Potential Trigger Event #1

You’ve been betrayed by your best, and only friend. It reminds you of back in middle school, when you learned that the friends you had depended on for years had never actually wanted you around, but exponentially worse. It hurts so much, for so many different reasons, and you still remember how everything felt as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. You feel so violated, so hopeless and so lonely that you turn to the internet for comfort, and to reconnect with an old friend.

You’d stopped being friends with her a few months ago, because she had started talking shit about your former best friend. You didn’t believe her then, because you couldn’t for your own sake. This was someone who had stood alongside you for years, whereas you’d only known this girl since junior year. But she was right, and you were wrong.

You regret saying those downright vile things to her, calling someone who was just as much a victim as you were a liar, a fraud, and a bitch. You now sympathized with her attempt to her, and wished that you hadn’t stopped her from burning down that “friend”’s house.

While you haven’t seen her in person in months, you still know her blog’s address, and you start talking to her there. The two of you, both hurt, lonely people, decide to do something about this. Together, you pen an elaborate-- but uncited, as neither of you have any proof that the things that happened to you happened-- takedown and doxxing of your mutual former friend, and spread it around social media as much as you can. You use pen names, so that it can’t be traced back to you.

And yet it is, somehow. You don’t have a clue how, but it happened. You don’t recall telling your “friend” about your second blog, the hidden one under an alias, so you wonder if say, one of that girl’s friends was the one to leak the information. Not that that’s your most pressing concern right now. Your parents are screaming at you about how this sort of thing is wrong, and how your former friend’s parents are threatening to call the police and maybe even sue, and that they’ve already called the cops on that girl.

But then, once you agree to take it down, they calm down. They stop yelling, and start being more sympathetic. They ask you if what the message said was true, ask you if he really did do those things to you. You lie, and say that it was all a fabrication, placing the entirety of the blame on that girl.

It hurts so much, like someone has taken a knife to your heart. The irony of you betraying your only friend, just like your former best friend did to you starts to sink in. You start to realize that you’re not as good of a person as you thought you were, that all along, it wasn’t justice that you wanted, but revenge. You thought you had the moral high ground, but really it was just a childish attempt at an eye for an eye, and betraying that girl proved to you that really, you were only in it for yourself. In this moment, you want nothing more than to just end your sorry existence.

Trigger.