My beloved childhood friend and grad school classmate dropped out of our program and blames me. Was it really my fault?

[Geocentric3445]

Disclaimer: I am incredibly depressed right now. And I am on the spectrum too.

I (25M) am childhood friends and PhD colleagues with an ethnically South Korean woman named Angela (35F). I’ve known Angie ever since I was 3 years old! Before the events that are described in this post, she used to love me like a younger brother (not sexually), and she always saw herself as my older sister. She's also much taller than me, and just as a cute gesture, she likes to rest her chin on the top of my head sometimes lol.

Our male classmates have sexual feelings for Angie. Indeed, she is conventionally very attractive, and she looks like a really elegant female anime character. She’s got shoulder-length black hair and thick bangs. She looks totally feminine, but she’s actually a complete tomboy. Angela loves sports, and has played basketball in university. Even nowadays, she goes running every day. Also, most of her friends are men. I personally admit that my choice of grad school was based heavily on the fact that it’s where she wanted to go. I have a lot of fond memories of her swinging me around in her arms when I was little.

This past summer, she and I went on an expedition on a mountain together with two of our fellow male classmates (who are now 23M and 25M). It was an extremely hot and humid day, so before we headed up the mountain, Angie took her shirt off in the car. She spent the entire day wearing nothing but a very low-cut, spaghetti strap sports bra and basketball shorts. Within the first 30 minutes of our field work, our male classmates began making remarks about her tight shoulder blades and abs. Angela has never taken sexual comments well, so she just her mouth tightly shut and became visibly worried. Pretty soon, one of our male classmates played a prank on her by grabbing her ponytail and yanking her sports bra. When this happened, Angela screamed and she started sobbing. I yelled at our classmates, and I grabbed her arm and led her away from them to a secluded area. We had a heart-to-heart moment where she rested her chin on my head and cried on me. I hugged her tightly and the first thing I noticed was that she was sweating to an unhealthy degree. I tried shushing her, but she never regained her composure for the rest of the day. 

She spent the next several hours crying and sweating, trying to work by herself but she couldn’t get any work done. Whenever she wasn't using her hands, she kept her arms tightly crossed around her chest and begged us to stay away from her. She also kept tightly holding her ponytail close to her.

Every time I hung out with Angie after the trip, we’ve always ended up fighting. She’s not only terrified of ALL our male classmates, but she’s terrified of me in particular too. She’s dropped out of our program, but she has a cushy public sector job that she continues to work in (we live in Western Europe).

Edited Friday at 09:43 PM by Geocentric3445