I've (17F) known my childhood best friend (18M) for a very long time now, I think for even more than ten years. Our families knee each other and my mom liked me being friends with him ever since I have memory.

Let's call him L. Both L and I like drawing, we've shared a ton of memories together through this hobby. For a bit of context, we dated for around a year and a half in 2021, but broke up since he thought we were still too young to date. We stayed as best friends afterwards.

I always thought of L as someone sweet and kind, someone I could rely on and could trust with almost anything, but in the past two to three years I feel like he's changed. When I talked to him about an unrelated conflict of mine he turned it around to make it about him, and even asked if our relationship was because of that thing. It definitely wasn't.

Lately, I feel like he's more self-centered. Everytime I tried telling him about anything about me or my life, he would stop me and start talking about him. Constantly. He'd get pissed at me if I texted two or more messages about me and not ask about him. It made me feel shitty at first, thinking that I was being selfish.

Now, the most important part is that both of us still draw. I'm pretty sure he does it as a hobby, but I aspire to be an illustrator. I have to admit that he draws better than me, it's obvious, but it feels like he's always trying to remind me he's better and I'm the worst. Everytime I sent a picture of a doodle, a sketch, or a finished piece he'd ALWAYS had something bad to say about it even when I didn't ask him for advice. I don't usually tell him about the mistakes on his own drawings and when I do, he gets pissed at me for it.

After a few months of having him doing that to almost every single drawing I made (Because he has the habit of leaving me on read most of the time) I had a massive breakdown and felt so insecure about me and my art that I stopped drawing for a good while, even crying when I stared at anything I made. I felt like I was over exaggerating but everytime I picked up a pencil I remembered everything wrong I did in the previous drawings that he pointed out. It made me cry so much that I almost quit completely.

I draw with my heart, it's one of the only things that make me feel human, so his constant comments on them and those always being negative made me colapse.

After talking to another friend about it and some other things he did (Like ghosting me, indirectly telling me that I'm stupid and that he doesn't expect much from me)I decided to ignore him as much as I could, since we rarely see each other irl.

I now feel more comfortable and less insecure about my art, but it hurt me deeply knowing that he thinks I'm stupid and that I can't even make my hobbies the right way. I've been ghosting him for now, and he doesn't seem to care. I've blocked him on TikTok and I'm pretty sure he hasn't even noticed. (And if he did, I bet he doesn't care.)

I don't know what to do. I know that I'll inevitably need to speak to him again but I really don't want to.