This Is The Story Of How My Cousin And I Barely Saw Each Other For YEARS

This is the story of how my cousin and I barely saw each other for YEARS

So when we were in kindergarten we were in the same class, and basically after that year we were split up until fourth grade. They removed us from each other without giving us an explanation.

Now that’s not to say we never saw each other, our family is huge and we’d always have big get together for birthdays, weddings, even just after church. We also rode the same bus.

But here’s the thing

I only had two friends

for a while.

They were that cousin and another boy our age, we’ll call him jack.

Fast forward a couple years and he was still my best friend, but I had made two more friends. That was when I REALLY started noticing that no one liked me.

Now I’d met my fourth friend through my third friend and they were both great, for a while, friend #4 was always a little on the mean side, but I didn’t care.

People always said “be nicest to those who aren’t nice to you” so I took those words to heart, “sit with the kid who doesn’t sit with anyone.”

Well this girl never sat alone thanks to me.

But she wasn’t getting any better either.

Now she wasn’t just a verbal bully to me, she would punch me, kick me, tackle me to the ground. And when I asked her why she’d say “that’s what friends do isn’t it?” And so I took her word for it.

Little did I know she was giving more reason for the teachers to keep me away from my cousin.

Apparently she’d turned me into a sociopath and I didn’t realize until years later when my parents told me they “didn’t raise me like this” and that they didn’t like friend #4.

I being a small sociopath ignored them.

Then flash forward to fourth grade when I got to be in the same class as my cousin for the first time in five years.

He told me that people had been keeping us apart because I was a bitch and I was super controlling. Now I of course don’t remember that seeing as I was just a little tyke at the time.

He told me that that’s what his teachers, his mom, MY mom, had been telling him for years.

By this time I was so influenced by friend #4 that I verbally threatened my class mates. A lot.

I had broken ties with Jack because 1) friend #4 always told me that being friends with a boy wasn’t “normal” (and really she just wanted to be his girlfriend) and 2) he was terrified of me.

They were all terrified, I was the puny girl who wore dresses every day, I wore pigtails and I had a foot of dark brown hair, in all accounts I should’ve been super cute, but was friends with the mean girl.

She had once broken an eighth graders thumb when she was in first grade, she had smashed her own head through a wall because she was angry.

And now I was a mirror image of her attitude.

Apparently, everyone was scared of me. I’ve since attempted to mend my ways and learn from my mistakes, I’ve tried ditching friend #4 a total of two times and I’m trying again. Once I learned about what she had done to me I didn’t talk to her for a year. She would cry she would scream at me. But NOTHING convinced me to talk to her. I’d been keeping her around once I’d made more friends, I thought they liked her. But now in eighth grade I hope she switches schools for highschool, my friends told me they hate her. They don’t like how she’s treated me or how she pushes her beliefs and opinions on everyone.

She was the reason for my prolonged separation from my very first friend and and they only put us back together because they thought he could do me some good. I will never let another person control me and take me away from the people I love and trust because that’s not “just what friends do” that’s what abusers do.

I also can’t stand my family and how they told my cousin all these horrible things about me and who I was. They told him that I was basically evil and though that may have been true for a while, I was still just a kid and hearing that my own family had trash talked me and kicked me down had locked me into my shell. When your own mother calls you a bitch you cave in on yourself. I got super depressed and I don’t even know what any semblance of a normal relationship with that cousin would look like anymore.

I may not have physically hurt myself, but the scars on my inside are a lot deeper than I like to admit.