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The original was posted on /r/tifu by /u/GurFresh7653 on 2023-07-17 07:53:56.

For some context, my (currently 17 F) freshman year of high school wasn’t great. I was a cheerleader, but I had a lot of issues with my team. I was tormented by 2 girls the whole year, and their moms treated both me and my mother like garbage, and this whole ordeal was completely enabled by the coaches. These moms were on the booster club and PTO, so their daughters were given special treatment as the coaches were thinking more with their wallets than the rational part of their brains.

Anyways, despite how awful cheer was, i had some really good friends outside the team. Me and 2 of my best friends had a group chat, and I’ll call my 2 best friends Katherine and Ilsa. We also had 2 guy friends who we frequently talked to that I’ll call Joseph and Karl. These people for the most part were good friends to me at this time.

At the beginning of my sophomore year, I got the opportunity to go cheer on the varsity team of a private school nearby, and since I was on JV at the original public school where I was being tormented, it was a better opportunity for me to go to the private school.

Since I wasn’t seeing my friends everyday, it was quite difficult to keep in touch. Ilsa and I had a falling out as we’d disagreed for a while on many things such a religion, politics, and behavior, and we also had personality clashes. Joseph and Karl were a bit tougher to keep in contact with as they’re not the types to usually be on their phones, but we still checked in with each other every now and then. As for Katherine, she was probably the most supportive person at this time. She texted me nearly every day and we even had a sleep over within 3 weeks of me transferring. There were times where I found it really hard to talk to my friends because something always reminded me of how awful things were at the public school, but I would always go back and talk to them even if it had been a while because I cared for them deeply and they truly are incredible people, despite my own internal issues and insecurities.

Well one day I stopped reaching out. At the very end of my sophomore year, and really this was more at the end of June of 2022 when I decided on this, I felt like it would be easier for me to just stop talking to my old friends all together, that way I could fully move on from everything related to the public school. For Karl, I just never reached out again. I’d gotten a text from Joseph and part of me wanted to reply, but I decided not to and not only did I not answer his text, but I also unadded him on Snapchat. The most painful one was Katherine. I stopped replying to her texts, her instagram dms, and I also muted her posts and stories. By the end of the summer, she’d taken the hint and unfollowed me and my mom on instagram.

So now here I am, one year later. I had to leave the private school because my mom moved to a new city and didn’t give me a choice to commute. Karl had randomly started snapping me again, and then on my 17th birthday, he wished me happy birthday and asked if I remembered him. We then got caught up on life and I told him my dad still lived in the area so when I was at his house we could hangout. Anyways, after talking to Karl again, it made me think about the public school again. Things with cheer were absolutely horrible for me, but outside of cheer I had some really really good friends.

Tonight I decided to look through my old texts with Katherine, and now I’m realizing how much I fucked up. I sat on my floor, put on some music (really sad stuff like Last Kiss, Dear John, The Archer, and I Wish You Would by Taylor Swift) and I read through our texts up until October 2021. Katherine was just the most supportive person I could’ve asked for as a friend, and I ghosted her without even explaining myself. The worst part is that a year ago I managed to convince myself that she was the problem, even though it was me the whole time.

Reconnecting with Karl showed me that my friends weren’t the problem. I left the public school. I ran away from my problems. I didn’t want to deal with my problems, which is why talking to my friends hurt me so badly. Because I never dealt with my problems and decided to just bury them, anytime I was reminded of the public school, I could only think of the bad. I couldn’t remember all the good times I had with my friends. And now after switching from the private school to a public school in a new city, I had more time to really process what happened to me, and I now know that the torment on cheer freshman year wasn’t even really about me, and that it was possible to stay friends with people from freshman year even if freshman year was traumatizing.

Back to Katherine’s texts, I saw one from November of 2021, and it had been a few weeks since we’d last spoken, and she said she thought I didn’t like her anymore and that it was awful. That’s the text that broke me. If not talking for a few weeks was awful for her, I can’t even begin to imagine what must’ve been going through her head when I ghosted her a year ago.

I just don’t know what to do now. Part of me wants to reach out and let her know it’s not her fault and that I don’t dislike her, but another part of me feels like me reaching out will make things worse. Internet strangers, please help. I feel awful and disgusted by my actions and I’m not sure what to do.

TL;DR - Freshman year sucked, I transferred sophomore year, at the end of sophomore year I dropped my friends from the original school, now 1 year later one of them reached out, and I feel extremely guilty for ghosting my best friend.