My sister Lena is 14. She has this one “friend” who is very odd from what I’ve seen? She’s known for being rude to almost anyone who isn’t popular at her school and yells at Lena for stupid crap.

She tells Lena she’s horrible at everything, talks behind her back, says she can’t be in her friend group, then says she’s “joking”.

Whenever something happens to anger the friend, she blames Lena and when she gets punished, she seems to have the mindset of “If I’m going down, Lena is going down with me.”

Lena came to the U.S. with our family when she was nine, so this friend is also very focused on her being foreign and won’t stop talking about her being white for some reason?

From what I know and have seen from this girl coming over sometimes, she finds random things to discriminate people for and also “almost” says the N-word (You “ni… ninja!) against dark-skinned people or the K-word (“kite” instead of…) against Jewish people to “be funny”.

Lena’s other friend who came over one day also told me that the friend was discriminatory, finding random reasons to insult someone (even them because they’re neurodivergent), and that they were having problems with her.

I’m helping Lena figure it out. Lena doesn’t hang out with this girl for now, but I still gotta rant. Why are people even like this?

  • owenfromcanada@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    7 hours ago

    While the “friend” is responsible for her actions, there’s a good chance she’s got something shitty going on in her home life. I’ve known a couple people like this, and in both cases, it turned out that their parents were consistently awful to them (in one case, the kid overheard a phone call where her mom talked about how much of a failure her daughter was). It might even be that one or more of her parents are exactly like this, and she’s emulating them.

    It’s perfectly reasonable to be both frustrated at how this person treats your sister, and also have some empathy for her. Assuming you’ve talked to your sister (and hopefully encouraged her that she doesn’t deserve that kind of treatment), the only other thing I can recommend is trying to treat this person with as much kindness as you can muster. It might make a big difference for her (though of course it’s not your responsibility to “fix” her).