My junior year of high school was incredibly tough and changed me forever, both because of hard financial times within our family, and drama with friends at school. High school cliques can be brutally exclusive! My school, which I had started midway through ninth grade, was no exception; I had never been accepted into any of the popular established cliques or BFF duos that abounded. I had three friends, each very different, that I mostly hung around. We were kind of like castoffs who banded together. But we didn't get far into our junior year before things began to fall apart.
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The first friend to bite the dust had joined volleyball and was intent on breaking into that clique, which started to strain things between us. She came to school all mad one day because the game the night before hadn't gone well; I said something that set her off, so she lashed out and hurt my feelings, and next thing you know we'd had a falling out. Friend B, instead of letting us both cool off and make up, went into full on bossy meddling mode, wrote me a self-righteous manifesto about forgiveness being mandatory, and literally ordered me to go apologize. Being bossed around gets my hackles up, so I dug my heels in and refused. To this day I really regret that I didn't have the maturity to recognize that I was allowing Friend B to ruin my friendship with Friend A, all because of my own stubbornness.
Friend B got weirdly possessive toward me as the year went on. She wrote about me when our English writing assignment was a descriptive essay. Then she called me and read her essay to me, which was somewhat creepy. Any time a boy talked to me, she either glared him down, interrupted and talked over him, or took my arm and dragged me away. The one time I slept over at her house, she actually freaked me out with her intense insistence that I share her bed with her. My stubbornness probably did me a favor that time, and I wouldn't do it. You can draw your own conclusions from all of the above; being rather naive, I didn't connect the dots until years later. All I knew at the time was that she was making me more and more uncomfortable, and I backed away as best as I could in a small private school. It was supremely awkward.
Friend C was my BFF who had been nice to me since day 1 in ninth grade. I kind of wish now that I knew what was going on in her life in our junior year that sent her off the rails into being a pathological liar. She lied to teachers, telling them she had a "heart condition" that was preventing her from getting schoolwork done. At the same time, though, she was becoming practically a karate champion, heart condition and all, according to other stories she told me. She started mixing up anime and video game characters and stories into real life and came up with some bizarre tales. The wildest was when she called me on Thanksgiving to tell me that somebody was lying in wait outside her house and she knew the mafia was there to kill her because she'd seen a laser beam on the wall. Why were they after her? Because (she said) her mom was descended from royalty, and as a child Friend had seen a mafia guy kill somebody at a beauty pageant, and now they'd tracked her down. I said I was going to call the police and she begged me not to—because the mafia had infiltrated them. Bewildered, my mind refusing to believe my friend would really make this all up, I asked my mom what to do and she promptly called BS and said my friend needed serious psychological help. I didn't know what was worse, the idea that someone was after my friend, or that my friend would lie like that. It wasn't long before her lies caught up to her, and she left the school.
So, I was pretty much left friendless. The person who, whenever a teacher said the dreaded words "choose a partner", had no one to immediately turn to. A couple senior girls ended up taking me under their wing, so I wasn't utterly desolate; but other than that, socially, my junior year was pretty lonely.
It really changed me, too. From then on, subconsciously, I took pains not to get too close to any one person or group. I've had plenty of friends, but never again had a really close "BFF", and in hindsight that has sometimes been a negative, because there have been times I could have used a best friend to lean on. In my senior year I rotated lunch tables—I was literally the ONE person in the entire class who didn't spend the year at one table, with the same group. I bounced around and was friendly with pretty much everybody; I even sat with the juniors sometimes, which apparently broke the rules, but nobody stopped me :)
At work, I got along with everybody, and made a special point of volunteering to train new people. I didn't just hang around with whoever was in my department; I talked to every employee in the whole store. I got along best with older employees and kept my distance from the younger ones (meaning the ones my age, ha!) and their drama.
In the military, again, I liked to go around and get to know everybody. I had full acceptance within a group, but even so, I liked to sometimes sit at different tables at mealtimes and take turns hanging out with folks from other departments. I also looked out for new people who weren't fitting in and made a special point of ensuring they got included. (One of them later gave me probably the most heartfelt thanks for it that I've ever received.)
While losing all my friends that junior year was distressing at the time, it cleared the way for me to make some new friends (ones that I stayed friends with all through college) and taught me not to confine myself too strictly to one group; that it was better to get to know lots of people, and different kinds of people, and broaden my horizons. Being forced to branch out, turned out to be a good thing because I got to know people I would have overlooked otherwise. And I like to think that having experienced being left out, I learned to have compassion toward and watch out for others who might be experiencing it, too. In the long run, it was a tough experience that overall worked out for good.
-Submitted for the Promo-Mentors challenge, "write about an experience that changed you." @futurethinker