You can always tell a real friend: when you’ve made a fool of yourself he doesn’t feel you’ve done a permanent job.”
— Laurence J. Peter.
Unpopular opinion, but I really dislike holidays. Don’t get me wrong, not “the holidays,” just “holidays” themselves. The mutual time off that friends and family have around Thanksgiving and Christmas is great, but I’m pretty sure that being forced to sit still through conversations and dinners and opening gifts one by one is a freakin’ torture designed specifically for me. Having conversations can be the worst part. People talk SO SLOWLY sometimes and they tend to repeat the conversational point they just made in different phrasing while they figure out what to say next. Super unnecessary. The worst is getting cornered into talking about something I’m not interested in (which is anything that’s not related to science). Sometimes though, it’s not the the anxiety of feeling trapped by uninteresting or slow moving topics that gets me, I can usually fight through that and make an acceptable exit ASAP. Sometimes my brain sabotages me, when there are multiple conversations happening at the same time or when it gets too loud in a room. A switch flips and I go from trying to keep up to being instantly overwhelmed by noise, my mind blurs and I get super anxious and I lose track of what’s happening around me. My ears physically throb, like my pulse is drowning out the sound. It sucks. I don’t have control over it, and a lot of the time I have to get up and do something immediately: my go-to is to frantically start doing dishes or any other task that looks normal to dispel that anxious energy. I used to drink insane amounts of alcohol to cope with it, but the hangovers got pretty vicious by the ripe old age of 22, and I really don’t like who I become when I drink. I get promiscuous and loud and impulsive, I say and do dumb shit, and I don’t have an off switch, I just keep drinking. So I quit. And now even half a drink gives me a raging headache, pretty good incentive for staying away from it.
I think most of my friends are pretty accepting of who I am, I will never be at their parties (the ear throb is legit) but I will always be down for a ski trip. Sometimes I’m hyper and sometimes I just want to watch Netflix for three hours. But also it’s very rare that I feel I’ve totally opened up who I am with them. I’m afraid that if I let that last piece of my guard down, and showed them who I really am, that I would be rejected, like truly rejected because it’s just me at that point, not a guarded version. My brain takes rejection very seriously, it likes to read it into really random scenarios: I was absolutely crushing at science jeopardy in seventh grade and I had my my elbows propped on the table with my fingers kinda in front of my face, when this kid Travis gently poked fun “are you praying right now?” Instead of giving him shit right back or even just saying “no,” I gave him the classic deer-in-the-headlights look. Did he really think I was that dumb, that I needed to pray to win at science jeopardy? Dang, I was doing something weird with my hands, now he thinks I’m a psycho. My brain instantly went deep into a rejection spiral. Or a contemporary example: the other day my best friend said he bought a ticket to visit Thailand with his buddy. I immediately felt like crying and had to make up some excuse to leave the conversation. I think rationally, a friend should’ve been excited for him, but my brain punched me in the face with “you’re not good enough and he doesn’t like you enough to have asked you to go.” Like WTF brain, you are literally going to Mexico in a month without this friend, why did you decide to cause pain? It goes back to childhood I think, or maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by my excellent therapists. But when I was a kid I had best friend after best friend suddenly flip one day and start ignoring me, hardcore, like I literally haven’t talked to any of them since. The first two flipped when I was nine, the next one when I was thirteen, and the final one when I was fifteen. I added layer after layer of armor around who I really was with each rejection (I still really don’t have no idea why any of them bailed, and I’m an adult with a decade of life between these experiences and now). Now, I struggle really hard to take that armor off and to be myself. I kind of lost who I was under the weight of all those layers. I learned how to get through social situations by trial and error, a social roulette if you will. Try saying or doing something, and if it flops, it will be burned in your memory to never try again. I would just watch all these people around me interacting, from inside my fortress, trying to figure out how they just say and do the right things, the acceptable things. I would copy their styles of humor and speech and mannerisms, try them out and blend them together to chameleon into the background of every group event. I literally created this bland human to showcase to the world, someone who was the average of every situation, no one actually knew the real me for many years. I learned to slowly open up, to surround myself with people I felt safe enough to do so. I even created a code word with that friend going to Thailand, in case I get an emotional kidney-punch again, so that I can get out of the conversation and let the emotions burn hot (they only last a few hours, max) and not say or do something dumb (like try and end our friendship). We’ll see how it goes.
