#in which adrian gives their two cents on toxic friendships

[greetings-from-the-suffer-puppet]

age doesn’t matter.

I’m fifteen years old, and American. Next year, I will be eligible to get a learner’s driving permit, have a relationship with an eighteen-year-old, and go on testosterone. These are things where age is a deciding factor.

But those aren’t what this post is about.

This post is about what happened to me between the ages of nine and thirteen, because there’s this misconception that toxic relationships are dependent on age. 

I’m not talking about abuse. We’ve all heard of child abuse cases, we’ve all heard about poor living conditions. Those affect people of any age.

We hear about teenagers whose families are great and who live in good homes, but who end up in bad situations anyway - teenagers who are old enough to make their own, fully informed decisions. Not kids. Children are supposed to be protected from that. 

I was a child when I entered the relationship that has left me with permanent trust issues and triggered the upswing of my depression. I was nine. 

So was the girl that hurt me.

I don’t want to undermine the horror of domestic abuse or abusive relationships. That’s not what I’m telling this story for.

I’m telling this story because everyone assumes that an abuser has to be an adult, or at the very least a teenager. Thirteen-year-olds don’t go on the news for physically abusing their crush. Eleven-year-olds aren’t reported to the school administration for emotionally abusing a “friend”.

Except when they are.

This is a true story. I wish to any higher power that I was making this up, but I’m not. This has scarred me, and I’m going to carry the impact of what happened for the rest of my life.

I’m not putting this under a read-more, but I am putting warnings so you can decide for yourself whether to read on or not. 

Warnings for bullying, depression, self-loathing, mentions of self-harm/thinking about self-harm, suicidal thoughts, manipulation, toxic/unhealthy relationships, and... and emotional abuse. 

I’ve never called it that before. 

To the people who were involved, if any of them ever find this:

I haven’t forgiven you. I hope I never will. 

When I was nine years old, a new girl came to our school. I’m going to call her S. 

She had six outfits to her name that she wore in different combinations. She always smelled strange and even though we didn’t share classes, I knew she wasn’t terribly smart. As a whole, the sixty kids in my grade either ignored her or directly bullied her. 

I pitied her. So did my friend J. So, a few months into the school year, we made a deal to attempt to befriend her. 

We treated the idea like a job. Neither of us actually liked her - there were reasons no one wanted to be around her - but we pitied her and no one else was willing to make the effort, so we kept at it. 

And then J quit. Literally. She went up to me and said “I can’t. She’s so awful. I can’t do this anymore.”

The two of them hated each other’s guts for the next two and a half years.

I didn’t give up.

I should have. I really should have. But I was young and I still believed that people were mostly good. I still trusted that anyone I met on the street was more likely to greet me with a smile than a threat.

I kept talking to S. I kept hanging around with her. I listened to her. I sacrificed time with my real friends for her. 

All the school’s anti-bullying videos were circulating and I myself was watching my sister be invited to things I was passed over for. I was sympathetic. I wanted this girl to be helped, and it was clear that no one other than me was going to do it.

The summer came and passed, and I went back to school no wiser about the pit I was slowly sinking into.

I was ten years old, and suddenly S was in all of my classes. I no longer had an escape. 

My best friends were no longer in my classes. My sister had never once been in a class with me at that school. My only friends that year that I could still see on a daily basis were J - yes, the J who S considered her mortal enemy - and two other girls, mutual friends of J and I. We’ll call them N and E.

Every day, I went to school and S was there. Every lunch, she followed me. Every recess, she dogged my footsteps. Every bit of time I had to be with my real friends, she would try to steal.

At some point she handed me a tourist-shop shell. She’d written “FRIENDSHIP” on it in black Sharpie. 

“Keep this with you,” she told me. “It’s to show how good friends we are!”

I put it in my backpack. I never found it after that. When I told her I couldn’t find it, she yelled at me and pouted. I apologized again and again. She told me we were still friends, so I was forgiven. 

Please remember that I was ten. I didn’t see the red flags going up. I didn’t know what to look for.

Even now, five years later, I’m still going back over those memories and recognizing things I didn’t at the time. I had never even considered the creepiness of that shell until my cousin compared it to her experience with a stalker ex-boyfriend. Here, have this token of affection... and if you ever tarnish it, you’re tarnishing our relationship, and you need to beg for forgiveness.

My depression was kicking in. My self-loathing was at a new high. I was going home and taking stock of all the things in my house that could kill me. I was in no shape to fight back against what S was doing to me.

I didn’t even realize that I needed to.

Things got worse.

S and J never stopped being at odds. They had screaming matches, hurling insults at each other whenever the teachers weren’t around. I was constantly treated to barrages on the other whenever I was in earshot of one of them. They’d fight, and it would fall to me to mediate.

It wasn’t an easy choice to make on who to support, though. J wasn’t a good person either. She was selfish and bossy and cruel; she was all the worst parts of becoming a teenage girl in a five-foot three-inch package. (Of course, the height absolutely lessened my intimidation of her. Of course. Not like she was the only girl taller than me in our grade, or that she’d taken scissors to my favorite shirt the year before without my permission, while I was wearing the shirt. Not like she was constantly demanding attention or insulting other friends. Not like she looked down her nose at me whenever I wanted to read something she didn’t like.) In fact, at some point during that year I and N confronted J about her behavior, essentially saying “You’re being awful and we’re not going to be your friend until you get your crap together”. (E, who’d never liked the drama, lurked quietly behind us.) 

I really was stuck between a rock and a hard place. 

It wasn’t an easy choice. S was clingy and off-putting, but J was arrogant and shallow. But J had N and E on her side - girls who had their flaws, but were leagues better than my other options - and so when it came down to it, I was on her side.

I think that made S more angry. It makes me wonder if she’d have still done what she had, if I’d come down on her side more often.

At some point that year, I did something immensely stupid.

The school had an event, and I met S’s mom for the first time. S wasn’t there, but my sister and my mother were.

We got to talking about S. S had told her mother about me, of course. I was still the only friend she had - sure, my sister and her friends were kind to S, but they were kind to everyone - and she was clearly excited as hell to have me.

“Your daughter’s kinda clingy,” I said, ten years old and buzzed on sugar and feelings things I didn’t understand. “Like... she goes way overboard. I get that I’m the only friend she has to talk to, but it’s... it’s a lot, you know? I wish she’d lay off a little. I barely have any time to spend with my other friends.”

My sister and mother acted like I was crazy for saying that to S’s mom. I’m not going to say they were wrong. 

S approached me the next day. “My mom said you told her I was clingy? That you wanted me to leave you alone! I know she’s lying. She lies all the time. You didn’t say that, right?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. (I still wonder what might have happened if I’d told her the truth.)

“I knew she was lying,” S said. She was smiling at me. I could see my friends behind her across the playground. 

“Uh-huh,” I said.

I didn’t know what I was doing at the time. I was ten. The only ten-year-olds who learn these things are the ones who come to school with bruises.

I know what I was doing now, five years on.

My mother had set up meetings with one of the teachers at the school to talk about the situation with S and J. It helped to talk, but nothing changed.

I’d told my sister and my mother and to other friends. Mom could only be there at home, and my sister and friends were in other classes. They couldn’t help me. 

The school had done nothing. My family couldn’t do anything. My friends couldn’t - or wouldn’t - do anything, either.

I was reaching out to the only source I had left: the mother of the child causing my problems. Deep down, below conscious thought, I knew that if I could get S’s mother to take my side, her daughter would have to leave me alone. 

But that’s not how it went. S’s mom didn’t take my side, and I didn’t stand up to S by telling her the truth.

So it went on.

That summer was the summer I discovered fanfiction.

Suddenly, the internet exploded with possibilities. Suddenly, I could hide from my problems by diving into interpretations of my favorite fictional characters. 

Fanfiction was one of three main escapes I had from S and J that year.

The other two were special school programs. AMP picked a few kids from sixth grade who passed their tests and dropped them into a middle-school class on Pre-Algebra, skipping sixth-grade math entirely. TAG piled a dozen kids from various schools into a bus every other day and sent them to another school for a few hours to explore other aspects of education.

S was in my classes again, but that didn’t matter. I was only in school half the time, and even then, we were on different levels of the curriculum. I had to see her often, but she rarely had the time to speak with me.

My best friends - my real friends - were in my classes again too. A couple were even in AMP and TAG with me as well. 

Sixth grade was off to a far better start.

S realized she was losing me, I think.

I wasn’t quiet about the fact that I was going to a private school for the next chunk of my schooling. After this year, I was never going to see S again. 

She was louder that year. She yelled at J more. She got into more fights.

I kept pulling away. I wasn’t out of the pit yet, but I’d been thrown a rope and a whole bunch of people were pulling me up.

The final straw came in the spring. It seems so small and petty, now, as a teenager who’s seen how terrible humanity can be, but S writing “I hate [best friend’s name]” was the cruellest thing I’d ever seen her do.

She could do what she wanted to me, and I’d take it. But insult my friend, and I was done. 

I stopped approaching her (not that I’d had to since fourth grade; she always barreled toward me whenever she saw me). I stopped talking to her. 

(I started pulling back from J, too. I was tired of friends that weren’t worth my effort.)

That left S standing at a crossroads.

She could accept the inevitability of change - we were going separate paths and she’d crossed a line I couldn’t forgive her for - or...

Or she could cling harder, and cross a line so extreme that I’d never considered the necessity of drawing it. 

Every year, a pair of jugglers performed at my school. The graduating sixth graders (eleven-year-olds) would perform as well. I finished my act, went offstage, and circled around the auditorium to stand in the back and watch my friends perform.

I don’t know where S came from. She was just... there, suddenly, next to me, grabbing my arm.

“Can you come to the bathroom with me? There’s something I need to tell you.”

I don’t know why I said yes. I shouldn’t have said yes. I should have pulled away and walked away and left her there. 

But I didn’t. I said, “Okay,” and followed her into the girls’ bathroom.

Five years on, I believe that I wasn’t really thinking that night. If I’d been firing on all cylinders, I wouldn’t have done what I did. I wouldn’t have gone along with her and I would have recognized the marks for what they were and I would have fucking left without spilling my soul out to someone taking advantage of me.

But I was tired and jittery from my performance, and I’d had a lot of candy, and I was feeling like being kind. 

(And people wonder why I’m the cynical, sarcastic twin. What the hell has kindness gotten me in the past few years?)

She pulled up her sleeve and said “I’m cutting myself.”

She didn’t warn me. She didn’t say it shamefully or tearfully or like a challenge. She said it... bluntly. A fact. 

(It wasn’t a fact.)

It wasn’t a cut she showed me. It wasn’t even a damned scar.

It was a bruise.

For gods’ sakes, it was a bruise. I was eleven, not four, I knew the difference between a bruise and a cut, but - 

...but I believed her. 

I don’t know why. There is no explanation I can offer you for how my brain accepted her bald-faced untruth. 

If that was all that happened in that bathroom, I might have been okay. Shaken and startled, yes, but the therapy I’ve been attending for the past year and a half could have dealt with the aftershocks of that moment.

But that wasn’t all that happened in that bathroom.

I’d been dealing with my depression for two years by then, entirely by myself. Never once had I told anyone about the voice in my head that constantly told me all the ways I was a bad person, or the sometimes urge to take one of the knives from our butcher block and find out how much pressure it would take to split my skin, or the list of ways to die that ran through my mind on days I’d done badly in school.

Abruptly faced with someone whom I believed to experience the same thing, how could I keep quiet?

“Don’t tell anyone.”

“I promise.”

I came home. Went to bed. Went to school. Went to TAG. Tried not to cry on the bus home. Got off the bus and fell into my mom’s arms, sobbing out the (edited) story of what happened that night. 

(My mom wouldn’t know about my depression for another two years.)

My mom called the school. In another week or two, I was called to the principal’s office for the first time in my life.

I stood up from my desk with the classroom gaping at me in shock. I walked out without a word or a backwards glance.

The principal said a whole lot of words in that meeting.

Most of them don’t matter.

The only thing that matters was the point of the meeting, the message she rambled over in sentence upon sentence instead of the four words she could have used.

“S lied to you.”

She was eleven. So was I.

She was so desperate to keep me by her side that she’d shown me a bruise she’d gotten from falling off her bed and told me it was a self-inflicted wound. 

She was so desperate to keep me hers that she claimed to be doing one of the most horrific things someone can do to themself, and managed to pick the one thing that would resonate with me the most.

She’d figured out by then that it was pity that kept me with her. What better than self-harm to induce pity?

For so long, that was what I focused on taking away from this. The betrayal. The lie. The desperate clinginess - damn near bordering on obsession - that made me feel like a favorite doll instead of a person.

But my trust and my faith in people weren’t the only things that S ruined that night. 

For the first time in my life, I had told someone about the darkest parts of me. For the first time in my life, someone knew about the voice in my head and the pit in my stomach.

And it was someone who didn’t deserve my secrets.

I did my best to avoid S after that.

She kept approaching me, though.

She never once apologized. All she ever said about the matter was “Why did you tell?! You promised you wouldn’t tell!”

I graduated. I never saw S again.

But that’s not the end, because with my luck, of course I run into the same kind of shameless manipulator two years later in my new school.