I was bullied in high school…
Or why I struggle to maintain friendships.
[Originally published on May 22, 2020]
Friendship has always been a very tricky part of life for me. I never felt like I had super close girlfriends even when I did have them. I always felt like I was in this in-between place. In middle school, I was trying to keep my childhood friends while they all moved on and grew up. In high school, I felt like I had some good friends, but not great friends. It turns out I was right because in my senior year we had a falling out that sent me into my first depressive state.
When I was in high school I had a close-knit group of girls I hung out with. However, there was one girl who always was so passive-aggressive to me and was always acting like she was better than me. I have no idea why, that’s just what girls are like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Well, combine that with Twitter gaining popularity this is just a recipe for disaster. At the very beginning of my senior year I saw this girl subtweeting about me (yes, I realize that is a dumb sentence). I was just so over her being immature so I texted her asking if we could talk privately at lunch the next day. She tried to get out of it claiming she had a club meeting, but I insisted on talking before her meeting and she agreed. To make a very long and dramatic (and frankly painful) story short, she stood me up and this was the beginning of a very dark time for me.
I was very upfront with my other friends about what was happening and none of them seemed to have a problem with the fact that I was being bullied. I made the very difficult decision to cut ties with all those people. If they didn’t see a problem with the blatant bullying I was experiencing then I didn’t want them in my life. The thing is, while I did take a stand that I do not regret, this made my life extraordinarily difficult. I was very lonely and depressed for my whole senior year of high school. I didn’t really have any friends to go to prom with or take graduation photos with. Truth be told, I have very few memories of my senior year from just being in a depression blackout.
I don’t gloss over this sob story for sympathy, but to explain the root of my very serious trust issues. Since high school, I have cycled through some really good friendships. All of them are so dear to me and most of those friendships did not end in some dramatic showdown as my high school friendships did, but I struggled to hold on to them. When I started to feel that distance, I didn’t fight it. People always leave so what’s the point in trying to make them stay? What that thought process has left me with is a deep sense of loneliness. I’m constantly overcome with the feeling that I am overlooked or de-prioritized in my relationships with friends. It is so hard for me to trust that the people I value in my life value me back.
If you’ve been here a minute, you may recall my story of working at MoviePass. Working at MoviePass provided me with some of the most enriching relationships of my life. I got to meet Zack and Shelby, my roommate and best friend Ally, Stephen, Madison, and Ryan. Each of these people are so dear to me and I’m constantly afraid of falling back into my old patterns of letting friendships expire. I’ve never worked harder at maintaining friendships as I have since I left MoviePass.
There are many friendships from MoviePass that I thought would stand the test of time but didn’t. While I am so grateful for the friendships that did, my glass-half-empty mind is constantly wondering why those other friendships didn’t make it. Were we ever really friends or just friends out of convenience? Why wasn’t I important enough to them to try and maintain the friendship after we didn’t work together anymore? Therapy has helped a lot in identifying that these fears stem from the fact that I felt abandoned by my friends in high school, but that doesn’t help when I feel abandoned by people now.
As we are all closing in on two months in quarantine, I’m realizing that the quality of my friendships far outweighs my perceived lack of quantity. The real gift of quarantine is that we are now forced to maintain our relationships without seeing each other. I am never going to be the person with hundreds of friends with a never-ending list of social engagements, but why did I ever want to be that person? I am much happier knowing that my friends love me and I love them than having 100 acquaintances I am constantly wondering where I stand with.
It’s been a journey for me to get to a place where I am not in constant fear of being friendless. Shit that happens in high school can really screw you up and seep into other areas of your life. The root of all my trust issues in all aspects of my life can be traced back to being bullied by so-called friends when I was 16. The moral of the story, tell your friends you love them when you can and maybe reach out to a lapsed friend or two while in quarantine. We are learning to maintain friendships without physically being together so now is a great time to renew those relationships.
The other moral of the story? Don’t bully people. It’s lame.
