u/FullmetalApathy

I (26F) had a best friend of 10 years who I’ll call “Jade” (25F). We’d been long distance for about 3 of those years. Last year I noticed her becoming increasingly invasive and clingy. Things were fine until I made the mistake of telling her I had gone on a date for the first time in years. She was visibly annoyed, so I changed the subject. She hung up shortly after, and went silent for a few days. She got over it because afterwards, any time she had a free moment she was calling to FaceTime me, and usually for multiple hours. And would try many guilt tripping tactics if I wanted to end calls early.

What started the problem is when I told her I needed a week or two of space and I wouldn’t have the bandwidth to talk to her because I had to manage apartment hunting in a new city, moving out of my apartment that I shared with a toxic roommate without him knowing, all the expected moving pains. Within an hour she was back to sending countless messages and within 3 days started sending multiple of her friends (high school mutuals that I haven’t spoken to since graduation) to flood my inboxes on social media, since I deliberately never gave them my number, to “check on me.”

I felt that was weird, and a little inappropriate of Jade. For context: none of those people even had condolences to offer me, let alone checked on me, when Jade told them about my parents dying—without even asking me if that was okay to share—but somehow this was the situation that required them to “check on me.” Why would I even need to be “checked on” because I didn’t want to talk for a bit? I simply didn’t acknowledge them.

Jade decided to give some of them my phone number so they could leave guilt tripping voicemails, and then she sent gifts to my old address for my birthday—which I couldn’t retrieve because of the roommate. Because she continued escalating, I continued ignoring her. This culminated in her sending police for wellness checks to all of my previous addresses that she could remember, at which point I directly told her to leave me alone and blocked her and everyone else she roped into this.

I know the ignoring probably wasn’t the best thing to do and may have even been petty and cruel because I dragged it out for a long time, but having been stalked before I felt like this behavior was stalking-adjacent and was too uncomfortable to talk to her again until she forced my hand. Was I wrong to block her? Did I blow it out of proportion?