I Asked My Friends to Choose Between My Ex and Me — They Chose Him
I never had the heart to tell them he didn’t even like them
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Felicia and I met right after I had hit rock bottom. All the girls in my therapy group were somewhat hostile, except for her. She struggled with group therapy but still went out of her way to make the new girl feel welcome — which meant the world to me.
When I started therapy, I was in a bad place.
(Which makes sense — how many people you know who are in a really good place show up at their doctor’s doorstep, frantically crying and stammering something about all of the emotions being there all the time and not wanting to feel anything ever again?)
I was in a bad place, and I took it out on others. By tearing down other people, I could feel better about myself. But Felicia still liked me. And even though she wasn’t the type of person I would normally hang out with, we quickly became friends. We did our therapy homework together and shared stories of our biggest traumas.
Group therapy was two repeating cycles of six months. My psychiatrist explained that you had to do the same cycle twice, because the first time, all information was brand new, and the second time it clicked and helped you to say farewell to unhelpful behaviors and thought patterns.
But because I am an overly ambitious teacher’s pet, I graduated from the group after the first cycle. I thought that would be the end of our friendship because that is what used to happen to me all the time. The sum falls apart as soon as you take the common denominator out of the equation.
Not this time, though. Felicia kept making an effort to keep me in her life. We talked a lot about friendships. None of my friends knew me the way she did. The stuff she’d heard while I was opening up in therapy was the stuff I either kept secret or ridiculed. She saw me. The real me. All the ugly nooks and crannies, not the polished version of me that my friends loved so much.
I showed her my ugly side, and she didn’t reject me or try to change me. That alone cemented our friendship.
She also had issues. “All of my friends have betrayed and abandoned me,” she once cried on my…
