Recovering From a Friendship Breakup

The hardest part of letting a longtime pal fall away has, for me, been the struggle to end my long obsession with the other person’s wrongdoings. If someone I really like and respect screws up badly enough, I’ll cut off all communication with them until I have processed recent events and compared them to very similar memories, which can take months or even years. Young people still have so much to learn that some kind of reaction is to be expected.
 Usually, the person from whom I’m parting is needy; maybe they’re a narcissist or deeply ashamed of themselves to the point of unintentional secrecy, or maybe they were transformed by a hard childhood into someone who didn’t want to get to know me so much as to give themselves a personification of things they felt they’d been cheated out of. I have a lot of embarrassing history of trying to be buddies with people whose favorite hobbies are their emotional issues. 
With one of those people, I thought that if I played a role instead of being 100% myself, that might magically get them to relax and see me - not just a fortunate person of whom they were jealous for having a great family but for them to like and respect me, which one could not do when they were bossing around the truly, impossibly stupid person I encouraged them to believe I was. Oh, and as I typed the beginning of that previous sentence, I realized that I also played a submissive role with another former pal, quietly watching her ignore my feelings entirely, because she was so focused on making herself feel better about her emotional unrest that little else mattered. In her case, some degree of that self-centeredness is still alive. I saw her recently while shopping, and although I knew that my opinion had always meant something to her [there's a little respect on her end since we were friends and have a lot of history] -- the whole time, I grappled with suspicion of some kind, as if she might have been curious about what I was up to just for show of asking. She wouldn't have implied curiosity about my personal life if she didn't mean it, but the distrust was there all the same, like I was suddenly 20 again or something. I felt so immature standing there, thinking, 'I don't want to hear you say, "Oh that's great! I'm happy for you!" Why should I give someone what they want, just to be polite? Will it make me feel empty like the last 100 times?' Letting her in on my career or relationship status has made me feel, as I said before, empty, in the past, so I don't like seeing her. Is that stupid? 
...Probably.
Mind you, time has taught me that you can be in a close platonic friendship for a while and, out of what appears to be nowhere, have your heart broken by it. The truth sucks. The cliche lines and verses about how you can't get through life without scars are absolutely true! Every story I could recount of being bullied or coldly dumped by a peer or a friend happened a year and a half ago, then eight, and some much longer ago than that, and each one of them has left a deep scar. I remember watching the classic clever social commentary film Mean Girls, literally squirming in my seat, and after laughing with friends on our way out of the theater about the greatest jokes and surprises, I got a minute alone to face my confusing discomfort. I couldn't tell where it  was coming from. Here's my best answer so far: being a little too sensitive, being female and being a twelve-to-fourteen-year-old had me grappling with and often overreacting to the way my fellow anxious, curious, overly sensitive A-hole schoolgirls treated me and each other. I can't recall a moment when I suffered through something incredibly similar to the most memorable awful crap in Mean Girls, but all these years after leaving one of the world's worst sleepovers behind, after my eighth grade lunch table bully tired of me, and once I wrote and complained enough about post-high school friendship heartbreaks to exhaust my hand and the eardrums of a few loved ones, I've been running into some of those people I never wanted to see again and have wondered what I should think of them now. 
In my dating life, I spot and avoid troubled, self-involved guys with accuracy, but in friendships with girls over the years, I have sought out these traits. 

If you have been in my position, I’m sure loved ones have told you that it’s because you have a “big heart”, but when those relationships explode, I get angry with myself and call it being an idiot.

Having said that, I don’t know how else I would’ve learned about self-preservation if not for those ex-friends. They forced me to strengthen my intuition and work on a sort of plan B for when certain red flags come up. 

Sometimes we "big-hearted" people are trying too hard to be patient and sympathetic. We should hide parts of our lives from certain friends, and sometimes that realization comes after years of sharing everything with that one pal. As much as it can deeply hurt to break away, it’s the only way to take care of oneself. Anything else would erode your individuality and that’s a painful waste of time.