Friend or Foe

[gentle music] When two high school sophomores named Lee Yeoreum, and pseudonym Park Jinkyung, first became close friends in 2022, people around them assumed that it was instant sisterhood, the best teenage friendship.

They were inseparable.

They were classmates at high school in Daejeon, spending nearly every hour of the day that they could together, and they exchanged hundreds of text messages between them when they weren't at school.

To anyone watching from the outside, they were close, sister-like friends.

But inside that friendship, the dynamic was anything but equal.

This was not a healthy relationship.

Yeoreum was 17 years old at the time.

She was a quiet girl who others described as looking very meek.

She was slender and stood at just five foot two and weighed barely 90 pounds.

This is a girl who is small, even compared to peers of her own age.

Since she was a young child, her passion had always been to draw.

She had a talent that was undeniable, and her main dream for her entire life was to just pass her college entrance exams and study fine arts in university.

She wanted to become an artist.

Park Jinkyung, on the other hand, also 17 years old, she brought a very different history to the friendship.

While Yeoreum had very few complaints, if any complaints about her, Jinkyung came into her life like a wrecking ball.

Before she ever met Yeoreum, Jinkyung had a different best friend, or we can say victim.

She was friends with another peer of theirs at school, who she slowly started to fixate on.

Jinkyung hadn't learned boundaries in her friendships and used this friend as an emotional dumping ground, and she reciprocated no support whatsoever.

It was entirely one-sided.

Friendships like these are extremely draining, and it turns one friend into a therapist.

It didn't take long for this friend to grow tired of Jinkyung's antics and started drawing those boundaries.

But Jinkyung didn't want that kind of friendship.

She wanted someone she could control.

Friendships to her, and to other toxic people, are based on how useful that person can be to you, rather than offering any actual friendship.

Once the person is no longer useful, they just drop them and move on, at least in the best case scenarios.