Missing ex-best friends
JMF246 - Nov 24 2019 at 13:57
This is incredibly long, I apologize in advance. I have been struggling with this for years now and I feel completely lost on what to do.
My two best friends and I had been close for 10 years. They were my family and helped me through every hard time in my life, and celebrated the good times with me. However, I was constantly their punching bag, the brunt of their jokes, and constantly received their criticism (not in a healthy, constructive way). I was going through a hard time in my life and instead of supporting me, I felt they ridiculed me. Both friends and I “broke up” at the same time but for different reasons. The first friend, we’ll call her Melissa was the one who teased me more but we were closer as we saw each other more often. She got mad at me for something silly and I lost it, telling her I take all of her shit and never say anything, and the one time there’s a misunderstanding she blows up at me. That fight went absolutely nowhere and we stoped talking, however our husbands share the same group of friends so we saw each other once in a while and were civil. Two years later we reconnected at a wedding and went for coffee a few days later to talk about what happened. We agreed we wanted to work on things, and wanted things to go back to how they were (without the bullying), but we weren’t going to forget what happened and we were going to be stronger because of it. Things were good at first, I reached out to make plans a few times but then realized that she wasn’t making the same effort and all of a sudden it was like we went back to being strangers. I have no idea what happened.
The second friend, we’ll call her Claire, literally stopped being my friend because I wasn’t on the same level as her. She had a career she loved and was moving up in, and had just bought a condo, and I was struggling to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and dealing with mental health issues so I was not where I wanted to be at that age. I wish there was another reason why she stopped being my friend, but there isn’t as far as I know. That’s literally what she told me, she just said I don’t want to be your friend anymore, we’re at different places in our lives. Melissa and Claire remained best friends and kept our group of friends while I lost everyone. Granted, most of that was my choice because I couldn’t take the abuse anymore. So why am I still SO heartbroken over this? I keep telling myself they treated me horribly I shouldn’t want to be their friend, but it doesn’t seem to help. I don’t have very many friends, so when I stopped being friends with them I REALLY felt it because I didn’t have anyone else. I don’t know what they felt, but it seemed like it was so easy for them to move on because they had each other and our other friends.
I truly feel like I’ve lost a piece of myself. I can’t seem to move on, and even though I’ve met some great people, no one will ever compare to the friendship I had with them and it’s like I don’t want to move on. I want to fix things but at the same time I can’t forget how they’ve made me feel. I’m broken and lost and I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know what I want to hear, but I’ve heard “it’ll get better with time, you’ll meet new friends and you’ll forget about them” etc. dozens of times and it just doesn’t help. I guess I just wanted the opportunity to talk to them and tell them how they made me feel and I wanted them to acknowledge and change their wrong behaviour. But now that’ll never happen. It would be incredibly weird to reach out now and “demand” they acknowledge their wrong doings. Maybe it’s wrong of me to want that. But I miss them so much and I don’t know why and I don’t know what to do about it