Last spring, I misrepresented something to a lot of people without realizing I was doing it, and even though I didn’t mean to deceive or hurt anyone, I did. I lost a lot of what I thought at the time were friends and had my faith in who and what I am badly shaken. I’d always prided myself on the fact that I don’t have a lot, but I’m honorable and compassionate and kind. But if that’s not true, then what is true about me?

What bothers me is I can’t stop being angry at the friends-of-friends and people who acted like my friends who are still trying to milk the whole situation for the drama. One or two in particular weren’t directly involved, but seem to constantly rehash the incident to get themselves attention and sympathy. A little while after things went bad, I looked up someone who had been involved on Facebook to see how she was doing. The first thing I found was a public post where most of the people with whom I’m still upset said cruel things about me personally. Not about the situation, but essentially about how they never liked me anyway because of my stupid face. It’s a real-life situation that spilled over onto online, and now and then someone I know in passing asks me if I know about what such-and-so wrote or said about me. If not that, then they ask me about something one of them must have made up about me, since I have no idea what they’re talking about. I still come across Facebook comments now and then where someone tries to make it sound like I’m still bothering them and they’re so put-upon, or cutesy comments in groups they know I’m in that amount to “tee hee! Hey, look, everybody, I’m ignoring somebody!”. I haven’t spoken to any of them since last March.

I guess my question is, how do I stop being so mad at them? It’s not like I’m a completely blameless wronged party. I’m not sure it’s right for me to think I can decide how long people should be mad or how they should react. I worry sometimes that still holding onto my hurt instead of the hurt I caused makes me a bad person. But at the same time… I’ve had issues with depression my entire life, but this was what pushed me the closest I’ve ever been to killing myself. My brain was already telling me, “you’re irredeemable; you’re a monster and worthless and you don’t deserve to live after what you did!” So when I saw people I had respected saying the same thing, it cemented the idea in my head as right, or at least as the thing that would make up for everything that happened and prove to everyone how terrible I felt about it. I had a plan and did a few dry runs before some good friends helped me snap out of it. Even after that, I took a long time to accept that what I did doesn’t define who I am. Sometimes I still have trouble believing that I’m worthy of the people in my life who like me and that I’m not disgusting and awful.

I’m even still a little afraid to make myself noticed in other circles of friends, because what if I say or do something to remind someone of year-plus old drama elsewhere, and it starts again there? At the time I had an art project I was working on, that I haven’t touched since even though it made me happy. They made a lot of hay about how ugly and stupid it was in their backbiting, and there’s that little voice in the back of my head that says, “but what if they were right and it really is ugly and stupid?” when I think about working on it again. But more than that, I’m afraid of what happens if I share it in an online art community where I go by a name they don’t know, and one of them recognizes it and tries to start drama there. There’s part of me always flinching in anticipation of someone suddenly exclaiming, “that was you? You’re horrible! Get out of here!”

I think about these people taking this thing that was so profound in my life and treating it as a joke, a way to make themselves look better by making me look bad, or a freakshow for their entertainment, and I get so angry I shiver. Especially since I see so many of them still in real life and on Facebook, I want to tell them that I know the things they said and what they can do with the entire lineage of the horse they rode in on. I know that would be giving them exactly what they want, though. I avoid these people as much as I can, so weeks or months usually go by between someone saying something nasty about me and the “did you hear/see…?” getting back to me as well. It isn’t fair to attack people for things they said when they were angry, let alone things they said when they were angry in, say, November. I try to focus on the good people and good things in my life, but somehow this manages to overshadow them. Even when I try to focus on the fact that I got off pretty easy all things considered, and the people who talked to me to my face about all the drama were for the most part far nicer than I deserved, I just get angry at the people who were nice to me. If they’re willing to say these sweet things to me privately, where were they when people were beating up on me in public? Why didn’t they stand up for me when people were making up lies about me for the sake of drama? But that’s not fair either. So I leave them all alone and stew about it, which puts me in terrible black moods where I can go from being pretty content to about to cry from anger and frustration in moments.

But it was over a year ago. I have no interest in talking to any of them ever again. I think even most of the people who were in it for the drama have long since moved on to more exciting sport, since I never responded to any of their attempts to provoke me. When I say “people I thought were my friends,” I don’t mean it in the geek fallacy “they don’t accept that I did something bad, so they aren’t my friends” way. I mean that in looking back at our interactions before that, the friendships seem pretty one-sided, where I did way more for them than they did for me. I think I read more into friendly-acquaintance relationships than was there. So these are people I’m probably better off without anyway. At the end of the day, the people I’m hung up on are all strangers who don’t know anything about me but what they heard down the drama-line, so their opinions of me and what I do shouldn’t matter to me. I’ve tried to focus on the positive and tried to start conciliatory conversations with people I’m not so angry with or acknowledge the people who were kind to me, but that just makes me very sad for reasons I can’t quite identify.

So it shouldn’t matter anymore, but it does. I shouldn’t still be this angry and scared, and yet I am. How do I move on from this?

• This topic was modified 10 years, 10 months ago by Potent Potential Turtle.