I finally figured out why a friendship with Chersti was so doomed from the start! We both have mental issues, opposite, mental issues that is. She has abandonment issues so she’ll do anything to keep someone from leaving her, typically, she finds a way to control and or manipulate them, which she is very good at. I on the other hand, have trust issues of a different color. For me, to be alone is to be safe, the reason being, I’ve finally come to realize, is that I took a lot of emotional abuse from Megan, my supposed friend, between the kindergarten and 7th grade, close to half of my life. Thus when I meet someone, and they try to get closer to me, I tend to get defensive and push them away. Sometimes I literally brace myself for the impact by hunching my shoulders a little bit. So when I stopped being Chersti’s partner, she freaked out, I went into slight social seclusion, which is what people with my issue do when we feel threatened, she on the other freaked because I was “abandoning” her. I go into social seclusion in order to avoid the pain that others might inflict on me. Chersti has a way of making people be nice to her by being mean to them if they aren’t on her “good” side, so she did and said some things to hurt me, both making a spectacle of me and trying to get me to be ‘nicer’ to her. This didn’t make sense to me at all at the time because all I was doing was leaving her alone, and to be left alone is to be safe in my book. Not in her book, to be left alone is to be neglected, to be ‘ignored’, which is very painful to her. I don’t feel like I’m being ignored until I’m talking to someone and they purposefully don’t listen to me. She must’ve figured this out on a sub-conscious level and started doing this to me, and in her opinion it would’ve been doing it ‘back’ to me, because she couldn’t see the difference between the two. It’s amazing how clear all of this is to me now. It makes it easier to forgive her since I know that these ‘abandonment’ issues are caused by something that happened to her in the past. Perhaps it was all the moving around that her family does. I am not saying that what she was right, or excusable, but forgiveness is a gift, if someone “deserves” to be forgiven, then they don’t need to be forgiven. That stuff about forgiveness I learned from a book called “The Confidence Plan” which is both for people with confidence issues and for people who just want to improve the confidence that they already have! I recommend that book strongly. It’s good ~Amyelk