Why did you have to GTFO and ghost your previous life?

I grew up in a small town with two best friends.

The three of us were extremely tight from elementary school through our early 20s,

with a brief interlude when I left for college.

But this completely fell apart about 11 years ago.

One of my friends was engaged to a real psychopath that liked to toy with her,

and that relationship made her mean-spirited, insecure, and paranoid as all hell. He came over one

Sunday to fix my old snowblower, which I was planning to sell since I recently moved to an apartment.

I offered him a beer, and he took that as an opening and tried to kiss me and put his hands on me.

I turned him down pretty harshly, but I decided not to tell my friend, who was pregnant at the time, and easily upset.

Well, he was pretty mad about that, turned around, and told her that I tried to seduce him.

Long story short, she believed him.

She went into an emotional tailspin, destroyed some stuff,

and burned a lot of bridges. My other friend decided, no smoke without fire, and believed him as well.

Word got around my small hometown pretty quickly, and it felt like everyone turned on me in a heartbeat.

After all, my two best lifelong friends believed I'd try to seduce one's fiance and caused her to destroy her life, and it was deemed weird that I'd invited him over to fix my snowblower in the summer, even though it was because I'd moved into an apartment. Even the people who were kind of on the fence about who to believe stayed the hell away from me. It didn't matter that he'd always been a butthole and a

player and their relationship and her emotional state had been on the rocks for ages, and I was

ashamed too. I wondered if I'd led him on in some way. I was devastated for my friend and I couldn't

hold my head up. I started avoiding people. For two years I was either angry or depressed all the

time. I stopped going out. I lost about

£30, and I was only 130 to start with. I cried all the time. It never occurred to me to seek

therapy. I also never seriously considered standing up for myself, confronting him publicly,

...