so... ended a 2.5 year friendship with my 3 closest friends by just quietly leaving. was that immature or..?
idk man, i keep going back and forth on this.
so basically i had this really tight friend group in uni, me and 3 other dudes. let's call them Karan, Rohan, and Sam. we were together literally every single day for 2.5 years. like... that kind of closeness where you don't even need to explain things anymore right? certain standards just exist without being said out loud. at least that's what i thought.
last 6 months though... something shifted. there was this girl, let's call her Maya, and for reasons i still don't fully understand she started running a whole character assassination campaign against me. spreading narratives, accusations, just... stuff. and i stayed completely quiet the whole time. like didn't react, didn't retaliate, didn't start my own side of the drama, absolutely nothing. i'm not interested in that person or in that type of conflict. i just wanted peace.
and what genuinely shocked me.. it wasn't even Maya doing it tbh. it was watching my OWN closest friends become the audience for it. like they were carrying it around, relaying stuff back to me, and slowly... slowlyyy starting to look at me through THAT lens instead of using their own damn judgment after knowing me for years. like... you've known me for YEARS. years. and you're gonna let someone else's words paint over all of that? bro.
but it gets worse. one of them, Karan... he literally told me to apologize to Maya. apologize. to the girl running a smear campaign while i'm just silently ignoring everything because i don't want drama. i still can't wrap my head around that. like what exactly am i apologizing for?? existing?? not engaging in her circus?? the audacity honestly broke something inside me.
and you know what messes me up the most... i hate even thinking this, i literally hate writing it, but sometimes i wonder... was it because she's a girl? like did that... idk. mold them somehow? make them unable to stand up for the truth? i refuse to use that word, i'm not gonna frame them like that, but the thought still creeps in and i can't shake it. i hate it.
and then there's the contrast. random acquaintances man. people who had absolutely ZERO obligation to me. they'd step in sometimes. just naturally saw what was happening and tried to contribute. i never asked them to, never even hinted at it, they just... did it. because they saw something wrong and their conscience kicked in i guess. meanwhile my own friends of 2.5 years... silence. complete silence when it mattered most. like how do i even make sense of that. what does that say about everything we had.
at some point i realized... if things like loyalty and fairness and independent thinking and standing by your friend only exist until social pressure enters the room... then maybe those values were never actually.. there. in the first place. you know? like if i have to sit 3 grown men down and explain why they shouldn't let someone else build their perception of their own friend for them?? if i have to explain THAT... then the friendship is already finished. it's done. there's nothing left to save.
and i also didn't want some massive fallout where everybody starts pointing fingers and the whole group gets torn apart over it. so instead i just... slowly detached over time. stopped showing up as much, stopped reaching out, and eventually just... left. no big speech, no explanation.
they never really got an answer from me. and idk if that makes me mature or just a coward lol.
sometimes i wonder if quietly leaving was mature bc it avoided unnecessary drama... or if it was cowardly bc maybe close friends deserve to hear exactly why you stopped respecting them. like maybe Karan genuinely doesn't know how disgusting it felt when he told me to apologize to my own bully. maybe the rest of them don't realize they traded years of friendship for the comfort of being a quiet audience. or maybe they do know, and just didn't care enough to stop. idk. i feel like i'm going in circles.
has anyone else dealt with something like this? what would you have done...