Feeling Jilted
I feel like I’m back in junior high school, that’s how immature I am. Only it’s nothing that transpired on the playground or at the mall while skipping class. No, it’s all Internet based relations.
A number of years ago, I met a deeply troubled, suicidal girl on a support website. We were roughly the same age and we both suffered from eating disorders and the desire to end our lives. We hit it off right away and began e-mailing each other several times every day, as well as writing copious amounts of snail mail, often 20-30 pages per envelope. I must say this girl knew more about me than anyone else in this whole world, and she would say the same about me. We truly regarded one another as best friends even though we never physically met.
Time went by, and of course things changed. Time has a way of doing that to Life. She became very frustrated by my constant admissions to hospital for purposes of weight gain.. she just couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get better when my life was so "perfect" in her opinion. And I couldn’t relate to her constant, obsessive love of men who treated her like shit. Such a lovely girl deserved so much more out of life; she deserved to be loved and respected, and I told her that every single day.
Our friendship was strained, but we still kept in touch. Unfortunately it would never be the same as before, and that rather saddened me. In a surprising demonstration of resilience, I went on to make a couple of new on-line friends, and she went on with her abusive relationships. Then we discovered we were both on Twitter, so of course we followed each other. But lo and behold if her and one of my Twitter contacts (who had become a dear friend to me,) didn’t connect and become great friends themselves! I know Laurie is confiding all her woes to Maria, and that makes me feel like I’ve been kicked in the teeth as Maria was my friend first, and now I’m the outsider. I feel jealous and jilted, as well as ashamed of my immaturity over this entire situation. It’s crazy how my self-hatred has been fuelled to even hotter degrees.