I had a friend who is chronically online. They live with their parents and are able to stay home full time and spend most of that time at their computer, either gaming or hanging out with people.

I met them through mutual friends and invited them to my space with my friends, as I got the feeling they were a lonely and wanted to invite them to a place where I try to let everybody feel welcome.

Whenever we did hang out, they would cut me off if I started talking about work, or things I did offline as they claimed it was boring and would change topic back to something like TikTok’s, video games, or things they did with their friends either in discord or VRchat. At first, I did not mind as I was able to change what I was able to mostly just joke and make references with them.

They also joked a lot, however a lot of their jokes were either sexually charged or flirtatious, which always left me feeling awkward and unsure how to respond. If they weren’t either of those, they would just be making fun of people. To the point where she even called me “low-key ugly” once and listed a bunch of things I should change about myself and when I told them I did not appreciate that, they told me it was their type of comedy.

After that event, I took a few months of space before I I talked to them again, as I didn’t really enjoy being around them.

Recently, though, they reached out to me and figured I would try to make things work again. And at first they did, but eventually the sexual/flirtatious and bullying jokes did start to come out again.

It all came to a head when we were playing Valorant, an fps together as she had wanted to. For the next hour, mostly she complained. About our teammates, the servers we were on, her ping. We had lost every game we played, but they were close. Finally, she started criticizing my gameplay, asking me what the hell I was doing, telling me how bad I am etc.

The part that has me wondering if I’m TA is when this happened, I got kind of stern and said “I’m not having fun playing this game with you. This is going to be my last game tonight.” To which she responded, “Well, you know what is fun? Winning.” All I could think of was to say “sure.” And when the game ended, I said “Talk to you later. Bye.” And hung up our call.

Since then, she has blocked me on every medium we had communicated on without saying anything to me about it.

I would not go back on standing up for myself, nor would I change the fact that I took space when I started getting frustrated. But her blocking me has me wondering, was I too harsh in setting that boundary for myself?