Last May, I had the stupid idea to reinvent myself. I thought that I could make new friends, step out of my shell, and become a kinder person. Shocker--it didn't work. I almost ruined my relationship with my roommate. I had an "episode" that I can't remember the details of. I realized you can never become someone else. You are always you, but somehow, my identity changed when I wasn't looking. I accomplished my goal in a way I never thought I could.
I think I sabotaged myself with the expectation of changing overnight. For years, I hid away in my room watching old movies and dreaming about the things I could be if I actually tried. I longed for a deeper connection that I didn't feel like I had with the friends I had known for years, so I latched onto my new roommate, hung out with his friends, met his sister, and drove the hour and a half to pet his childhood dog. We stayed up until 4 a.m. every night talking about our deepest insecurities. It was a cautionary tale of manufactured closeness.
Shortly after that, I learned that I black out at the drop of a hat. Unfortunate, when you spend most days paralyzed with the fear of your thoughts leaking out and poisoning people's opinions of you. Maybe it's good it took this long to get over my hangups around drinking because all of a sudden, I had this guy who spent all of his time in my space and knew too much about me--a combination of what I meant to tell him, what I told him under the influence, and what he apparently overheard when I sleep-talked. I don't know if he was making it awkward, or I was projecting my discomfort of our relationship imbalance, but the end result was the same. I watched more movies and tried to act normal.
It's hard to piece events together when the person telling them to you is a chronic exaggerator. I don't know if I told him I loved him, but I know that I could have. The line between "friend" and "crush"--as much as I hate the word--often blurs as I get used to having a new person in my orbit. Maybe I let my eyes linger. Maybe I did love him, a little bit. So what? The same thing has happened before. Nothing is supposed to come of it.
Things edged back to normal as the months passed. Not everything was the same; we didn't sleep in the same bed or have our late night chats anymore, but that was fine. I met more people and made an effort to get to know them. We hosted video game nights. It bugged me, though, because none of them were mine. They shared my roommate's music taste, favorite YouTubers, attitude. I was the outsider.
Just in time, I went home for the holidays and got to see my old friends. I regret that I didn't appreciate it more. I wanted to lock myself back in my room because obviously this little experiment had failed. There was no point in continuing it.
When I went back to my life in January--or was it February? March?--things slowly started to unravel. There was a week where I overextended myself, and I found myself caught in a web of not-quite-lies for the next couple months. I couldn't lean on my roommate, because I think he was going through a rough patch as well, so I was left floundering. I don't know if he heard me crying myself to sleep. He described my worst moments as the week I "went catatonic." I will probably will never know what I looked like from the outside, or how severe it really was, so I'm left to speculate.
I pulled myself out of it slowly. There were a couple of nights when I left my place at 11 p.m. and walked until my legs gave out. I moved from film to TV because my attention span was shot. I let myself shake in the bathroom until I stopped repeating "I'm sorry." I slept a lot.
It might sound like my life shut down, but it didn't. During this time, I got involved with a newspaper as a sportswriter. I was completely out of my depth, but I did it. The first article I wrote appeared on the front page. Covering games got me outside, even if the weather was shitty. I don't know when it happened, since so much of it is blurred together in my mind, but I felt okay again.
An old friend had a breakdown of her own. It sounds bad to say that it made me feel better. Before the holidays, she was feeling the best she had in years, so she lived in the moment. Hardship is what made her reach out again, and our groupchat became active again. We called every week or two. I made new friends as well, even if they lived hours away.
I also started devouring books in a way I hadn't done since elementary school. As the weather got nicer, I started exploring local hiking trails in the mid-afternoon instead of abandoned streets in the middle of the night. I got a job in IT and was asked last-minute to step up as Sports Editor. It was a lot, not only because a year ago I was preparing to enter the film industry, but because it excited me in a way I wasn't sure I was allowed to have.
When it comes to the future, I'm trying to aim small. If everything goes to plan, I'll be getting a car (finally!), which opens up a whole new realm of possibility. I can drive out to visit one of my closer friends in October, and I might even make the trip to Vancouver--my first time ever in Canada--over the holidays to see my other friend's new apartment. Look at that, I'm getting ahead of myself already. I'm going to get a new bookshelf. I have plans to see a movie in June. That's small. It also makes me feel unreasonably happy to know that my friend reached out to me first.
There's a lesson in here somewhere. In a couple of years, I'll probably look back and say this was me coming out of the lowest point of my life, but from where I am now it just looks like I'm on the upswing. Everything I tried failed, and I still was better off because of it. I'm confident in my abilities. I know not to jump into friendships head first, and more than that, I recognize the strength of the friends I've had for coming on seven years. This isn't me trying to purge the experience. I'm still going to be living with my roommate, and I'll still see my current "friends" around the dinner table more often than not. I guess I'm just excited for more of the same. You don't notice the important changes when they happen over the course of weeks and months and years.
That sounds sappy. Forget it.
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