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wickedsleeper · 11 days ago

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Guess who’s alive? that’s rhetorical, i know no one’s reading this rn, maybe in the future, who knows. i don’t really know why i decided to come back after ditching this blog for like a year; giving it another shot i suppose. i don’t really use social media much, i’ve always been just a lurker. it feels nice though, writing as if for someone else, even if this just winds up being a glorified journal. i used to use Snapchat a lot. not for its intended use of course, i’d just ramble into a camera for a few mins then post it on my story. idk, text posts have a certain charm about them don’t they? they can be as long as you want, can be about heavier topics. i considered changing this blog’s name, there’s a couple of people i’m not friends with anymore who know it, but no. wickedSleeper is MY name, if they find it they find it. not that i’ve done anything wrong, the best way i can describe it is that they don’t know we’re not friends anymore yet. guess that can be the topic of this. this will be long, so if you don’t care no shame in leaving.

I’ll use fake names for this, but if anyone involved finds this it’ll be pretty obvious who i’m talking about, i doubt it’ll happen but it’d make for an interesting day. i live in a small town, and i’m a homebody, there was a period of time where i would even call myself a recluse. luckily i’ve been getting better, but it’s still hard sometimes. i got out of high school a year early because i got my GED (which is a whole other story). my parents didn’t push me to do anything immediately so i basically had a year off to just sit around doing nothing but playing video games. it was fun, but very bad for me. the only friend i kept from high school we’ll call Kevin, i’d known him since middle school but never really had a reason to hang out with him till high school. looking back we just had a lot of classes together, had lunch together, hung out every once and a while. after i got out of high school he was the only one who really kept in contact with me. Kevin is a quiet guy, a bit bland is a way to put it, and i don’t know the details but he started dating this girl Carly. Carly was crazy, not a very detailed picture i’m laying out i know, but i didn’t know her that well. all i know is there was always something going on with her. she was one of those people who would spill their purse and trauma dump you to hell and back the first time you met them. the way this is related is during my off year, i used to play with Kevin and Carly on playstation, and one day i’m sitting in a VC but it’s just me and this other guy Jake. i’d never met him before, but we get to talking and it turns out we like a lot of the same stuff, he’s also unemployed at the time and boom: we’re playing games like every day.

There’s a lot of stories but i’ll try to not find out if Tumblr has a text limit lol, basically through a series of events Jake, Kevin and I start a DnD group, along with Jake’s girlfriend Jenny. this is around when the pandemic started, so none of us had anything to do all day. we’d just go over to Jake and Jenny’s apartment and play DnD for hours on end, not just DnD either. online games, going out IRL, we did basiclaly everything together. well, here’s where the problems began, but they only really appeared in retrospect. at the time, i had never really had a lot of friends before, so i didn’t know what was good and bad when it came to relationships. the biggest problem was, and still is, Jake is a fucking maniac. imagine a spoiled manchild with anger issues and a plethora of untreated mental health problems. now look, i don’t blame someone from having mental health problems, i struggle with them, but my problem is someone who uses them as a shield. he would only ever use them like that; if he snapped at someone you weren’t allowed to get mad because he had anger problems that he was totally “working on”, shit like that. but i rationalized it, these were my only friends. sure Jake was rough to be around sometimes, but most of the time he was super fun! i didn’t want to start a big stink and ruin our gaming session, stuff like that. another factor is knowing Jake would literally never de escalate, ever. he is the kind of guy where a minor disagreement could actually become a physical fight because he would NEVER step down at all, never admit he’s wrong about anything. he treated his girlfriend like shit. she was this quiet, quirky girl, and he would just rip into her over the littlest things.

I’m a spiritual person, all of us in the friend group were, and if i learned anything from the 2 years or so i was around there 24/7 it’s that no one is immune to cults. the shit Jake said was insane, every other month WW3 was around the corner, he was being followed by literal angels, he time travelled back in time 6 months after accidentally dying, he was raised in a satanic cult in which everyone died except for one girl who had a demonic sword that could eat souls. all of those are real things he said and i believed. i can’t believe i believed them, looking back i feel so stupid but i don’t know… when you’re around someone every day, when they’re your best friend; you value their words. it’s not like he’d come out the gate with shit that wild or anything, he’d just say a little thing here, a little thing there, until evetually maybe you let down your guard. like “well i don’t know… it sounds crazy but i do believe in spirits… maybe Jake did see something the other day”. only to ramp up from there until every day he’s talking about some terrifying apocalyptic shit he probably ripped from an anime. we were so isolated, i didn’t have other friends, i didn’t even really do anything; the only time i left the house was to go over to play DnD at his place, and with the pandemic going on… i’m just glad my mom raised me right to be wary of shady stuff like that, otherwise i might have wound up like Kevin.

We were all close… too close. we weren’t acting like 4 individuals, we were like this hive mind. we talked to each other nonstop, shared problems with one another. when i say that i don’t mean in the normal way friends do, i mean if one of us had a problem the others FELT bad, as if it was us having the problem. i only managed to remove myself from the group because of therapy (i was going for another reason and during the sessions realized what a problem the group was). i realized what the group had become, a hive mind with Jake as the undisputed core, just like he always wanted. always coddled, always catered to because no one wanted to deal with his tantrums and arguments if you set him off. in the moment you think “oh it’s easier to just do this, i don’t want to upset him…” only to turn around and realize you’re acting like his maid, or his mom. i realized i wasn’t having fun anymore, i was always walking on eggshells as not to set him off. until one time i did, a story for another time as to not make this post the size of a fucking novel. but i didn’t speak to him for a year after that night. Kevin though… he never left. Kevin had hit a wall in his life, Carly had broken up with him and it fucked him up, he just sort of… never recovered from that. Jake capitalized on it, on purpose or not i don’t know. i don’t know of Jake is some wannabe mastermind who acts how he acts on purpose or just so maladjusted he’s like that genuinely. either way. Kevin just kept going, it’s not like i was gonna do anything. Kevin was still friends with Jake, and i wasn’t. if he wanted to keep hanging around him that was his choice. but as time went on, idk maybe it’d be easier to describe the present and work backwards.

I made a dumb choice maybe 6 months ago. i took a shortcut. i was lonely, bored. all my new friends from college were out of town for break and i wanted to play games, so i decided to talk to Jake again. i wanted to give him a fair shot; we did have fun together, we were best friends, it had been a year. maybe he had gotten better, grown as a person, i wanted to at least give him a chance. he hadn’t. but i kept playing video games with him anyways, i didn’t have anyone else to play with, i should’ve just looked for new people. i was wise to it though, i wasn’t falling for any tricks, wasn’t going to walk on eggshells or fall for sympathy baiting. this was transactional, i wasn’t Jake’s friend again, i just liked playing multiplayer Borderlands. but with the 3 of us, i could see how much Kevin was just… wrapped around Jake. it was gross. hearing both of them in the same VC, i don’t know how i didn’t notice when it was just Kevin and i. Kevin was just a shadow of Jake. that’s what he wants to be, that’s what he chose. all of Kevin’s opinions come from Jake, the way he speaks even. it’s what happens when you don’t remove yourself. i know this because that’s what i was like for those 2 years, it makes me sick to think about. that’s what i was like, what others saw from the outside, a drone. no thoughts of my own, just Jake’s, no time spent away from Jake, no life without Jake. maybe a bit of an exaggeration but you get what i’m saying. what makes me upset is i don’t even know when it happened to Kevin, i only realize it because i actually grew as a person. those 2 are stuck in time. willingly. i say 2 because Jenny recently left Jake, good for her, i hope it works because he’s trying to keep his claws in her.

There’s more to say but this is long enough. i stopped talking to them a month ago but they’re both crazy enough and know where i live that i didn’t feel comfortable saying directly that i’m done with them. so instead i just sort of… faded out. said i’ve got a lot of shit on my plate and just stopped gaming with them. not a satisfying ending, but i think it’s for the best. Kevin has chosen this life, nothing i can say would change that. and Jake, i don’t even know where to start. if they were going to grow they would have, i just need to look forward.

So uh, moral of the story is this: any good relationship shouldn’t be give and take. if you even have to debate on if a person is good or bad for you; they’re bad. you shouldn’t have to be like “oh well they’re really nice, buuuuut i don’t like when they scream at me sometimes”. real friends are all good with no drawbacks, people you can enjoy without a little voice in the back of your mind worried they’re about to snap over nothing. i’m lucky enough to know that now.

Bye i guess.

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#relationship #cult #ramblings #long reads

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