Ever since I was little, I’ve always been in and out of friend groups due to the inconsistencies of behavior between people. So when I got to middle school and I met someone who I could finally call my best friend, I was ecstatic. Unfortunately for me, the happiness was not all that long-lasting.

So after that first year of ‘best friendship’ that consisted of gossiping about meaningless middle school drama and passing to each other at practice, the competitiveness really broke out in the eighth grade. She would always have to be better than me at anything and everything, whether it was subtle or blatant.

From the amount of playing time on the field to the number of friends to the difficulty of class assignments, everything became a competition. I was blind to it at the time, because middle school was already a weird time and I guess I just didn’t notice how my “best friend” was actually treating me.

For a while, even throughout a decent portion of high school, I truly believed that I was her best friend. I would ignore the fact that there was always someone else there that she would be more interested and invested in, because I thought that my friendship mattered to her. Once we hit the eighth grade we began fighting almost all the time, and for a while we weren’t even friends.

You know those relationships that are on again and off again? That was our friendship. We wouldn’t speak for nearly a whole year at a time, and I would hear how she would speak about me behind my back. I couldn’t believe that I had been friends with her, but I would always give her another chance.

I met many friends through her, and one of them is one of my closest friends to this day. However, she would be mean behind my back to her friends who also liked my friendship and they would all tell me the awful way she spoke of me. She would make up lies that weren’t even true, she would talk to people who had never even spoken to me and they would form opinions of me based on her lies. There were no secrets with her. If I told her something, she would tell someone else as if my life was just a piece of gossip to her. She thrived on anything that wasn’t about her because she thought that other people’s issues would make her life more interesting.

I always thought that she was my friend, as if she cared about me or my friends. She hurt me and she hurt many other girls throughout high school. She convinced me to ignore a girl that I actually really liked, just because she had been copying her style throughout high school. She didn’t make me a better person, she didn’t make me happy, and she tried to turn me into someone that I did not want to be. That’s not someone that I want to associate with. I feel as though she didn’t care about me at all and she only cared about herself.

So the whole time that I thought she was my friend, she was really just toxic to my life. The girl who I thought was my best friend truly was never more than just a stranger to me. Sure, I knew her, but I only knew what she wanted me to know. Nothing more.