(28/M) One of my oldest friends cut ties with me a year ago, and I’m still trying to process things

This will be a really tough thing to write about, but I’ll try.

I was alone for most of my life, apart from my family. I was bullied a lot, and it led to extreme mental health problems in life. As a kid/teenager I was awkward, moody, and I had difficulty controlling my emotions. I’d just cry at the slightest thing. I never found making friends easy. The only time people really interacted with me was when they were making fun of me, or if they took pity on me. All I ever wanted was to be liked by people, but I just didn’t know how. So for my childhood, I essentially dug in, put the walls up and hunkered down until I could outlast them.

I didn’t have a real friend until I was 17, with a new start in college. Even then I was so desperate to not be alone that I’d overwhelm them with constant requests to hang out, eventually my college friends just stopped replying.

One of them didn’t though. I met him three years in to college, and he was essentially the only one who stuck with me. We talked about stuff all the time, he’d listen to me and try to help the best he could. I didn’t do the best in college (wasn’t popular, no girlfriend, etc.), but I knew this guy always had my back.

It continued after college too, when I went back to my parents. I was never able to get a job because of extreme anxiety issues, and I just rotted away for a few years. He was always there on the other end of the phone though, and he’d talk me through my fears and try to help how best he could.

He eventually got a good job and got his life on track. For ages, he’d do his best to help me too. It’s not like I wasn’t trying, but I was just not in the right place. But he never complained. He even loaned me money when my welfare got cut off, among other genuinely great things he did for me. I worshipped the guy.

That all changed when we moved in together. Eventually he started to take more and more of a parental streak with me. All of the various small things I’d do would be looked down on, how I cleaned and how I was still only working part-time. After a few months living together, I realised we had very different worldviews, and he was very dismissive of anyone who didn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps, basically passive-aggressively talking about me. I never felt strong enough to defend myself, because I felt I owed him for everything. Plus it was the pandemic, so we had no choice but to be around each other.

Eventually it wasn’t just advice. he started ordering me about, treating me like his child. Being very condescending to me, and never really taking stock in my opinion on anything. Inspecting me after I cleaned up. I tried to keep seeing it as him trying to help, but eventually I just saw it as tyranny. And soon, I’d just start taking the opposite of what he said. He wasn’t really a friend, he was an authority figure. I would have done anything to do good things for him, but he was very self-sufficient.

I just became terrified of him. He could see everything I did, hear everything in the house, he remembered everything. I just felt I was being watched and judged all the time. Maybe it was my own paranoia at first, but it eventually became very true.

He found out I talked to my other friends about him, and he turned on me, hard. To him, I had betrayed him unforgivably. was a lazy sponge who hadn’t moved on since college. I couldn’t help him with his problems, I had nothing for him. And he only wanted friends “with solutions”. He kept a big list of all the ways I wronged him, and one night he snapped and said them all to me, going right back to when we first moved in. He ended things with me, and made sure to say it was me who truly ended it. He said anything I did to fix it was too little, too late.

We had two other housemates who totally took his side, and by the end I was a complete pariah. They all left last year at the same time, in complete disgust at me.

I’ve done my best to put my life back together, but I’d be lying if I said it was going well. I feel terrible at what I’ve done, and that I’m a worthless human being. I feel he’s seen the black void at the heart of me, and that makes me think I’m a terrible person who’ll hurt and use everyone if they get close.

I’m really afraid to meet people now, as this has completely shaken my confidence. I don’t even like leaving my house now. I’m not a lazy person, I’ve gotten a job since then, but I feel the damage has already been done. I feel like I don’t deserve to be happy.

What should I think about all this? I don’t trust my own mind anymore