It’s easy to feel like a monster if pain is hoarded as a weapon or an intangible, strategically shifting blob. The most entitled people usually win that battle. If they say a mistake can’t be rectified, what’s the point of being in each other’s sphere?

You don’t owe people anything if the punishment for a real or imagined crime is greater than the crime itself. There is no mistake that would be improved by your suffering. If people ask for suffering instead of growth, they are dangerous.

I don’t know your situation. People get cut out for all kinds of reasons. But if people are saying things about you instead of to you, they aren’t your friends, in the most practical, pragmatic sense. This isn’t a virtue judgment on either party. Good or bad is irrelevant. Everyone needs friends for the place they are in life or they won’t grow, even a damaged person, especially a damaged person.

The way shit is set up, most people are doomed to make a lot of mistakes. But sometimes those are the people with the most insight and the most empathy and they contain the possibility of becoming better friends than the people who had everything line up for them. What’s the point of someone who never fucked up?

Monster and victim are huge ugly curses pasted on our ordinary, small lives. You’re just a person like everyone else, and you need to live. With time you will gain perspective on what happened. If you need to improve yourself, do it. If you were exploited, you will learn to protect yourself. But most of all, you have to live.