I'm going to try to keep this brief, but I may fail. This is all pretty stupid and petty, I guess.

Had a friend in my friend group that I wasn't super close to, but I got along with quite well. We were pretty different, but we had a ton of mutual friends and a similar sense of humor in a many ways. A few years after I moved to NYC, I found out he was moving up with his gf, and we made a plan for the two of them, and my then-roommate and I to get a place together.

Things went fine at first, but as time went on more and more red flags started appearing. He was always an attention addict, way too much of a wannabe shaman/hippie/guru for my tastes, but it was pretty easy to just ignore that side of who he was and talk about weird movies, sex, and have fun drinking and smoking pot.

When we moved in together, I soon found it was very hard to avoid his overbearing personality. I'll admit, I have a pretty strong personality too, so I'm sure this was part of the clash, but in a group dynamic I really do my best to temper it and get along with everybody. This guy really needed to run the show most of the time. When you're just hanging out in a group setting, that can be easy to put up with, depending on the kind of person you are. When it's in your house all the time, not so much.

Things really didn't take a turn for the worse until I did this 30 day bikram challenge and lost a bunch of weight/got into the best shape of my life (since have gotten it all back, shit happens). At the time, dude was still suffering from this chronic injury that made it hard for him to walk/exercise, and he also drank a ton of beer, so he had a pretty baller beer gut going.

First of all, he began making all kinds of "joking" comments (the kind anybody can see are not actually jokes at all) about how I was going to not see the challenge through. I ignored these, completed the challenge, and stuck with bikram and weight training for a long time. I don't mind telling you, I looked good. His gf (who is a sweetheart and whom he subsequently dumped, look for that at the end of the story) one day made a completely innocuous comment about how I looked really good, and I swear, he had this fairly well-disguised grudge against me after that. The "joking" insults increased in frequency and ugliness. They extended into insinuations that I was gay, etc etc.

He also began stepping up what had always been a hobby of his, which was baiting me on social media. I'm a very sensitive person, and I really don't like it when people who are ostensibly my friends are rude and snarky to me in the guise of some kind of joke, especially when it seems like they are doing it just to make our other friends laugh. I tried to roll with it for a long time, gave some shit back occasionally, but at one point I finally just leveled with him and said, "dude, stop. I don't like what you're doing, it makes me upset, and I don't think you should be saying rude stuff about me online, jokes or not."

He went off on this tangent about how I needed to be less sensitive and understand what he was trying to do and I just cut him off and said I didn't want to hear it. I was already thinking about moving out due to other circumstances, but this sealed it for me. I didn't want to be in this kind of environment, where I was being constantly disrespected in my own house every day.

After I moved out we basically completely lost touch, and neither of us tried to keep it alive. I blocked him on social media a long time ago. It was only through mutual friends that I found out he's now doing some fucking idiotic and pointless magic ritual/self-help type shit (basically a bastardized version of The Secret). I and others who have also had a falling out with him (a mutual friend of ours who lived with him after I did actually reached out after we hadn't spoken in a long time to ask if we could get a beer and talk, because he was having the same kind of conflicts).

I honestly think he just gets off on manipulating people, and when anybody decides to stand up for themselves like I did (or this other friend of ours did) his BS takes on a much more sinister and pointed flavor than it usually has.

Oh yeah, he also dumped his gf of like 2-3 years, whom he lived with, the week her fucking father died unexpectedly, and apparently sent her all kinds of psycho shit after the fact about her being worthless and stupid and wasting her life.