earlier this week, my best friend told me that she thought i was belittling her with the language i used when we were in public. if you know me, which hopefully nobody reading this does, you know that i care so so so deeply about being a kind person, and about making sure that everyone around me feels loved. so, naturally, this deeply affected me. i don't want anyone to feel belittled or like they aren't good enough around me, especially not my best friend.
i told her that i was sorry and that i would truly work on it, because i am and i will. she is almost a year and a half younger than me, so she is a freshman and i am a sophomore. i think that sometimes that plays into our friendship dynamic a lot more than we realize. sometimes she will say things that make me realize that she's not living life at the same pace or in the same way that i am, but there's nothing wrong with that. it just means that we have very different outlooks on the world as a whole. at first this didn't feel insurmountable. it felt like it was a chance to receive a new perspective on everything. but lately i feel that gap between us growing larger and larger. anyway. my point in saying this is that i think that it is highly possible that i've treated her as though she is younger than me while we were in public. not that i was intentionally doing anything to alienate her from my friends or the people around us, of course, but she is younger and therefore doesn't share the same experiences as me and most of my friends do. when we are in public, she says that i seem to act a bit more belittling towards her than i would with other people. upon closer reflection, i realize that i can definitely act in ways that might come off as belittling, but i never do it intentionally.
sometimes when we're in public i'll pull her off the edge of the sidewalk so she won't get hit by a car that's incoming. or i'll say "nope, my car's this way [name]". both of these things seem harmless in the moment, but i now realize how damaging they must have been to her. i feel terrible for doing this to her, but i also just wish she would have told me sooner. i feel like so much resentment is building up between us and i don't know what to do because of it. don't get me wrong, i'm so aware that most of this is my fault and that i should be able to recognize when certain interactions are 'off', but it's difficult for me to read the room as well as other people can. i know i'm just making excuses, but you'll have to understand that i'm just trying to explain where i was coming from.
regardless of my intention, my best friend was hurt. that's really all there is to it. that being said, after i apologized and reflected more on what exactly she was saying, i started to wonder if she was maybe projecting certain insecurities onto our own relationship? this sounds terrible, i'm very aware, but i think that she cares very deeply about others liking her, and for this reason wants them to see her as interesting and older than she really is (i do too), but there are certain things she's pointed out to me that i just can't seem to understand. i know i'm autistic, but like i feel like this is a whole new level of not understanding the nuances within a social interaction. to add another layer of complexity, i've felt for a while that we have very differing outlooks on life and how we approach it. i feel like i'm a more negative person when i'm around her, and we constantly are gossiping about other peoples' lives in a way that feels wrong because i know i wouldn't do it if i wasn't around her.
don't get me wrong, i absolutely participate in these conversations, and i even look forward to them, but i think that as i get older i'm learning more and more that that just isn't who i want to be. i'm not trying to spread all these falsities about me online, like that i'm the best most mature person in the world, but i feel like when i'm with her i just am not my best self. sure we're funny, but i feel like we need to be funny at other peoples' expense. obviously it's a group dynamic, but it's one of those things where i don't struggle with it unless i'm around her. even if she doesn't bring it up, somehow it makes its way into the conversation, and i always leave those interactions feeling disgusted with myself because that's not who i am. i genuinely try to see the best in everyone, and i feel like making fun of another person just doesn't align with my core values. and i've tried bringing this up to her by saying "can we stop talking about other people?" or "i feel like we're being a bit too judgmental" or even "i've recognized lately that i'm not really being super kind towards other people and i'd like to change that," but we keep falling back into those patterns. it's not as though i expect us to change overnight, but it does feel gross when our only form of interaction seems to be when we are comparing other peoples' lives to our own.
additionally, i've been working on myself a lot lately, and while i can recognize that i of course have flaws, i really do like who i'm becoming, and i have this nagging little voice inside me that's saying that a big reason why i haven't been feeling how i'd like to is that i'm constantly repeating this cycle of comparison with her. obviously it's not her fault, but it's a pattern that i have noticed is hard to break. also, i feel like our energy doesn't seem to be in alignment anymore. ugh i don't really know where i'm going with any of this, but my point is that i feel like we are no longer what the other person needs, which is such an icky feeling because we've been around each other 24/7 for the past 6+ months. that being said, our friendship has felt increasingly more and more transactional, like i'm doing more physical labor to ensure we're hanging out. because of this, i feel an immense amount of the pressure of us remaining in contact lays on me. of course, she can't drive yet, but like she doesn't even bother asking her parents if they can pick her up/take her places. and i know it's a matter of convenience and she probably just doesn't understand how expensive gas is, but it comes out of my own pocket, and even when i've tried to have conversations with her about this, she doesn't seem to understand. it's not her fault, but it definitely feels shitty when i feel like i have to coordinate and make sure that our hang outs happen. also, it's started to feel like she expects me to pick her up/drop her off to and from school, and it's even began to bleed into her own life; she wants me to take her to and from hangouts with her friends, etc, etc. and i really have tried to communicate with her about this, but i feel selfish saying that i only want to drive her places when i get to hang out with her. also, we live like fifteen minutes away with traffic, so if she wants me to drive her places it's at least a 30 minute round trip.
i'm saying all this because it al leads back to earlier today (about an hour or so ago) when we were hanging out at her house and doing homework. one of her english assignments was to read out loud the prologue of romeo & juliet, so she wanted me to sit quietly for a moment while she did it. if you've ever been hanging out with friends while they are trying to film/speak about something serious, you'll know that it is almost impossible to keep a straight face, so mid monologue when she was saying "two houses both alike in..." we made eye contact and both burst out laughing. i thought the entire thing was funny and that we were both laughing at the situation, so i took the ipad which she was recording with (because obviously she wasn't using the recording) and made a joke like "haha this is what you sound like..." and spoke in an overly posh voice as i recited the opening lines of the play. she laughed along with me, but afterward she told me kind of abruptly, "that was unkind." i was taken aback because i thought we were both joking about like how unserious the assignment was, and i told her as much. she got really serious after that and basically said (not all at once but for timeliness's sake i'll write it together) "that was really unkind. like it struck a nerve. i was trying something new for the first time and like imagine if you went onstage and were trying to do a new accent and immediately after you finished, i laughed at how funny it sounded. i just think it was mean and like not funny." she was saying this in a really angry and frustrated way, which is why i was so shocked. obviously i understand why that would have hurt her feelings, but i just didn't get why it did in the context of our situation. like i personally would laugh because i feel like it is funny to try and fail a new accent. i don't know. after that, i made up an excuse as to why i needed to leave and drove to the nearest parking garage i could and watched the sunset while writing this. i don't know what to do from here. it's not just this one interaction that changed things, but it's a cumulation of everything in general. i feel like she and i are insanely out of sync and i just also feel upset with myself for not understanding why she felt sad (i understand it if i was being deliberately unkind, but i rewatched the video and she was laughing along with me and i never said anything about HER i think i made it clear i was laughing about the assignment).
anyway i just feel like we've been drifting apart for a while now, and i also just really dislike how i feel about myself and the world around me when i'm with her. everything just feels like a competition and i feel like she doesn't ever want to have the kinds of nuance in our conversations that i feel like are necessary when we're talking poorly about someone (like, we shouldn't make fun of how someone looks but rather how they treat people). also, she seems very much wrapped up in physical appearance, and don't get me wrong i am too because like obviously we're teenage girls in 2026. we're going to be insecure. but the way she speaks about beauty is so objectively hurtful. she constantly is comparing people by saying "i think i'm prettier than her" and "i think that she's prettier than x,y,z..." and i just don't feel like that's the kind of conversation or mentality i want to have. i feel like everyone is just as beautiful as everyone else, and when she tries to quantify it i feel immensely uncomfortable. idk. i think that it just boils down to her feeling like i'm on some high and mighty ground and me not always understanding/knowing how to interact with her in a way that will make her feel happy. idk. i just feel like we've been communicating really ineffectively and like she no longer aligns with who i want to be. i don't like who i become when i'm around her, which is really scary to admit because obviously it's not her fault. it's like how oil and water interact; individually they're both perfectly fine, but when they interact, they start to repel one another, and they don't sync up well. even if you shake it (like with jokes), everything eventually settles at a distance from each other.
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