between that summer after I moved to that fall, Panzer got a new microphone headset and wanted to combine their close friends in one huge Skype call to test it out. They were so happy and so excited to test it out! Everyone was pretty enthusiastic at first. I got to meet other friends of both Panzer and Silver! It was a pretty good time for the first couple days. Hearing different accents and voices is kinda fun when you can muster the energy and/or spoons for it.

    But things got awkward super fast. Then strained. Then tense. Then verbally violent. It sideswiped me completely, but Panzer and Silver revealed to me that they were trying to down play a friendship that was on the rocks between them and another friend that was becoming possessive and manipulative about who gets invited into their apparently exclusive group. Massive double standards were had and Silver and Panzer felt the most victimized.

    Long story short, there was a massive fallout that I had first person witness of between this group of friends that was never very stable in the first place. Panzer, Silver and I retreated to a skype group with just us three to recover from that.

    To be quite frank, the nature of my first conversations with Silver was on a messy foundation from the start, and I shouldn't have let myself get too sentimental. I was doing it for Panzer's sake because they were shook from this situation with their other friend group that I didn't want to cause another incident for them to cope with.

    tl;dr : My first encounters with ex-friend Silver were awkward and full of red flags even BEFORE I MET THEM. I ignored the signs and became friends with them anyway because she and Panzer were hurting from losing a friendship and I wanted to be the kind of nice mom-friend I thought they both deserved at the time to help cope with it.
    The next two years, 2014 and 2015 were actually pretty good! We licked our wounds from that bomb of a situation and created our own small friend group. Silver and I became friends and found we got along pretty well actually! She and Panzer continued to roleplay and play that game they played together and I watched them draw sometimes in livestreams. We were all eager artists.

    I needed this because throughout 2014 and the first half of 2015 I was going through some of the worst Depressive episodes in my entire life due to some financial duress that my family were going through. We lived paycheck to paycheck most of 2014. I went hungry a lot of days because our food budget was so small, and our alloted foodstamps weren't enough to supplement our diets because the guidelines for eligibility is so fucked up in my state (Montana). and because we weren't eating, I became an anxious wreck because I stress ate a lot when I felt depressed. Empty stomach+ brain screaming for food while also telling me im a useless, talentless fat fuckface= no bueno.

    Having friends who cared about me took the edge off. Since a lot of my friends also are mentally ill in various ways, there was a ton of solidarity with my suffering. So hanging out with Silver and Panzer together was a welcome reprieve from all that going on in my personal and occasional working life. Silver was thankful to have another person in her life who didn't shun her immediately due to her struggles with mental illness. Although she had a tendency to step on our toes from time to time regarding her struggle to reciprocate care and support, we got along pretty well and worked with each other's shortcomings.

    Everything seemed pretty normal. We all had our ups and downs and most the time we were able to talk things out if we had minor fights and disagreements. We were finding that happy medium with our chosen creative methods, and doing our best.
    (about April or May), things started to take a nose-dive with Silver, although Panzer and I both tried to turn the other cheek and ignore the red flags.

    Silver was physically ill as well from a plethora of health issues. Some were valid and with reasonable concern, some were frantic hypochondriatic diagnoses. Panzer and I were concerned for her health, because we saw that SOMETHING was wrong with her and pushed her to get the help of doctors she had access to, despite her frantic paranoia that carried through to her regular conversations with us. Early symptoms of what was later diagnosed as IBS-C started emerging and caused Silver to drop out of school and developed agoraphobia. She absolutely FEARED going outside. Even going into her backyard to let her dog out to run around and go to the bathroom gave her anxiety.

    We tried our best to ease her worries, and supported her the best we could from a distance since we lived so far away from her. These issues in themselves didn't cause any fights, but her interest in art and writing and roleplay waned. She was declining and I felt powerless to help her.

    Without divulging too many more of her personal issues, everything happened to her took its toll. I found myself unable to know what to do. Secretly in my off-time I'd read articles about her symptoms, read informative blogs about people coping with similar issues. I tried my best I really did. Sometimes the roleplay would work. Some days Silver was just too depressed to do more than sit at her computer and talk to us idly. Despite my worries and my own depression, I did my best to support her.

    I started feeling the same doom as before, but I tried to not vocalize it too much around Silver. She was starting to hound on Panzer some more about being more active in roleplay, and started to lecture them more and more and more about their style of creation. Silver is very much the sort of person who likes things prim and proper and organized and in their rightful organized place. Panzer is....the exact opposite. Chaotic and eccentric thoughts and ideas that are often spur of the moment. Although I am an eccentric person myself, I can understand the appeal of organizing things nicely so I did my best to be neutral to both their styles, and talked Panzer down from being too upset and say something out of line.

    Around this time Panzer wanted to go back to college, in hopes of progressing their chosen career and went to a convention for the first time since they first met Silver. I was really happy for them! They were pulling out of a depressive pit and it felt so warming to see my friend moving forward in their life and making positive changes.

    However, around this time in Summer, Silver's behavior flipped so much over that neither of us could really figure out why this was all happening. Silver's dismissive criticisms and nitpicks became unusually cold demands to do what she wanted to do. Panzer admitted in some side conversations to me that they felt really upset because Silver was trying to get them to not go to college because "you need to be here with me. I will be lonely. You don't need school".

    Silver started becoming overwhelmingly possessive of Panzer and pointers on how to organize her ideas became harsh criticisms on how none of their ideas ever made sense, and that their ideas was the work of a toddler. I paraphrase a lot of this, but arguments became more and more frequent as time went on and as Panzer started college again.

    It was around this time that I started feeling a suspicion that....Silver didn't really want to be my friend? All of our interactions with each other were in the Skype group and when Panzer wasn't around Silver didn't feel compelled to maintain conversation with me. She just waited for Panzer to come online.

    I felt like....I was just a friend of Silver's because I was a close friend of Panzer's. Because I was involved with them, I was just another tool to posess them more and more.

    I tried swallowing this paranoia, and it mostly succeeded. But the arguments continued as Silver's uneasy clinginess to Panzer became more unsettling and obsessive. Anything that Panzer did that didn't involve her became a bit argument about how Panzer was going to abandon her and leave her to rot, proceeding to guilt-trip her for making her feel like shit when she was dealing with her physical problems on top of her declining mental health.

    Panzer started growing tired and weary again. Her art became more strained, organized, cold. Nothing like the eccentric nonsensical art she created before. I was growing heartbroken but failed to find a way to bring it up without Silver threatening a meltdown.

    Months of Silver's berating and guilt-tripping and struggles came to a head one day while we were talking about minecraft and computers. Silver had recently gotten a new computer a month before so she was enjoying new freedom in enjoying higher graphics. Although she was perplexed on why minecraft would run out of memory. I suggest something I had done in the past to fix the issue and for some reason it didn't work and minecraft wouldn't run for her anymore.

    She went on a tirade and started pointing fingers at me and accused me of trashing this computer and ruining her other one due to my "shitty advice".

    I snapped. She had never attacked me directly before. All her attacks have been towards Panzer.

    I snapped. My patience with her was gone, even when my sense were telling me that her struggles were becoming mentally draining for me. Even when my mind was telling me that her illnesses and struggles were no excuse and no pass for her to be manipulative and demeaning to her friends when they didn't do exactly what she wanted.

    I snapped and said all the things I was afraid of over the accumulating months. About how I felt that I was never a friend to her. How she never cared about me, and swept my worries and fears aside to talk about herself instead and how her problems were so much worse than mine since " have a well paying job" and am able to cope decently with my Depression. I felt our relationship became one-sided despite all the funtimes we had, and how she was so willing to demean and dismiss those funtimes as important to her if we didn't help her.

    I was done feeling like I never mattered to her. I know demanding reciprocation sometimes can be a tough thing to balance, but she never tried. She felt like her problems were worse and that Panzer was obligated to fulfill them.

    I was done knowing that my paranoia was right. I was scared, but I was done. I left the Skype group and cried for an hour because I had lost a friend.


    I felt like maybe I was being unfair on Silver, because she was having such a hard time coping with feelings she has suppressed as a child because of having no friends and healthy outlets to express them, but helping her was so draining on Panzer and I that we started fearing Silver.

    We FEARED that anything we did that didn't fit her perfect idea of organization and logical knowledge, she would throw a fit that we'd abandon her since we weren't listening and that "everyone leaves me at some point, why don't you guys admit it and leave me alone" and guilt trip us until we concede and try and make her feel better.

    She started BLAMING us for things that were going wrong, since we were her only support network. She started blaming us for not fixing her issues.

    It was really hard to deal with, and even now I'm noticing things about our interactions over the last 3 years have raised red flags that I should have noticed but I chose to ignore. How she failed to maintain friends for very long after meeting them. How quickly she was to dismiss creative ideas. How she felt jealous of Panzer and I since we talked about OC's more freely, and how she made us feel continously guilty for enjoying things without her that we knew she didn't like anyway. It seemed we weren't allowed to like things she found boring or not worth HER time, while she endlessly lectured us on things she was passionate about. We tried in vain to listen to her and hope she'd return the gesture someday, but it never came.

    We played right into her hands, and I think I did most of all.

    I'm seeing this all unfold, and Im noticing more and more things and the feelings have started hitting me like a brick wall. After almost 5 months, Panzer and I are still trying to pick up the pieces and fixed things that her subtle abuse and manipulation broke or changes. Panzer's art is becoming more delightfully weird and eccentric, and I don't feel as pressured to hide my interests around my other friends like I used to with her.

    I still feel broken though, because I can't stop caring about her. I can't stop feeling like I love her. I feel guilty about not giving her the help she needs. I feel like a failure that I couldnt help her improve.

    It was hard to give up that hope, that I could help her cope with her mental illness. Because we share a lot of the same fears about our friends leaving us. But none of my words never reached through to her. I go to her blog every day to check up on her, and my heart jumps into my throat every time i see a ranting post from her talking about how "my two friends caused me to need therapy. It's all their fault im like this." and it makes me want to cry that I couldnt do anything. Even if she didn't deserve it, I couldn't help her.

    Am I a failure for stepping away from a situation that was exhausting me? I feel like I am sometimes, though seeing Panzer become more uplifted and confidant about their art is encouraging though. I am seeing the invasive effects of Silver's influence get away from us little by little. And dealing with her online presence in other social circles is easier to cope with and brings us both less immediate anxiety.

    But it's still hard sometimes. To realize that in many ways, I wasn't really Silver's friend at all.

    I'm sorry if none of this made sense. Im re-reading and a lot of this is really hard to understand for me.

    If it's not too much, can I have a hug maybe???
     
    • Like x 1
  2. VintageBear

    VintageBear Active Member

    This is all coming out all of a sudden because I found out the other day she unfollowed me on tumblr and deleted me from skype.

    After confronting her with my emotions and how I felt she thought about me if she felt so willing to throw away our friendship while she remained so creepy and obsessed with Panzer. After all this time, she only cares about Panzer? Did I ever mean anything to Silver at all?

    In her response, she said

    You never said anything to me for weeks and you always waited for me to make the first move to talk to you… every single time, every single time.

    That gave me the hint that you didn’t want to be friends anymore- that you were slowly dropping me, so I took initiative.

    Again with this silence- it’s bullshit. wanted to talk to me? talk- it’s not that hard, I just couldn’t come up with every single conversation topic we had each and every time, I grew tired of waiting to get talked too first.

    I felt hurt goddammit!!! We had a fight that involved me opening up about my feelings towards her and all of the piled up occurances of her manipulation, and she EXPECTED ME to be the one who would break the silence about it after CUTTING CONTACT WITH HER. I ignorantly allowed her to remain in my skype contacts, and told her she could talk if she wanted to, but she never did??? She thought it was my sole responsibility to speak to her again after all that was said and done. She expected Panzer and I to apologize to HER for causing HER to need therapy. That us breaking contact with her was uncalled for. But yet she didn't have one ounce of energy to think about how much this situation has hurt me???

    I felt so angry and so violated.

    I really feel like I had never been her friend at all and she was just using me for my kindness and genuine wanting to support her. And when I didn't give it to her without question, I was tossed aside like nothing and then chastised for not coming when she cried for help.

    It makes me both angry and sad.
     
    Last edited: Sep 9, 2016
    • Like x 1
  3. mrozna

    mrozna bloodthirsty hussar fuck

    You already know what I think about it, so *hugs*
     
  4. VintageBear

    VintageBear Active Member

    Thanks friend -hugs- You've been much patience with me as I sort my feelings out regarding all of this.

    I came from this situation lost and bruised because I've seen all those tumblr posts that tell you to sever toxic friends in your life. and when I did there was peace, but an even stronger sense of guilt that I did not have the help they needed.
     
  5. VintageBear

    VintageBear Active Member

    I am not without awareness that I have mistreated Silver at some points due to misinterpreting her actions.

    One of the times I can recall clearest is actually right after Panzer and I cut immediate contact with her.

    In the beginning Silver was pretty guilt ridden, before she became creepy and obsessed with Panzer again. There was a window where she could have possibly reconnected with us and work on forgiveness.

    It was during this time that it was suggested she join Kintsugi. She made a singular topic about her feelings. in blind sadness and anger, I followed her there and the only responses to that topic were from me using a subaccount.

    I knew it felt wrong because I was deceiving her, no matter my valid feelings. I was talked down from posting on that topic, so I made one last post on that account apologizing for my tone and stopped responding.

    I later confessed to Silver a couple weeks later, in a reluctant conversation that she started with me in what was then an attempt to seek forgiveness from me which she later changed her mind afterwarsds.

    She laughed and told me she knew it was me, but I still felt relieved I didn't carry that burden anymore. I have not interfered or used subaccounts since then.

    That was our last real conversation ever.
    I'd link to the topic in question but I don't want to overstep that boundary and expose who Silver is publicly, but I won't stop anyone who stumbles on it themselves.
     
    Last edited: Sep 9, 2016
    • Like x 1
  6. VintageBear

    VintageBear Active Member

    It sucks having online friendships sometimes.
    I can't get rid of her presence, no matter how hard I try.

    I can't stop thinking about her.
    About the other friends I lost too, because of my mental illness. We suffered the same, we didnt know what having friends was like and how to properly treat them. I learned fast. I learned my compassion wasn't something to be ashamed of.

    She still terrorizes Panzer.
    The other day, Panzer told me that Silver still really liked criticizing their art because it's not perfect.
    I was told she said "Oh come on, you and I both know I make better maps than her." to a friend they share mutually. Silver doesn't know. Silver doesn't know that she is estranging this friend for the same reasons she estranged Panzer and I.
    It's so hopeless and I hate this feeling. Why can't I stop loving her if all she does is make me feel angry???
     
  7. VintageBear

    VintageBear Active Member

    I am stuck between going to her side and saying things will be okay.

    And balling up my fists until my nails draw blood from my palm and sob until my eyes go red from muddled anger and regret I wasn't a better friend.

    Goddamn, I failed Silver. Silver is losing all her friends and there is nothing I can do. But all she does...is make me so angry.
     
  8. VintageBear

    VintageBear Active Member

    I am a horrible friend.
     
  9. VintageBear

    VintageBear Active Member

    I yelled at her and stormed off when I should have just sat there and took her verbal assault (is text-based assault verbal? what the fuck)

    I should have resolved that small issue with her, but damn, it was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
    I snapped!

    I loved her as i would any friend, but the doubts grew and grew. When i finally talked to her days ago, she told me she resented i never spoke first. That she had trouble speaking to me casually.

    Was she afraid of me?
    Was she afraid that because I seemed more mature to her, and had less relevant interests that she couldn't control me as easily?

    Fuck fuck fuck.
     
  10. VintageBear

    VintageBear Active Member

    Oh god.
    She just....needed more help than what I could give her.

    I couldn't stand around and watch her beat on Panzer like they were a punching bag. But I couldn't do anything until those last couple months. I didn't act up.
    I suffered in silence because I had the vain hope that everything would go back to normal.

    But even though I'm fucked up from all this.

    I've never felt so normal in months. I say mean things about her sometimes, but it's been hard to parse all these feelings I've buried for the sake of maintaining that motherly image in front of her. I hid my pain from her. The pain I allowed my brain to cause me.

    But I am starting to heal. I went on a vacation. Panzer went back to college. We are still good friends. I have good friends.

    I wish I could tell my friends how much I love them. How much thinking about them makes my heart swell with happiness. Some days this love makes my depression lighter.
    I am glad I have this love, because letting go of Silver's love makes me so...conflicted.

    I'm sorry. I'm posting too much.
     
    • Like x 1
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