I have a friend who I met around 10 years ago. I used to work with her Dad in a local supermarket stacking shelves and she sometimes used to run me home before taking her Dad home after the night shift.
Initially we didn't go out much as she lived a good hour and a half away, so it was only the odd night out, usually getting to a pub, so I never got to know her really well, and it was often as a group of women out on the town. We got closer to each other over the past few years as she moved within a 5 minute walk of my flat. At the time, she was living with someone who by all accounts was not a good person. He drank heavily, took a lot of hard drugs, stole from her and trashed her house when he left. I felt so sorry for her. At the time she was struggling financially and was not receiving all the benefits that she should have been getting, so I gave her 100 pounds after he did a runner with the last of her money for the month. She did not want to take it but I insisted and said I did not expect to be paid back.
She got Covid twice and I shopped for her each time. I dropped off gifts to cheer her up. She gushed about what a good friend I was to her and how much I meant to her. I gave her money for a new haircut for a job interview and on two recent birthdays, spent over £30 each time on carefully selected gifts, knowing how much she loves Wonder Woman, so all that merchandise, filling up gift bags and seeing how much it made her happy.
Just over a year ago, she had a lottery win. She told everyone. It was £35k. Not an inconsiderable sum. Things really started to look up for her. She also found a decent part-time job. She spent a fortune on a new wardrobe, moved to a nicer house, treated her parents to lovely gifts and seemed to burn through a lot of the money very fast.
Now I never expected any gifts at all for Christmas or my birthday.... especially when she was struggling and I was not... but now the tables have turned. I lost my job last year. On my birthday in January she kept going on and on about she could not wait to spoil me and had ordered special gifts online and was just waiting for "one more" to add to the bag. The year before she had given me gifts despite not having much money, a bag of stuff which was so obviously items from Poundland worth around £3 that she had either grabbed last minute or obvious stuff she had been gifted that she did not want. A mini bottle of wine.. I hate wine.... cheap perfume and I don't wear perfume..
So when we met for my birthday and she handed me a bag of... well.... basically the same kind of crap... my heart just sank. I felt unseen, unappreciated. She turns up bragging about how she has just spent £200 on clothes and hands me cheap tat from a discount store... is that how she really sees me...
At one point last year she gave me access to her account for a film subscription online. She recently changed the password, and I asked her why.. she said she thought she had given it to me.... after giving it to me, she then changed it again one week later and has gone off the radar.
Am I right to feel offended?
I have to add that it's no skin off my nose to lose this "friendship". She has shown herself to be a hypocrite and a gossip, a bragger, a person of many faces and someone not to be trusted. She seems to latch onto people, use them for something and they either seem to get angry and lose her, or she starts gossiping about them and ditches them.
God this sounds so childish typing it out. We are all mid forties! But it still feels like she is giving me a nonverbal fuck you with the shitty "gifts" and the password change.
Thanks for reading my vent.