I feel like I caused an online friend to commit suicide, or at least indirectly encouraged it.

I should preface by saying I didn’t know them at any kind of notable personal level. Just chatting occasionally. I’d also provide them with emotional support and some affectionate/intimate roleplay.

One night they opened up to me completely. Said they’d had a crush on me at one point. Said they needed me. Said that I was the only thing keeping them going in life.

I tried to push him toward therapy in that moment (perhaps a bit too forcefully) and he refused it, saying that if I was there for him he wouldn’t need therapy since I was “as good as a therapist.” (He later went back on this, instead saying “if you leave I won’t have a reason to go to therapy.”) He didn’t understand how much weight he’d put onto my shoulders.

I ran. I left a long message reiterating that I believed in him and hoped he got the help he needed but that I couldn’t give him the support he needed. Then I blocked him.

I thought I had just been providing emotional support to a friend, but after he opened up I felt more like I had been a crutch, like I was his entire livelihood, and I wasn’t ready for that. I felt like he was shouldering the entire weight of his life onto my shoulders, on top of my own mental health concerns.

I later learned that he edited some of his last messages to me (Discord quirk) following my response. Talking about how I’d betrayed his trust, how I’d lied to him about how “most people deserve a little bit of unconditional support,” saying that he vomited from anxiety for the first time in several months after I’d blocked him.

About a month later he tried to reach out via Steam. He accused me of not wanting to be friends. In short, I said that, no, I want him to get the help he needs, and said that I didn’t want to totally disconnect. But he made some hostile remarks toward me regarding what I’d already done and how that conflicted what I’d said. I don’t remember exactly what I’d said. I blocked him there.

He sent me many friend requests over Discord after that with account names such as “why?,” “how does abandoning me help me,” “I cant move on from you a******,” and “what did I do wrong?”

I kept blocking the accounts he made. I couldn’t handle it. The huge amount of responsibility for something so far out of my league and perhaps even control. The negativity and toxic/manipulative behavior.

And then the friend requests stopped.

I don’t want to reach out. I don’t want to open that door again. But his words haunt me and make me feel like what I did was cruel. And if I was truly the only thing keeping him going, then I shudder to imagine what else he’s done in response to me cutting him off.

I feel guilty for neglecting his mental health because it feels sort of selfish now. I feel guilty about feeling guilty because that kind of codependency would have taken a huge toll on my own
mental health.

I know I shouldn’t blame myself for it. They say that if someone is saying things like “I have nothing to live for if you leave,” they’ve probably been there for a while even before something happened that made them vocalize it. But even if he’s still alive, that could even be worse, since I’ve confirmed his personal beliefs that a) he can’t trust anyone with knowledge of his shattered mental health and b) I don’t seem to have cared about him as much as I said I did.

And honestly, I’m not sure how much I cared about him. I like making people feel nice. For years I’ve had a hard time standing up for myself. I guess I’ve provided a lot of people with emotional support and given them a lot of my time because I thought it was what I was *supposed* to do. Living selflessly, not selfishly. I thought it was the right thing to do.

Now I don’t feel like I can trust that instinct. I want to provide *some* support for people — I don’t want to be a major reason for living. I don’t want to be the one holding responsibility for the life of another person.

It feels wrong to say I don’t like myself because I’m too nice, but situations like these really make statements like that feel more valid because they highlight how disingenuous some of my people-pleasing can be. I don’t feel like I can live for myself without hurting other people, perhaps even people I care about, and I hate that. I hate the conflict, both internal and external. I don’t like how my kindness can be a bad thing, either for myself or for others; it’s discomforting.

So I don’t know if I really had a connection to him or not. I don’t want anything to happen to him, but it’s hard to say how much of that is caring about his wellbeing versus the weight on my conscience if he did carry something out. Because I could have provided more support and I didn’t. I know that I should come first, I should take care of myself before I try to take care of others. But, f***, where is the line drawn? I hate this feeling.