Melissa: Part I

In the hushed interior of a car, a revelation unfolded, revealing years of simultaneous realizations. "I think my little sister is ugly because she has a round face," she confessed all said without hesitation or remorse.

Over nearly a decade, my friendship with Melissa has served as a crucible for the forging of self-worth and dignity. To preserve her anonymity, I've chosen to conceal her identity beneath the pseudonym of Melissa.

I am grateful for her family sheltering ours during a period of profound loss in my life. Yet, I swear with unwavering conviction that the cold embrace of the streets would have offered more compassionate solace than her unyielding indifference.

If there's a lesson the eclipses of this year are teaching me, it's the resonance and authority within my voice. It is an immutable right to articulate my truth, to expose the vulnerabilities and scars wrought by endured injustices.

I always knew her treatment towards me was wrong, yet I persisted in offering her grace. I made excuse after excuse for her, and it wasn't until I lived in Germany that my friends there first labeled her behavior as abusive. They were right.

Her fixation on physical appearance was incessant and was a plea for validation. She ensured her reputation remained immaculate through manipulation of the truth. But ultimately, she was always a God-awful human being.

Perhaps in this blog post, I will delve into her internalized misogyny and the value she placed on surface-level appearances. The accumulation of actions indicated that she lacked self-awareness and heavily depended on others to shape her personality.

As I mentioned earlier, Melissa would constantly ask me if I thought she was pretty. Her need for validation was draining, feeling like a daily chore. Her question was usually followed by whether I thought she was more attractive than whichever other girl she was comparing herself to that day.

She requested me to follow a Lebanese girl's Instagram account for the sole purpose of stalking her. I never knew who she was or why she needed to stalk her because she would never answer my inquiries. After my friendship with Melissa ended, the Lebanese girl and I briefly exchanged messages privately through DM's, where she asked me why I followed her. I let her know about Melissa, and she told me she wasn't in the least surprised.

I'll never forget when she started dating this guy during college, and she lied to me about needing to go to a specific store in a mall in north Houston. I've never been to north Houston, and I knew the commute would have been nearly an hour with traffic. At the time, I-45 was under a lot of construction, but Melissa was desperate to travel for shoes she needed at one store.

She lied to me. She only wanted to go to stalk her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend from high school. Psychologists discuss how serious stalking is, typically attributing it to men. However, it's important for more people to realize that women also exhibit such behavior.

It was draining to feel dragged along by someone who funneled all of their energy into stalking other people. It was a disrespect to my time, my energy, and our friendship. But unfortunately, Melissa was someone who always thought about herself first and foremost.

Her sense of others' values was always linked to whether she thought their physical appearance was enough. She would bounce around by calling me ugly and then confess that she was jealous that I looked "exotic." Much of her emphasis on beauty was related to a proximity to whiteness.

She once bragged to me that her ancestor was raped by a Frenchman, which is why green (or blue) eyes ran in her family. The colorist remark was triggering, especially because I was only sharing that I was trying to trace the genealogical roots of my mother's side. I was exhausted from hearing her boast that people would mistake her for an East Asian woman, despite her clearly looking Mexican.

What I wish people knew was that I struggled with her violating my personal boundaries. I think I briefly spoke about this in a prior blog post where I talked about the need to maintain firm boundaries. She would copy everything about my personality, down to how I styled myself. When I brought up that I felt uncomfortable about this, she would only disregard my feelings to say, "but you're my style icon!"

I would pick her up wearing whatever outfit I threw on, and a few days later I would see her post a picture wearing the exact same pants, blouse, sandals, and purse. Down to the fragrance that I wore, the makeup that I used. My personality, my interests. At one point, Melissa would kick my cat and claim she hated cats...only to eventually own them.

I wish people knew how violating this was, how it felt like I was being stalked by her. It was obsessive behavior, and it was always dismissed and excused because she was excellent at manipulating others.

Looking back, I can recognize that this was someone who didn't know themselves. She needed other people to build her personality for her, her style, maybe because everything was always decided for her.

What I learned from these experiences were the importance of having a sense of security within yourself. This means deciding for yourself, connecting to your authentic self, because these are all qualities that exemplify unconditional self-love. Constantly comparing yourself to others will always lead to long-term problems.

Looking back, I didn’t respect myself enough to leave the friendship earlier and I do regret staying in that toxic situation for as long as I did. When I was in Germany, my friends there were kind and caring enough to teach me how to value myself, how much they valued me as a friend and how what she did was highly abusive.

They first noted her behavior when she would make me schedule our Zoom meetings at a time that was convenient to her but highly inconvenient for me. Despite the fact she didn’t want to adjust the timing to make it fair, and at that time she wasn’t doing much and had more of a freer schedule than me. I think I would zoom with her at 2-3 AM my time when I was going to university in the early mornings.

I think in the next blog post, I'll share the time she was arrested for shoplifting and how her family scapegoated me as a way to protect her.