I’m scared I emotionally overreacted and forever burned a bridge with my closest friend

Friendship and Social Life

I just need to feel validated or at least comforted that I’m not a crazy lunatic who no one would ever want to be friends with. I’m feeling so low self worth about it this right now I just can’t stop crying.

Almost a year ago one of my closest dearest friends cheated on her boyfriend in a really nasty way (affair style with her coworker) and blew up our entire friend group. I know this is a terrible thing to do and it took me a long time to work through the fact that she could do something like this. She totally distanced herself from me and everybody for a bit but ultimately, through our mutual friend who lives with her, we reconnected and I saw she was really hurting. Despite the fact that she had been lying and withholding information about her life from me for a long time, i forgave her.

I tried to be there for her after the breakup and went to visit her several times at the start of the summer. I reached out to her about ideas for plans and expressed interest in going on lots of hikes and camping trips later in summer. We were discussing going on a trip for my bachelorette party in the winter. Whenever I saw her, she told me how much she loved and cared about me and how she wanted to do fun things with me over the summer.

As the summer went, I saw her repeatedly spend time connecting with friends other than me. She went hiking and camping with other friends a lot, and on trips with other friends out of state. I slowly noticed she hadn’t made a plan to come see me once since the breakup. I was feeling really dejected and overlooked but I didn’t want to say anything—I knew she needed to reconnect with more people than just me, but it was starting to feel bad. Finally, she did reach out and invited me to go camping, but it was a weekend I couldn’t go. I suggested the following week instead, and told her about a camping spot I really wanted to go to. She was super down. That Sunday I see on social media that she and two other friends decided to go to that same spot without me. I was so upset and I confronted her. She apologized and made it out to be an error in communication. I told her then how I’d been feeling excluded, and she apologized again and said she was surprised to hear that and didn’t realize I was waiting for her to reach out to me. She made a plan with me and our other friend after that.

Two weeks after I saw her, I see she was on an international trip with our other friend to the same place we’d been talking about going for my bachelorette trip in a few months. I couldn’t believe she didn’t tell me she was going and I felt super blindsided and left out all over again. She was texting me from the trip and not saying she was there and finally I confronted her. She gaslit me and told me she mentioned the trip in front of me. I said I didn’t believe that. A few days later she sent me a message saying she wouldn’t allow me treating her that way in the future and it doesn’t matter if she told me about the trip or not because it didn’t concern me. I then unloaded a huge text about how i feel like she doesn’t care about my feelings or think about me because we’ve been planning to go to that same place together and she went without me and didn’t tell me. And it felt exactly like the camping thing. I told her I’m hurt by feelings excluded and taken for granted and that I feel like she’s been dishonest with me and this friendship has felt toxic and I need space.

Now I feel like I was too harsh and said too much and came off as crazy and irrational and possessive. I’m super ashamed. I feel so negative about myself. I’m afraid I burned a bridge and I don’t have many friends because I’m an introvert. I’m tired of feeling ostracized and I feel like this just made it all the worse. :(

Posted Oct 7, 2025, 2:31 AM UTC

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