u/ThrowRA_entrelinhas

Has anyone else realized they were put into a role in their friend group?

I’ve had basically the same group of friends since elementary school. There are four girls and one guy, and over time, everyone kind of ended up having a “role” in the group.

J(26F) was the smart one. She got good grades, gave off the impression that she didn’t really care about us that much, but everyone kind of idolized her because she was intelligent.

K(26F) was the youngest. She was kind of distracted and a little “not many thoughts going on up there” sometimes.

V(26F) was also part of the group, but she was always a little more distant.

The guy, D(26M), had a crush on J for a long time, but obviously nothing happened. Eventually, he started dating K, and they were together for years.

And then there was me(26F).

I was the distracted one who didn’t really care that much about school. I wasn’t particularly interested in getting amazing grades, but I could keep them around average without much effort. I also disagreed with J a LOT. We would constantly have different opinions about things, but I never really took it seriously. I just thought it was normal for friends to disagree.

We’re adults now, and we’ve all gone our separate ways, moved to different cities, etc. D and K eventually broke up, V became even more absent, but the idolization of J never really went away.

What I’ve only recently started realizing is that, for a very long time, I actually believed the role they had given me in this group: the less intelligent one whose opinions weren’t really that important.

And the weird thing is… I’m starting to realize that it wasn’t actually true.

A lot of the time, I would bring up an idea or opinion, and nobody would really pay attention to it. Then J would say basically the exact same thing later, and suddenly everyone would agree with her.

At first I genuinely thought I was imagining it. I even wondered if I was paranoid or somehow making things up in my head.

But it kept happening.

There have been multiple situations where I told J my opinion about something, she tried to convince me that I was wrong, and then weeks later she would bring up the exact same opinion to the rest of the group as if it had been her idea all along.

And everyone would listen to her.

Another thing that made me think about this was reading Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Without getting too much into the book itself, some of the ideas about how people can become defined by the role they have within a friend group really stuck with me.

It made me look at my own friendships differently and question whether some of the things I thought were simply “my personality” were actually things I had internalized because of the position I had in that group.

The thing that really confirmed this for me, though, was meeting a completely different group of friends in college. I made friends with people who genuinely appreciated my ideas and actually listened when I talked. They would ask me to elaborate, take my opinions seriously, and sometimes even tell me that they thought I had a good perspective on something.

That was honestly when I started thinking, wait… maybe I’m not actually the person I thought I was in my old friend group.

It made me look back at years of interactions with my old friends and notice this pattern that I had somehow never questioned before.

And what makes it even funnier is D.

Whenever we need to vote on something as a group, he can have a completely different opinion at first, but the moment J expresses her opinion, he suddenly changes his mind and agrees with her. Sometimes he literally changes his position completely just to be on her side.

And I genuinely don't think he even realizes he's doing it.

I don’t think J is necessarily doing all of this intentionally either. I don’t think she sits there thinking, “I’m going to make everyone ignore OP’s opinion.” I think the group has just been reinforcing this dynamic for so many years that everyone is used to it.

But I’m honestly tired of feeling like I have to wait for J to repeat something I already said before my opinion becomes valid to everyone else.

It’s strange realizing that a role you accepted as part of your personality might have actually been something your friend group taught you to believe about yourself.

Has anyone else had a similar experience where making new friends made you realize that your old friend group had kind of assigned you a role that wasn’t actually who you were?