Friends?

  • I feel like I should be so grateful. Firstly I have my health, I have my family, but friends.. not so much. I have always struggled with friendships. I grew up in Essex until I was 8. My mother and father wanted a change of scenery and switched from the city to the country. That was hard, leaving people I had grown up with from a very early age to having no friends. I was put into a small primary school, a lovely school. I tried to make friends and eventually found myself a small group of girls. I unfortunately have not been blessed with the brains and this led to me being bullied throughout all of my school years. I did not stand up for myself so this mainly remained unnoticed. These girls picked on me for a long time, until high school actually. I never fit in the friendship group. It came to a head and I made the decision to leave the group and try and find new friends. Bear in mind this was the middle of high school by this point and that made it even harder! Eventually I found myself the best group of friends! Up until the last years of high school we were all inseparable. Most of us had the same classes in school so it was very fun. I won’t be naming any names as I want to respect people’s privacy. This is my own version of events and I totally understand their are two sides to every story. The four of us, I loved it. Then it came to the last day of high school. One of the girls had dropped me, completely. Without reason, gone. That broke me. I asked what the problem was but the answer I will never know. The 2nd to go was for a silly reason. She decided that friends were not as important as supporting her boyfriend. Now I know we were young but still I could not understand how someone could just leave the group because of a relationship. The 3rd. A natural drift, different things were put in the way. Nothing malicious, just life. The 4th, the worst. We were friends long after we both left high school in 2012. I want to say we were almost joint to the hip. The thing that pulled us apart.. a man. an ex. I had been seeing an old flame and it was suddenly called off by him. She knew the whole time what was happening. One day, she came to me with some news. I knew what she was about to say, I had knots in my stomach. She had been sleeping with him, they were to be together. I was completely heartbroken. How anyone could do that to another girl I will never know. But our friendship came to an abrupt end. The girl who once had a beautiful group now had no one?.. Funnily enough a girl who I used to hang around with in the early high school days had made contact with me shortly after. We had been joking around that our old friend had stopped being friends with both of us. Quite frankly this was the best thing that had happened to me because to this day we are still best friends. I am eternally grateful to have this one amazing, supportive friend. I struggle everyday and dwell on the negative times but knowing I have one person in my life that will always have my back is the best feeling ever.