Hi Jexa,
sorry it's taken me so long to come up with a reply.
I think you need to stop trying so hard to fix the relationship. See if you could let her have her reactions while you have yours. Especially, see if you can defuse whatever is going on from the opinion you have of yourself.
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Originally Posted by jexa
I mean, I get why people might not like having friends like me. But this is a REALLY bad situation for me. I struggle with friendship in general because I struggle with abandonment fears and a sense of desperation in relationships.
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Your best bet would be, not to prevent her from "abandoning" you if that's what she's inclined to do, but to learn to tolerate what feels like impending abandonment and -- stop
taking it as abandonment.
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I mean, I get why people might not like having friends like me....
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Nuh-uh.
Cut it out. There's no such thing as "people", first of all. Any given person is going to like you more at some times and less at others, and that's going to have more to do with them than with you. If you can just let that happen, sort of the way you just let it rain when it's raining, you'll have a much easier time with it than if you try to fight it as you're doing here. There's no such thing as "friends like you," either. You did some stuff at a party that you're now having second thoughts about. There's no way that any two people who were there could possibly have had exactly the same reaction to whatever you did. Not that I'll ever know, nor you probably, but I wouldn't be surprised if a good third of them turned out to be secretly envious because
they wouldn't have dared to risk getting caught hiding in the closet.
If you can manage to detach from the notion that you have to fix your relationship with your (ex?)-friend before you can work with her, you may even be able to make good use of the work situation to sort out the relationship. What I'm picturing is: you go ahead and do the job the best way you know how. Your (ex?)-friend perhaps comes into the situation a bit apprehensively but finds nothing worth worrying about and settles into doing the job the best way she knows how. The job gets done and both of you discover that, to your surprise, you can work well together.
Or: your (ex?)-friend has some stuff going on that starts to get in the way of doing the job. Much as she'd like to blame you for it, you're just doing the job and if there are any issues on the table, they have to be hers.
She gets to work on getting along with
you for a change.