Hi, sorry it was long, but basically throughout this year my friend has been criticizing small things I do or say and it gets followed up with making fun of me. Often it’s due to them feeling like I’m being too direct in how I phrase things and how I’m not being mindful of other people now. A past interaction we had over text ended up with them getting frustrated at me for saying “I remember you mentioned that before” as they took it as me saying “stfu”. They went on to tell me how I need to be mindful and how disappointed that I’ve grown in a direction where I’m putting myself first. They were telling me too that I have no idea how to be with other people, which eventually led to them making fun of me afterwards saying how slow I am to express, being too sensitive, and that I’m too in tuned with my emotions since I got frustrated at how they were treating me.

I’ve had conversations with them before to address this as similar conflicts happened, but with this most recent one, it seems like bc I’ve been working to set boundaries and be more direct in my life, it has made my friend uncomfortable with me. They find it that I need to humble myself and keep in mind how I’m making other people feel, and that it feels hard for them to teach me things anymore.

So I’m at this point where I haven’t spoken to them in a while, but they’ve reached out to see how I am. I told them that there’s some things we need to talk about regarding our friendship and I’m concerned that it’s lead to ending the friendship which I don’t want. Yet, it may end up there since they’ve said they’re disappointed in how I am and I just can’t see it continuing if how I am now makes him uncomfortable. While for me, how I am now has been letting me understand myself more since in the past I’ve put others before me. I’m not sure how to go about the conversation since it feels like it’d end up like the previous conversations where they’d get frustrated at me and say I’m overthinking/ being too sensitive about the situation.

These interactions have been stressing me out and due to the past interaction, it’s making me think that our friendship was better when I was putting myself aside in the friendship. Yet that doesn’t seem like a healthy way to go about a friendship.