a letter to a friend

A very good friend of mine whom I have known all my life recently stopped being friends with me because of a letter I wrote to her. That was almost a year ago, but she has not forgiven me.
It was about an experience I felt we shared.
This friend moved a few years ago from the city out to a rural area, one that was quite conservative and closed-minded. In her usual optimistic, sunny way, she tried to improve things, to bond people, to pour her considerable energy into improving the town. And predictably (and least for negative souls like myself), they rejected her efforts wholly.
So, seeing her harming herself by throwing herself constantly against the wall, when the people in her neighborhood taunted her and her family, tried to kill her dog, passed rumors in the town newspaper, I tried to give her my best advice, out of the depths of my own similar experiences,
but this was not accepted or understood.
Absolutely unimaginable cruelty. That's what the people of that town inflicted on her. People who had been her friends turned on her suddenly and viciously, yelling at her and her family as they sat in their homes, calling her daughter a whore, invading her backyard and even her basement, claiming to own portions of it.
This is something familiar to me because when I was a child in Philadelphia, very similar things happened to my family. Only I was not at first able to escape it because of my age. And it continued up until those people died or moved away and I finally myself left the place behind me, physically and psychologically.
The entire block, all composed of people very much like my family in background and economic status, decided to make us outcasts. I was 5 years old when all of them sat out on their front stoops. A trip to the library across the street was like running the gauntlet because all them jeered me and my mother, throwing stones and glass bottles full of bees and yelling epithets.
And they did this every time any of us put our faces out the door.
Soon we retreated to the back alley. My parents taught me to ignore, to pretend none of it was happening. They never, to my knowledge, called the police or set out to change this. They submitted to it like dumb beasts under the lash, and encouraged me to do the same.
At school, it continued as bullying. In high school, I spent an entire year eating lunch in the bathroom because otherwise, I was thrown down the stairs or into a trash can. Being small and unequipped with any but mental advantages, I was unable to fight back, and my parents had made it clear they did not want me to complain to the authorities, who in any case didn't care, and watched as blandly as those parents on my street as these things happened to me.
But I have miraculously been able to will these events not to mar my life forever. I have not forgotten them, but I have been able to turn them outwards. They have given me, as worse events gave Mandela and others, the ability to escape the prison of selfhood and identify with the most downtrodden, to feel with them and try to reach out to them. I wanted to give this same gift to my friend, but was not able.
Why else have I been given the ability to write, but to communicate what I have learned from my own experience? I hope other people will be as fortunate as I was to use their own pain to escape bitterness and to help others escape their pain.