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This is me pushing back against the little voice that tells me that I "don't really need to talk about anything or to not share things because they're just little and not worth talking about and someone's always got it worse so why share", so hi, welcome to my venting/recollection space of sorts, where I'll be trying to break that thought train and actually talk about things. Trigger warnings will be for suicide and/or SH.
(TW; suicide) So April 1st marks one year since my life basically turned upside-down. March 30th I went with a friend (J, best friend of 10ish years) to see a play that another friend (M, best friend of 4ish year) was acting in. Cue morning of April 1st. J messages me saying M is in the hospital, then gets told she wasn't supposed to share that information and then can't tell me why M is in hospital. Day goes on, I'm super anxious and worried and have no idea what's going on. Start probing J and C (3rd friend involved in the story, M's secret bf (long story)) for details, they still won't spill. Day continues and by evening I was so freaked out that I started guessing reasons for it. J and C, as I almost hit the nail on the head with one guess, finally tell me that M tried to commit suicide. I can't even describe what I felt upon reading that, maybe a giant combination of shock and terror and horror. I had known her for 4 years and never knew she was even depressed, let alone suicidal. Later I found out that this was because she didn't trust me with that information, saying that I would've tried to help by going to my parents who would've told her parents (she attributed them to being the main cause of her depression, strict christian family with a tendency to favor their son over her). So the rest of April was extremely weird. She got out of the hospital after a week or two, seemed okay, then things started getting weird. She started smoking, dumped C and rebounded with some 18 yr-old (she was 15 at the time) druggie who was also a mental mess, and was just not herself. Normally I would've spoken out against the first two things, being of sound mind and judgement. But boy, was I not of sound mind and judgement. I was constantly scared that she would just disappear one day, and was desparate to not set her off, so I just let her do whatever she picked up as a, albeit unhealthy, coping mech, without saying a word. Already I was emotionally wrapped around her finger, and to top it off some switch in me flipped and I became weirdly empathetic (I was already like normal-level empathetic but this was like turned waaaaay up) so I basically abandoned myself and all my goals in favor of doing all I could to support her. Hadn't even been a month and I was already losing myself.
Cue May, which I actually don't remember hardly any of. The only things I really remember are one day just absolutely word-vomiting all the stuff I had been keeping pent-up for the last month and a half to J and C (M by then had been repeatedly telling us how she wanted to die or who wants me to die or how she (Kinda graphic description warning):
Was going to hang herself but she had her pet rabbit in her pocket and didn't want it to escape into the wilderness and it was awful and I felt sick reading all of it and I dreaded speaking to her or going on that chat and it was just horrible, but we never told her parents or anyone because we were so far under the illusion that it would be a bad thing and it would just make her feel worse so we didn't), and then her coming over that day and (she had been borrowing my phone so she could check her messages) accidently clicking on the wrong notification and seeing all the stuff I said (she might've purposefully scrolled further idk but she saw it all) but I only found out the next day. And then the guilting started. She'd go for a few days, saying how I was two-faced and not helping only making it worse and being a terrible friend and alll that, then pretend everything was fine for a couple days, then would make some snide sharp remark and it would just start all over again. Twice it blew up into big arguments where she proceeded to deny ever doing anything wrong and how we were the bad guys and we should just put up with all of it and it was horrible and (TW: self-harm) that's when I started self-harming, because I blamed myself so badly for causing her more pain. I think I stopped caring about myself at that point. And that's all I remember from May. Don't even remember my 18th birthday really. Kinda sad.
Cue June: (oh at some point in May I found out M had been SHing as well for quite a while, reading that hurt a lot) June 1st: I saw her at a youth group meeting, it was kinda awkward but we made it work since we were in public. Then out of the blue, we were standing off to the side and she just kinda off-handedly flips her pocket inside out and there was blood stains and some part of me just knew that it was because of me and sometimes I wonder if it was a "look what you caused" sort of action, but it was horrible. But I didn't say anything, just sorta awkwardly looked away. First weekend in June we went on a youth trip together, it was actually pretty nice and things felt sorta normal between us. We get home and within two days things go to shit again. At this point I had changed so much personality-wise and behavior-wise that my parents were noticing and they made me cut her off because of how much she was affecting me. This also involved telling her parents that she was gonna run away and live with the druggie bf I mentioned (who also had a very questionable sex-life history). I begged them to not tell that information, believing whole-heartedly that it would make things very worse for her (M had even said if I did that it was just gonna make her want to kill herself more). In the end they helped me see reason and on the 21st I gave the info to her parents and blocked her on most media. Buuut continued to message her off and on trying to make her see that she had hurt us. She never did. She told me I was playing the victim and she would always ALWAYS redirect the convo so that it became about MY mistakes and how I had hurt her and blah blah blah. Every. Damn. Time. It took me a long time and a lot of hurt to see that it was pointless. And it took me even longer to start getting better.
I'm not sure how I put up wiith her so long, constantly being in a state of fear and dread and guilt and fatigue. But I neglected so many things. My goals, my family, J, myself, everything. Everything was put aside for her. I'm still coming back from that to this day, school-wise.
There's still a lot I'm forgetting, I think, but that's the gist of it. At least, the gist of those three months... I still get shaky thinking about it, but less so these days, so yay progress lol. But I still hold a lot of resentment towards her, which I'm not sure how to heal. Guess I'll figure that out eventually. So there, the start of my venting. I think it's gonna feel good to have it all written out in one place. Now to press the "add thread" button without backing out. 3, 2, 1...
