The First Betrayal

When people talk about betrayal, they usually imagine a romantic relationship.
This isn’t about that.

My first betrayal came much earlier—when I was eleven or twelve—and it came from my best friend.

At that age, friendship feels absolute. You don’t question loyalty; you assume it. I was her best friend until a new girl joined our class. Slowly, without explanation, I became invisible. She walked with her, laughed with her, and ignored me completely. I was hurt, of course, but I stayed quiet. I didn’t know how to name what I was feeling.

When the new girl was transferred, I felt relief. I thought I had my best friend back. I thought the pain had an expiry date.

I was wrong.

One day, I was absent from school. When I returned, I found cruel things written on my desk—about me. No one admitted who did it. Days passed in silence until my best friend had a fight with another girl, someone blunt and honest. In anger, she shouted what had been said in my absence:

“Thank God she didn’t come. It feels so good without her.”

That sentence lodged itself inside me and never really left.

I didn’t ask why she felt that way. I didn’t ask what I had done. I assumed the answer was obvious: I must be the problem. I tried to fix myself without knowing what was broken. I learned, very early, to internalise rejection.

That belief didn’t come from nowhere. It echoed what I had already seen at home—my father’s violence, my mother’s quiet insecurities, the way people ignored her, the way she was made to feel invisible. Watching that, you absorb a dangerous lesson: that being ignored means being unworthy.

I’ll digress for a moment, because memory works like that. There was an aunt who never picked up my mother’s calls and lied about it, saying the phone never rang. My mother, innocent about technology, believed her. I didn’t. I somehow knew she was lying, even without ever having owned a phone myself. Today, that same aunt calls me repeatedly—and I don’t pick up. Not out of cruelty, but clarity. Some truths arrive early; we just don’t recognise them then.

Coming back to my friend: I cut contact for two years. Eventually, she returned, and so did the cycle. My mother warned me. She never forced me to leave the friendship; she simply said what she saw. I didn’t believe her. I thought she had lost trust in people. She hadn’t. She had gained vision.

My friend had patterns. She called me the night before exams, knowing I studied only the night before because daily studying bored me. Those calls were enough to derail me. Once, she cheated outrageously in a maths exam—asking everyone one question each—and still topped the class. She was clever and manipulative. I didn’t recognise it then, because movies had taught me the wrong lesson: that if something is wrong, it’s because you are lacking.

There are details I don’t even remember fully anymore. I had trained myself to forget bad things. I was proud of that ability once. Now I know it had a name: escapism. Forgetting so you don’t have to confront the truth. Forgetting so you can continue blaming yourself.

She had a folder on her computer named Pagaliya—“mad girl”—filled with my photos. She once invited me to a fair and ditched me to go with her boyfriend while I stayed overnight at her house, waiting. The worst moment came when she accused me of being the bad friend for leaving her for two years—and I believed her.

There was always something subtle. Laughing when my photos were taken. Mocking expressions. Scrolling through pictures with amusement. Slowly, without realising it, I started believing I was ugly—something I had never cared about before. I had never been insecure about my looks. I didn’t want beauty; I didn’t value it.

Even when puberty brought pimples, I didn’t care. When my mother wanted to treat a mark on my hand, I refused. I truly didn’t mind. But insecurities are contagious. They don’t always begin inside you. Sometimes, they are planted.

That is the damage toxic people do. They don’t attack what already hurts. They create wounds you never had.

This was my first betrayal—not because someone left, but because someone stayed and quietly convinced me that I was the problem.

If there is one thing I have learned, it is this:
Do not ignore red flags.
You may not be wrong.
The one making you feel that way might be.

P.S. There is much more I could say about her. She caused damage I only learned to name years later—what I now recognise as my first encounter with depression, at a time when the word itself did not exist in my world. But some stories do not need to be told all at once. I will leave the rest for another time.