when i back away i’ll keep the handle of your gun in sight
currently:
reading: the girl chat on discord
listening: fusion fam friends streaming fortnite
watching: season in review owl team videos
obsession: pokemon go eevee community day
what follows is the complete history, as best i can remember it, of my friendships with bronwen and anna and how introducing them killed one relationship and strained another (and it’s not the one you think!)
i met bronwen my junior year of college when she started long-distance dating my dear friend will. she fit into our friend group perfectly and she and i got on like a house on fire, bonding over our shared love of speaking very bad french, russian novels, and taking back sunday. we saw her once every few months when she could come up for a weekend, and when will and john were at work we would while away the hours drinking moscato on my bed and talking about anything and everything, ordering cookout, and watching the razorbread collective play mario kart. bron moved to aville after we all graduated and i proceeded to never see her as i sunk deeper into my depression hole of never leaving my house unless i was going to work. when john dumped me and i left asheville like, immediately after, bron was one of the people that came to see me in those two brief weeks in between. i moved home and then a few months after, will and bron moved to chapel hill and they became 2/3 of my college friends i could actually see without going back to aville. (the other, of course, was my main bro trev) they would come to see me on holidays and random weekends, and i would go stay with them on other holidays and random weekends. bron and i talked a lot about the end of my and john’s relationship, why it happened, the missed signs, how my depressive slump didn’t help it, etc. she was a willing ear and she really helped me process all the feelings i had about that time, and we also had a lot of good times. the two new year’s eves i spent in their various apartments were the best.
anna i had known of since freshman year, since aville is so small. honestly i wasn’t her biggest fan until one of our mutual friend’s birthdays my senior year. we bonded over doctor who and lizzie bennet diaries and always being in fucking zeiger for classes. we would visit each other on our respective couches and do homework together. after school was over, right before she moved back here, she came to 304 a few times to hang out. she came with me when i went to buy my first comics at comic envy. after she moved back to maryland we were tumblr friends and as i left the house less and less we became better friends since i was always on the fucking internet. she had a Traumatic Life Event™ about 6 months before john and i broke up and i was definitely a shoulder to cry on during that time. when i moved home after the breakup, she and evangeline were my two main support friends, since most of my irl friends were still very close with john and it felt weird to shit-talk him or process shit about him with them (until will and bron moved away that is). we got progressively closer and i invited her to christmas with my family since she couldn’t go see her family and that pretty much cemented our friendship for the next year and a half. every vacation she took from work was to visit my family, we had a shared tumblr, we swapped fic recs and headcannoned at each other almost constantly. the days i did not speak to her for at least half an hour were few and far between. she called me and asked for advice on anything and everything, and wanted my parents’ input as well. she was angling to be welcomed into my family the way lindsey and bodi and shawna were (as my adopted siblings, basically), and for a while it looked like maybe she would be. bodi and i went to see her the halloween of 2015 and she introduced me and andrew then (even though she didn’t say she was trying to set us up, she was). she gave me his number at the beginning of december (again, not saying she was trying to set us up, it was for some dumb joke we were making), and from then on she and andrew hung out 2 or 3 times a week. they often ended up talking to me during that time, either skyping or snap-chatting or just plain old talking on the phone. when i was trying to decide where out of state i should move she pushed hard for me to move here to maryland, going so far as to suggest a job opening at her company to me, and offering her couch in her basement apartment after i got the job until i found a place of my own. then, my second fatal mistake: andrew and i moved in together, and asked her to be our third roommate.
my first fatal mistake was introducing bron and anna. they had similar emotional abuse in their tragic backstories and i, having no firsthand experience in this, recommended them to each other as really cool people that should be friends. they were okay friends until i stopped being anna’s long-distance bff and started being anna’s real life person roommate, with all the issues that come from being a person you live with. as soon as i was no longer the person who would listen to all her problems and became a person involved in those problems, most of her frankly stifling attention shifted to bron, who thrived under it. as my roommate relationship with anna deteriorated, her friendship with bron bloomed into a circlejerk of not actually working on their issues and self-medicating with micro-obsessions.
now, this is important: anna and i are toxic roommates for each other. she demands your full attention all the time, which isn’t bad as a long-distance friend you can just ignore if you’re not in the mood, but living with her was irritating beyond belief. her inability to read a room really began to show, as she could never tell when andrew and i needed couple time or if she was welcome to join us. initially this wasn’t a huge issue, since we attempted to do almost everything together as a trio. we had family style dinners, watched tv together, and played happy families for a few months until andrew and i accidentally triggered her beyond belief and she ignored us for a full 3 days. normally i would not have had a problem with this, but she and i worked together and i had to drive her to and from work (and bring her lunch!) on the days she was ignoring me, which left me feeling like less of a friend and more of a mom with an angry teenage daughter. the longer she went without communicating anything to us about why exactly she was acting this way, the angrier i got. by the time she acknowledged what had happened and apologized for ghosting, i was furious and didn’t know why. meanwhile, andrew and i were forced to spend three days as a couple, going on dates and spending time by ourselves, and we actually really loved it. after she tried to make amends, she was startled to find our dynamic had shifted from a trio of friends to a couple, with a friend/roommate. she spent the rest of the time she lived with us attempting and failing to navigate that dynamic.
about a month after The Fight™, she confronted me. i had been cold to her since her apology and she wanted to know why. we talked and argued for 2 hours. she equated me avoiding her “are you okay” questions over the last month to me gaslighting her, which deeply hurt me. in retrospect, i can see that she equated my behavior with her parents’ emotional abuse, but god, sometimes people are just assholes. i was just an asshole, not an abuser. the accusation of gaslighting really stuck with me and colored pretty much every interaction i had with her until we hashed it out literally a year later.
in the spring of 2016, bodi moved in with will and bron. it took maybe 3 or 4 months for things to go bad. bron and will expected bodi to be saner than they are, and bodi had the worst summer of their life, rapidly cycling between mania and depression thanks to their bipolar, messing their meds up a few different times, hallucinating bugs and mold in their room constantly, and losing their short term memory for days at a time. will and bron drew some significant boundaries that bodi didn’t so much cross as waltz all over, and in a fit of frustration will and bron called me about it. i tried to mediate as best i could, smoothing things over to both sides, acknowledging bodi’s weakness while still trying to explain that sometimes living with someone as desperately mentally ill as bodi was that summer is more than some people could deal with. bodi ended up moving out fairly quickly but not quickly enough for will and bron, who were done with bodi. the height of their nonsense was them trying to convince me bodi had tried to poison them by putting soap in their whiskey. this was the only point where i refused to concede to their portrayal of things, insisting to them that bodi would never. i gave a lot of ground to them but this, i wouldn’t budge. i don’t think they ever forgot this.
bron came to visit in november, shortly after the Fight™ but before tensions spilled over into the gaslighting talk. i anticipated talking with her and reliving those fun 304 times. we had that for the first night she came over, for about 4 hours, before she had to go to bed. the next morning was reserved for anna and a trip to an arboretum. they invited me, but, trying to respect that they had a relationship independent of me, i declined, anticipating that they would come back that afternoon and hang out. they didn’t. they stayed in dc until pretty late, and then came home and went straight into the bathroom to soak their feet. after anna went to bed i had maybe another 1 1/2 hours of bron time before she also went to sleep, saying we would hang out before she left the next day. we didn’t. she and anna went to a nursery that morning, and then to ikea for planters, and by the time they got back and bron left for nc again i had had to leave for dc myself. i was sorely disappointed, but not really mad. i was frustrated but realized that i could not dictate what bron did with her own vacation time. i was very honest with her and let her know this. i don’t think she every forgot this confession either.
anna invited herself to christmas 2016. it was miserable for me. my family is pretty close knit, and also very southern. guests have to be Treated Right™, and she was guest. i had not seen my family since i moved, and i tried to spend as much time as possible with them, knowing i wouldn’t get a chance to for a while, but anna’s introverted nature meant she would withdraw from family functions early, and guest etiquette required that we make sure she is comfortable at all times, and a few nights ended early or changed altogether to suit her. even though i attempted to drop hints that maybe she should go home before we spent time with andrew’s mom’s family, she insisted she would be fine, and therefore crashed the first time i met andrew’s mom. she spent a lot of time before the trip trying to angle to get time alone with my bodi, but when i refused to rearrange my days to fit driving her around she had to make due with arranging to see rogue one with them instead. much to her annoyance, bodi turned right around and invited me, andrew, and andrew’s twin brothers, who were 10 at the time, to the movie as well. once we were out, she became increasingly frustrated that bodi, surprise!, stuck with me for the most part, as anna accidentally stuck herself with the twins as she tried to “buy their love” with pokemon go. at the end of the movie, carrie fisher’s cameo at the end sent bodi into a crying fit, as carrie had died just a few days before, and space mom meant a lot to them. bodi turned to cry on me instead of anna, despite anna initially pulling them into a hug, and i think that was the last straw for her. andrew’s step-dad, who is a shithead, was pulling some childish bullshit and anna cited feeling unsafe there as a reason to invite herself home with bodi. this was, to me, the final nail in the coffin of my regard for anna. it doesn’t make much sense, but after a fall of discontent, leveraging her trauma to get her own way was the thing that truly opened my eyes to how manipulative she could be.
things only got worse from there. anna makes friends by memorizing all the things a person likes and then learning everything she possibly can about them to have something in common and something to talk about. this is not a bad thing necessarily, but when all you have in a new place is the things you like, it can quickly get suffocating. i decided to buy some plants, to pick gardening up as a hobby maybe. two months later anna had 35+ succulents and a garden for a room, and any conversation about plants devolved into her lecturing about things she’d learned off the internet. hobby spoiled. i picked up a few bands i knew but hadn’t listened to extensively, and after hearing them a few times to and from work she also bought their album and played them constantly. i decided i was going to enjoy my life and take baths a lot, and after a month or two anna’s entire shower regime was lush products. what worked so well long-distance became one-up-manship as roommates and i started to feel like she was taking over my life. she told my family stories to our coworkers, even the ones that would embarrass the shit out of my family. she showed off pictures of our family dogs. she talked about andrew’s and my relationship like she had orchestrated every bit of it, when what she did was introduce us and give me andrew’s number. every so often she would do or say something and i would be reminded of the lizzie mcguire episode where she makes a younger friend who copies her in everything until lizzie snaps and ends their friendship. i have a slow but lasting temper and i did not actually want to ruin our friendship, so i started withdrawing from her as much as possible.
meanwhile, bron became anna’s rock. they spoke every day and encouraged each other’s worst habits, in my opinion. bron validated anna’s decision to not go back to therapy, anna indulged bron in bron’s growing inablity to leave the house, and eventually they developed hardcore crushes on each other. (will and bron were married at this time, in an open marriage. it works for them? i hear conflicting things.) in this time period i made my third fatal mistake: talking to bron about anna. when things went south with her initially i tried to keep other people out of it. since the only support system she had in place (save like, two people) was MY support system, and since i didn’t actually dislike her, i didn’t want to vent to my friends and family and risk alienating her from the people she looked to for help in rough times. after finally breaking down to my mom in january 2017, the floodgates opened. shawnie didn’t know her, so that wasn’t really a problem, and my parents, bodi, and lindsey were all capable of holding my issues with anna separate from their relationships with her. i unfortunately assumed bron would be able to do the same, especially since she asked me to mediate between her and bodi the summer before. initially she heard me out, but as time went on we spoke less and less. going to her for help the way she had to me for bodi had ruined our friendship. she was less than impressed with how i was coping (ie, i wasn’t really) and wanted me to sit down and draw definitive boundaries with anna. remembering the gaslighting talk and a more recent incident where she literally asked me to restate my issue 4 times before she apologized for something that upset me, i never did. maybe this would have helped, maybe it wouldn’t, but every time i asked her to stop a behavior, unless andrew backed me up on it, she mostly did what she wanted to anyway.
this mainly showed with our cat. the three of us had adopted a cat from one of anna’s and my coworkers, and after we thoroughly established that andrew should be his favorite person and reinforced that to him, anna seemed determined to bribe him to love her. this wouldn’t have been a problem, save that at the height of her bribery campaign she was feeding him treats without communicating that to andrew, and had so captivated his attention that he actually disliked me. he is my fucking cat. if i asked her not to do something, specifically her training him to do things she thought were good which would have been disastrous if they continued into when we had kids, she would actually ignore me because i hadn’t done research on training cats like she had. this was our strange battleground for months. it was incredibly petty and i’m almost ashamed of it, but it happened.
2017 passed in a haze of low level irritation interspersed with bursts of rage. i called bodi, lindsey, and my parents a lot to try to mitigate my anger and get opinions on if i was justified in being angry about something or if i was just too sensitive to her brand of irritant. i was very careful to avoid speaking in anger to her, because though i often feel spiteful, i try not to inflict it on others. on two or three occasions my mouth got the best of me and i said something deliberately cutting, meant to make her feel awful. fatal mistake #4: one of those times involved bron. i don’t remember what i said, but i know it involved twisting something bron said to me and using it to hurt anna. not a great look for me. at this point in time i was so desperate to have something that was not shared with anna i was acting irrationally, getting jealous over nothing, and being very protective of my friends. i started leaving her out, and forcing even more distance between us. she, course, was telling bron all of this.
now here’s where we are in fall 2017: anna is constantly hurt by my actions. i am losing my mind trying to stay as far away from her as i can when i drive her to and from our job every day and live with her, while not being outwardly mean or spiteful. andrew has given up on her, and while willing to listen to me agonize over if wanting her away from me makes me a bad person, always comes back to advising me to stop caring about her. bronwen is in constant contact with anna, who she likes. despite both anna and bron claiming to be assertive, call-you-on-your-bullshit personalities, neither has said a word to me about being unhappy with my behavior. i believe (mistakenly) bronwen and i are still good friends, and anna and i just need to not live together any longer.
bron had scheduled a visit over a weekend in early november to see tegan and sara with anna. she never lets me know she is coming up- i hear it from anna. anna and i had had a heart to heart a few weeks before and are breathing easier than we had all year. i have friends coming up for a podcast festival that same weekend, and make plans to see them the same friday and saturday that bron is up. i know that technically we have sunday to hang out, but remember the previous visit i’m not holding my breath. friday i come home from work (anna had taken the day off) and there’s no bron. i figure she left late or something, as i’ve had no communication on it besides that friday is when i need to have my room (which functions as a guest room) clean for bron. on our way to the metro, i comment on bron to andrew, who tells me bron was in a car wreck outside of richmond and is on a bus that won’t get in until late. i freaked out a little over this, but pushed it to the side to have a nice time with my other friends that night. when we got back to the apartment, bron had arrived, and it was only then that they told me she had been in a wreck. apparently i was being too loud as i tried to make conversation, as after maybe 5 minutes of chatting i was summarily dismissed as bron turned the tv on and gave it her full attention. i went to vent on tumblr about being mad that anna hadn’t told me that bron had been in a wreck, and then realized that i couldn’t do this, as anna and bron both followed my blog. i made some stupid vague post about how i was frustrated i couldn’t use tumblr as a vent space any more, and thought no more about it. we hung out with our friends the next day, had a great time, and by the time we got back anna and bron were asleep. by the time i got up the next morning, bron was on a bus back down to nc without so much as a goodbye text. anna came to see me a few hours later, and informed me that bron was furious at me for the vagueblog post, which she thought was about her. i immediately texted her to explain and apologize, and the next morning i had my reply.
she was super pissed at me. she was incredibly blunt, telling me that she thought i had anger transference issues and that i needed to go to therapy. i informed her that i was actually worried about how irritated i was all the time and was considering therapy anyway, at which point she changed to a more supportive tone while holding me at arms length. after my initial relief that i had not lost my friend of 5 years, i started to actually think about what she said, and consulted my oldest and best friends about the anger transference thing. i’m a pretty introspective, self critical person, and if this was actually a problem i had then i sure as shit wanted to know about it. all three admitted when i was already angry or frustrated i was more prone to getting more angry and frustrated, but nothing that was abnormal. this bullshit diagnosis was the first strike against bron.
i was talking about how relieved i was to anna later that day or the next, and she said something that really piqued my interest: “bron was really surprised you had considered going to therapy. she was all ready to write you off when you texted her and she was kind of thrown that you didn’t fight her on that and didn’t really know how to handle it.” why, exactly, was she ready to write me off so quickly? anna and i started talking this over, and bron had really lost her good opinion of me since i had moved in with anna. she thought i was “taking my anger with bron out on anna,” which was laughable, since i was never angry with bron in the first place. the more anna and i talked, the more the picture of someone who was ready to drop a friend without actually talking to them emerged. bron never reached out to me to say that i was hurting anna, never bothered to let me know that she thought i was an ass, and was perfectly content to just.. never speak to me again with no explanation. while i understand this impulse, bron had always prided herself on being a very up front person who doesn’t shy away from hard conversations.. expect in my case, apparently. strike 2.
over the next week or so, i would ruminate on this situation, and think it to death. periodically i would explain what i was thinking to anna, who i think felt really guilty for driving a wedge in between bron and me. i never blamed anna for talking things out with bron, because fuck it, i talked to bron too! this is what friends are for and it wasn’t anna’s fault that bron ended up being unable to separate me, anna’s shitty roommate, from me, her friend. i mentioned something like this to anna maybe a week after the initial text conversation, with the question i kept coming back to: why was bron willing to throw away 5+ years of being friends for my bad behavior to my (sorry anna) frustrating roommate for 1? especially since she had treated bodi the year before in much the same way i treated anna? the answer blew me away: “well, i mean, all the stuff you did to me was just the last straw, since before that there was all the stuff with john..” …what stuff with john????? “oh, you know, where you would make him feel guilty for going out without you after refusing to go out, trying to keep him home with you, taking your depression out on him, that kind of stuff.” I DID WHAT NOW??? i was furious. bron couldn’t have known this because it wasn’t something that came up often, but john and i had made a pact when we first started dating- i, the introvert, wouldn’t be pressured or guilted into going out and he, the extrovert, wouldn’t be pressured or guilted into staying home with me. we recognized that we needed different things to be happy and tried to take care that we could get what we need. if he felt guilty leaving me home at the end of our relationship, that’s on him. i didn’t try to make him feel that way. i know that my depression in aville affected my relationship, i had told her that myself one night when i was working through my bullshit. the fact that she was using this as reasoning to turn against me? horrendous. anna said that bron warned her about my “pattern of getting depressed and taking it out on my roommates.” strike. fucking. three.
i was so fucking hurt. to hear that someone you previously thought you were on good terms with was making shit up behind your back to justify not liking you anymore was.. indescribably painful. ironically, i’ve given bron what she wanted before i tried to make amends with her: i’m not going to ever talk to her again unless forced. i am never going to be able to trust her again after all this shit. i was a maudlin piece of shit for a hot minute afterwards, but now, almost a year later, i’m mostly just disappointed. bron is a great friend when she wants to be, and i’m sad that our opinions of each other have turned so sour. anna and i still work together, but no longer live together. it’s been 8 very nice months since she moved out, and andrew and i are in a much better place for it. i don’t think she and i will ever be best friends again (at least, i hope not) but we’re building back to being ~friends~ again.
thus stands the record of this fcking disastrous incident and all the relevant buildup. i tried to write the facts of my feelings, and not just how i felt about stuff, if that makes sense. i behaved very badly, but i don’t think i deserved what i got. i hope this can be the last of all this and i can stop thinking about it now that i’ve written it all out.
good night <3