I made a new friend when I was eight. My teacher introduced her to me one day when she called me a stupid child for something that was in hindsight, a small mistake any eight year old would make, like faltering because I couldn’t remember what 3 times 7 was or something silly like that. The friend I made that day has been with me ever since.
She wasn’t a terribly good friend as a child; she was the obnoxious kid that rode on your back, pulling at your face with her grubby little hands in a death grip so that no matter what you did, you just couldn’t shake her off. She would sit at the foot of my bed while I tried to fall asleep, saying stuff like “Maybe if you weren’t such a stupid kid, your parents would love you more,” and when I sat alone in class, she would be there telling me how people didn’t want to talk to me because I was fat and ugly.
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Because I spent so much time with her- we practically grew up together-, I didn’t mind her presence so much anymore because at some point I figured the things she told me must be right. Throughout Junior High, I walked through hallways staring at my feet because she told me I was chubby and nobody in their right mind would bother talking to me; and she was right because hardly anyone did. She laughed at me whenever I played a wrong note and my violin screeched. She told me boys wouldn’t like me, because I was just so damn plain. Every story I wrote for a while was balled up and binned, because she would tell me my words were stupid and pathetic and that I should just stop. For decades I played it safe, took no risks, because she stopped me from making a fool of myself; if I didn’t put anything out into the world, I would be laughed at by only her and nobody else.
I believed every word she said to me; because for a while, nobody ever told me otherwise. She was the voice in my ear whispering “He’s lying,” when a boy told me I was pretty for the first time. She sabotaged my relationships because unlike me she questioned everything- “What if he’s lying about going out with the boys tonight?” or “What if she’s more than a friend?” She made sure I worried about the tiniest things, and she would have me fully convinced he didn’t love me if he hadn’t replied in 2 hours.
I couldn’t just tell her to shut up. After all, she was and still is my friend; we grew up together. It’s hard to tell her she’s wrong because it feels like she had been right all this time. But some days, I find the strength to ignore her and she leaves me alone for a little while. Then she comes back and tells me, “That thing you wrote is suuuuper dumb. I hope you’re not planning on posting it.” I shrug and say, “So what if it is? I’m gonna do it anyway.”