So I had another weird day.
I met with a friend of mine and we talked about my former best friend, the one who was making me so miserable. She confessed that she had done some digging regarding my former best friend and what she found was a lot of lies. And I mean, a
lot of lies.
Turns out most everything that she told me about herself and others in the last 2 years has been fabrication. We're pretty sure the name she gives is real, but we don't know her age or her history. She has told each of our circle of friends an entirely different story regarding her past. To me she said she had lived in Israel until her teens and had been in the IDF for a number of years (when I relayed this to my mother, bless her, she knew instantly that my friend was a fraud) to another friend, she had lived in France for some years. To another friend she was a ballerina in New York. She claimed to have many disparate degrees from several universities. She said she was going to school for medicine.
The thing is, it all sounds ridiculous in hindsight, but you've never been shined up by this girl. She has a thousand-amp personality. She draws people to her. And she makes herself into their best friend, it's totally uncanny. I remember marveling (and writing, here) that I never thought I would meet anyone like her, someone who's vibrant and bright and
interested in me. I was just out of high school and I had no friends. The fact that it was all too good to be true only dissuaded me from reflection. She was everything I wanted. And she was the same with everyone else in our circle. To me she was engaged and encouraging of me. To my friend Rose she was a dedicated worker and an artiste (Rose called her the "academic soulmate") To Jess she was an outdoorsman and athlete. And the thing was, all of us were completely willing to believe her, I think because she could sense what we wanted and she gave it to us. I know Rose and I were both at points where my former best friend was the one person we trusted most in the world. She is supremely talented at reading people, a terrifyingly physical and forceful personality, and an amazing dilettante capable of being just competent in enough things to pull off her lies. In another life she could've been a successful cult leader. But none of us really knew anything about her. Rose pointed me towards the
"hipster grifter" phenomenon as an explanation, although so far as we can tell my former friend never engaged in outright fraud (she did have a habit of losing expensive things she borrowed) She did, however, accuse my friend Jess of identity theft and called the cops on her, resulting in a paraphernalia charge. It's apparent that she has not attended school since the semester I met her, and she has no job, even though she seems to be awash in cash.
I don't know, it just blows my mind. She had me wrapped around her finger, I would have done anything for her. And I'm not really angry at all, the last two years have been good for me and she was, for a time, a source of immense support. And I met all my true friends through her. But friendship requires honesty, and at this point I have no idea what I am in relation to her. It's curiously liberating, because the person I drove myself crazy trying to live up to was a paper monster. It's like figuring out privately that the lottery ticket you won a million dollars through was fake.
Aside from the pointless, pathological lying, she may have other mental problems, but she was good to me, for the most part. Only in the last few months has she stopped being the friend I always wanted and thought I had, and started being rather callous and dismissive. It was driving me nuts, trying to figure out what facilitated that change. At this point I think she's just tired of keeping up the facade.
(It should also be noted that the events that facilitated my former best friend's exodus from our group involved an expensive, canceled vacation that she had people counting on her to facilitate. She claimed to have avenues of travel and funding she did not actually have, and people lost money and became suspicious. After that she engaged in a lot of infidelity rumor-spreading amongst the couples I knew and that was the straw that broke the camel's back, spurring Jess into investigation which led to her confronting my friend and being accused of identity theft. I was only told about all of this tonight)
tl;dr My world is upside down.
