I have friends?

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I had "friends". But in about four separate instances, those "friends" turned out to be people who liked to bully me or otherwise do things to hurt me.

My first "friend" was a girl who lied all the time and liked me because I believed her lies when I understood them at all (except sometimes when her mother or my mother would tell me she was lying about something). I stopped being her friend when she stole an object that meant a lot to me, and then claimed to have "found it in the woods". (And then when my mother asked her mother to get it back for me, she claimed she "found it in her sleeping bag".)

The next one was a girl who was in a small group of girls. They were always switching around so that one person was bullied and the rest would bully her. They liked me because first off I could be that person who was bullied most of the time, and second off because they could use me to get back at each other and I wouldn't know. One of them seemed to have no conscience at all, and I used to have nightmares about her.

The next one was someone I didn't really consider a friend at all, but who later approached me saying "I was your best friend in junior high!" (I had no friends in junior high.) Later on (much past junior high), she would invite me over, or invite herself to my house. When this happened, she would spend a whole lot of the time gleefully running through what she saw as my faults. She said a lot of cruel things. And the worst, was that she never, ever listened to me when I managed to tell her she was wrong about something about what went on inside my own head. She would just continue pronouncing her judgements on me including my motivations for doing various things.

The next one was a group of people who purported to be my friends, but talked about me behind my back in really cruel ways. They had a whole lot of fun with me. I could be persuaded into anything, even when they convinced me that I had multiple personalities. (And I blamed myself for everything until much later. My psychiatrist actually saw what they were up to, and ordered me not to see them, but I saw them anyway. I had no clue how badly I was being used.) They basically treated me like I was an object, and as if this object was their toy, belonging to them, not to myself. When I finally got away from them, they became enraged the same way a person would if their own possessions walked off and decided they wanted nothing to do with them anymore. Even now, they still look for ways to bully me, much of which involves lying about me or twisting bits of the truth into mostly-lies. One of them even took a picture of him and me when he visited me in a mental institution as I was being diagnosed with autism, claimed that the picture was taken much earlier than it was and in a different location, and claimed it proved that he was my boyfriend at that time (I actually had another boyfriend at that time, not him, who mistreated me but wasn't the kind of conscienceless manipulator this guy was), thus giving him supposedly a greater insight into who I was, than I have myself (or than people like, say, my real boyfriend, had). (He also claims I was never diagnosed with autism. Okaaaaaaaay.)

It took me a really long time to overcome my social passivity and get away from "friends" like this. What happened to make me realize how bad it was, was that I made some real friends in the autistic community. Around those friends, I was highly fearful. Whenever I was at a vulnerable point, I waited for them to hurt me. When they didn't hurt me, and repeatedly didn't hurt me, I realized how awful my previous "friends" were for doing that to me. They'd use my social and communication difficulties against me in every way they could possibly think of.

The good thing is that my life is no longer the nightmare it was around "friends" like those. The bad thing is that some of them still try to bully me even though I leave them alone.