I’m a female senior in high school and, like many people, I experienced a “friend breakup” with somebody very close to me. Right now it’s December and everything ugly went down last April, when I was a junior. Even though I did the right thing by cutting out a toxic person in my life, it was both a hurtful ordeal and a painful process. Everything is a-ok now!

The reason why I am writing this is because I want to know if this person I used to be close friends with is a narcissist or if she’s just toxic. To make things easier, I’ll call this girl X.

Basically right after cutting X out of my life, another friend of mine was going through a horrible breakup with a guy she claimed was a narcissist. When I asked her why, many behavioral things she said matched up with X. At this point I had stopped talking to X, so I was and still am basing things off of recent memories. I’m going to write down exactly why I think X is a toxic narcissist. Somebody tell me if this is narcissism or not.

How I met X / The first red flag: CRAZY PEOPLE FROM THE PAST:

When I first met X, the school year had just begun, she was the new girl in town, and a senior. She had moved from out of state over summer break. I read somewhere that when one first encounters a narcissist, often times they make themselves seem extremely like-able. X was no different. Her magnetic personality drew me right away to wanting to be her friend. She gave off a “manic pixie dream girl” vibe. We had one class together, and it wasn’t a very popular class so the small number of us in there bonded with each other really well. I thought X seemed like a particularly cool gal and about a month or so into the school year, we hung out outside of school. I had not even been with her for an hour or two before she started talking about how crazy life was before she moved, and how she had three stalker exes. She also told a bunch of other wild stories about the people back home, like her crazy ex-best friend and the restraining orders she had to place on two particular people at her old school. I’m not trying to belittle her unfortunate past, but I also know that a red flag is when narcissists claim they have crazy people in their past.

EGOTISTICAL PERSONALITY:

Yes, she has a good voice, yes, she can dance, yes, she’s confident in herself but there is a point where her self-love becomes vain. It’s hard to be around someone who only cares about oneself/what they want and at times won’t even listen to others, unless that person can give them something like ass kissing for instance. X loved to have her ass kissed. I stopped kissing her ass when she stopped kissing mine, and for awhile our friendship still remained strong but started to deteriorate when she’d do something wrong in the relationship, I’d call her out for it, and thus started threatening her ego she so desperately wanted to protect. I think this is why she went through so many friends. Eventually the ass kissing will run out.

NONSTOP LYING:

Ok so fast forward about a month or two after beginning to hang out more with X and she and I are super close. I’m not going to detail every time she’s lied to me but god damn… she lied to me frequently. With her specifically, it started with little things that didn’t add up. She wasn’t very good at lying, but she kept doing it anyway. Sometimes the lies were super irrelevant and other times they would hurt my feelings so bad that they’d make me cry. Her lying eventually lead to some bigass, straight up obvious, hurtful and manipulative lies that made me say “does she think I’m stupid?” The nerve. Calling her out on any lie, big or small, made things a whole lot worse.

USING EXTREME DEFENSE:

This correlates with calling her out on the lying. Whether she lied or tried to pull something else, she went into full defensive mode if I tried to talk to her about it, even if I make all efforts to be polite and non-accusatory. I remember her only ever apologizing to me once, and we’ve gone through many arguments.

MANIPULATION:

X was a manipulator— Again, this correlates with everything I’ve been saying before. Along with defending herself at all costs, she tried to manipulate me if her bullshit defense wasn’t working. This included skirting around the situation, making me feel bad/guilty, and even using personal information against me if nothing else was working. She would do absolutely anything to win. Seriously… many times it was like I was the one apologizing for her wrongdoing. I learned through all this that apologizing and smoothing things over are not the same.

GAINING AND LOSING FRIENDS FAST:

She didn’t keep close friends for that long— this is just something I had picked up on over time but for some reason I thought I was immune to this so I ignored this red flag. She would get SUPER close with someone super fast and then boom! She’d get sick of them. She’d gain friends quickly, some drama would happen, and then she’d magically find a new friend group to be a part of or start to get friendly with someone who couldn’t see through her facade yet. When X and I would hang out, sometimes I’d bring an additional friend of mine and I would witness X give the same treatment to my friend that she gave to me when we first met: start talking about how crazy her life was before moving and all the crazy people she had to deal with. She’d probably have around three or four close friends at a time before they’d realize she’s a shitty person. I may sound like I’m projecting, but I’ve seen this behavior happen with multiple people and it happened to me too.

NO RESPECT FOR PERSONAL/PRIVATE INFORMATION:

I have seen multiple examples of X’s complete disrespect for peoples’ personal information. She has told me numerous, detailed stories of her exes and what their genitalia looked and even smelled like. She’d make fun of them in her recollections. Those little stories were funny at the time but now I realize that you can’t just throw that kind of information around out there because it’s so intimate. If I were her ex, I’d sure feel violated. Also as I mentioned before she labeled her exes as stalkers. Now, I’ve never met any of her exes except for one, who X had dated after she and I had met… and after their breakup, all this guy did was occasionally stare at her in the hallways. Yes that behavior was kind of weird but in his defense it was definitely not stalking. To falsely label someone as a stalker is dangerous to their reputation. This makes me wonder what her other exes did to earn their titles as stalkers because she called them stalkers too.

I think the reason why I stayed friends with X for so long despite the red flags was because I was attached to her facade… not the real X. I will never ignore another red flag in a person again. I will never apologize to people in order to “smooth things over” to keep the friendship going. Our relationship ended in April of 2017 when X attempted to lie and manipulate me for the last time. I’m not going to go into full detail about it but I will say that this particular lie was super hurtful and malicious and, above it all, another completely flat out obvious lie. I couldn’t take it. I pulled her aside one day and debunked every mistruth of her little scheme. I didn’t apologize this time. What’s funny is that right after I did that, she repeated the same lies and this time added a little extra spice: used my extremely personal mental health issues against me to make her arguments stronger. I basically just walked the f*** away. I never spoke to her again. I’ve blocked her on all forms of social media. I’ve basically blocked her on everything except for her number. When I see her in public, which has only happened once thankfully, I act like she doesn’t exist.

Submited by ‘L’