u/lillygracee12

I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m so lost that I’m running to Reddit for advice. I pray this doesn’t get lost in this channel because I seriously need some guidance.

For context I, (F, 17) and my best friend, (F, 17) were in a long term relationship for 3 years. THREE YEARS. We knew from the get go when we started dating that her dad was incredibly homophobic, maga, racist, and Republican but we didn’t care. We were 14 and we loved each other and we thought that was enough. And it was for a little while until EVERYTHING crumbled.

Around mid July this year her dad discovered that she is lesbian and dating me and he flipped his shit. He accused me of so many terrible things such as g(rape), SA, and coercing her into dating me. He also accused my parents of grooming her because they provided her a safe place to go and support. He then claimed her sexuality was a trauma response from the grief she experienced after losing her mom in 2023. (However that excuse of his makes no sense because we started dating 2 months before her mom passed away.) We tried to make it work for around 2 months but our relationship was really struggling. We were arguing a lot because she wasn’t able to process what happened and move forward. I admit, it was hard for me to understand her situation because I come from an incredibly accepting, democratic family, but still. I couldn’t understand why it was so hard for her to accept that her dad was (and is) a bigot.

Anyway, fast forward to now, we’ve agreed that we need to just be friends so that she can work on her relationship with her dad but here’s the problem: he doesn’t want to fix the relationship. She’s tried so many things. She’s tried to have conversations with him constantly that he repeatedly shuts down. For weeks she had been pushing for family therapy and when they finally got into their first session, he immediately wanted to quit and find another therapist because the one they met was affirmative of her identity. He immediately wanted to find a conversion therapist or someone through their incredibly conservative church. Just today, she sent him a website with resources for Christian parents of LGBTQ+ children to work through things. It was basically an online support group and he told her, be, verbatim, “I don’t like websites like these because they try to push you towards acceptance and I am not going to accept you.” ..like what the fuck!???

Here’s where I come in: I’ve been her girlfriend for the majority of my teenage life. I don’t know how to not be deeply involved in her life because we still love each other so much, we just can’t be together right now. So I’ve been holding her hand through all of this, guiding her through her conversations with her dad as best I can over the phone, searching for and offering her resources, (I found the online support group she sent him) and overall being her rock. I love being her rock I never wanna not be there for her but I think I’ve become too involved. She’s a chronic people pleaser, it’s so hard to get that girl to stand up for herself, her dad is incredibly manipulative and it works on her every single time, she has no agency, she will literally ask everyone around her what she should do, when something bad happens she spirals and I have to talk her out of it. She’s keeps saying how much she hates her life and wants to kill herself and I’m frankly really scared that if I start to detach myself from this situation and attempt to let her figure this out on her own, she’s gonna crash and burn and I’m gonna lose her forever. But at the same time, I’m really exhausted. Between school, college apps, and managing her situation, I have barely any time for myself. I miss when things were easy for us. I miss her so much. I wish none of this happened and I have no idea how to save both of us from drowning.

if anyone has advice for my situation please send it. Even if it’s small. I’m desperate

I am a rising senior at a school that’s pretty well known in our area for having a lot of druggies, especially pot heads. Is the type of school that media would depict in an overly satirical
way, except it’s all real. The English bathroom is always hazy from vapor smoke and stinks of weed constantly, football games are full of drunk students who pre-gamed or just flat out snuck things in, and in general we just have a really bad drug and alcohol problem at my school that everyone has just gotten used to at this point. You would think that I also participate in that stuff simply because this is the culture of my school, but it’s just the opposite and everyone gets annoyed at me because of it. I’ve never attended a function or a party, (mostly because of self esteem issues which is its own problem but it’s worth mentioning.) the most I’ve ever done is small get-togethers with friends that are always very fun, at least to me, and never involve alcohol. However, whenever I tell people from school that I’m not really about that druggie life they kind of sneer at me and ask if I think that I’m better than them. That’s not the case at all. I just genuinely have never felt an interest in or a desire to drink but I would never ever judge someone else for that. Everyone thinks it’s weird or embarrassing that I don’t drink or smoke, everyone thinks I’m some virgin Mary purist asshole, but truly, that’s not the case. Now I’ve started feeling FOMO and I’ve started to wonder if maybe it is as embarrassing as they say it is. It’s really messing with my self esteem which isn’t very high to begin with. So I wanted to know, does anyone else face this problem at their high school? Do I have to start drinking to be cool? Is it really that embarrassing?

Should I avoid talking about controversial topics in my college essay? I don’t want to be viewed differently by admissions because of political bias, and I know everyone always says that admin reps view applicants holistically but how true is that? Please help a girl out!!!