Am I overreacting or is my friend immature and uncaring
A year ago I was invited by an old work buddy of mine (I'll call him Tom) to a friend group of like 7 people who all know him from high school. We didn't talk much outside of just work related stuff before this and occasional checking in, and I'm not sure what other than the release of Peak made him invite me to this group specifically to play games, because I have never been a gamer, but I've enjoyed playing with them and grown fond of everyone in there for the most part. I am the youngest in this group at 30, he's 35, and everyone in this group is in their 30s.
Over the last year I've been getting the feeling that Tom is starting to not like me, from the way he talks down to me in chats and targets me specifically every time we play games together, either in games where sabotage is the name of the game it always seems like he takes out his frustration on me specifically, if it's a game where we are supposed to work together he screams at me for everything, for answering questions he asks, for being in the way even though I intentionally try to not be, for not calling things out (when I literally just called the thing out seconds ago and he just wasn't listening). If I'm sharing a story, he'll cut me off in the middle of it with a "Boringggg" and other people will laugh. He's called me "fucking stupid" and told me to "shut the fuck up" so many times, and I really try to just bear with it because I know that's just who he is as a person, but he also gets extra mad if I say anything in response, to defend myself, to apologize, to explain anything, I'm just "making up excuses". Last night in particular they wanted to switch roles the last round of a game we were playing and even though I was trying to learn on the fly, I couldn't keep up and the other person who switched with me, I'll call her Rachel, kept dropping things that made everything harder. I'm getting screamed at by name, Marcus is saying "ohhh it's so fucking easy isn't it, SimonHunterHawk you're fucking up everything, Rachel you're perfect" when literally nobody said that their job was easy, we just picked roles at the beginning and they never asked to switch, and basically when I didn't respond we all just got screamed at for 5 minutes straight to the point where as soon as we hit the menu I said goodnight and left because I was in tears.
I have CPTSD and Autism and they are aware of that. I also have chronic pain and nerve damage in my hands so I'm not good at video games for that reason, but I think I was doing a really good job last night. I am normally a very calm and collected person and last night I was so frustrated with his verbal abuse that I was screaming back at him because what the fuck, this shit has been going on for months at this point.
I reached out to him last night and asked him to please understand how triggering it is for me to be screamed at and spoken down to the way he speaks to me. I also explained that I value our friendship but when he talks to me like that it makes me feel like he doesn't even like me. He claims I'm baiting him by responding and should just not respond, that he's playing a character and it's all in good fun, but I don't think that's true because it's so targeted at me specifically and he will literally go out of his way to compliment the other people and never says anything positive towards me at all. He basically told me to get over it, he would not be willing to even try to be a little nicer, and also never addressed whether he values our friendship or likes me at all and at this point what he didn't say hurt way more than what he did say.
Nobody we play with comes to my defense, everyone says I'm too sensitive, and they can handle it so why can't I? But at this point I am not willing to accept that this is me being too sensitive, I really think he's just being an asshole and everyone else is either fine with me getting yelled at because he won't yell at them, or they all just don't actually care about me and i'm some lolcow to them.
I go out of my way to not be in the way, to play well so we can all have a good time (I will even play solo to get better at games so I'm not pulling them behind), and I'd never speak to anyone the way he speaks to me. I guess I'm just frustrated because what is the point of trying so hard to be a decent, kind and caring person, studying communication and trying to make things work with people who just don't seem to care enough about me to treat me like a person.
Posted Jul 10, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC