27 August 2013

The Music-Makers

I hear the clock ticking between tasks at work, in the space between sentences and bites of dinner. It's equal parts anxiety and excited anticipation, counting down the remaining planning hours I've left to pull this thing together. I've never thrown a party this big, mainly because I never wanted the mental burden of what to do if no one showed up, but lots of my friends appear to be way stoked about attending my wedding. That's a weird and new experience for me.

I know I have a lot of friends around here, many of whom I only met in the last three years or so...most of whom I met while working for the magazine, where I became some sort of amped-up version of myself for a year and a half. I made more friends in that amount of time than I had in my entire life before it. When you're in a position to help people get where they're going, you tend to make a lot of friends.

I knew it at the time, in a way, but I was far too enthralled and challenged and pressurized to stand still long enough to let it bother me. It's not that I now think it should have bothered me -- helping people is a great way to make friends, I guess -- but if it had happened more gradually, it certainly would have bothered me. A lot.

Before college and booze, I didn't dare attempt to befriend people who had lots of friends because they'd surely wonder who the fuck invited me out (I acted out that scenario in my head many, many times, though it never happened...well, actually, I believe I've managed to block them out). I stuck to the outskirts of high school, especially by the end of it. I skipped lunch most of the time to avoid the awful situation of sitting with any and all groups of people who didn't want me there, and I'd sit on the concrete bench by myself for an hour, writing fanfiction and regurgitating lyrics in a marble notebook.

For a long time, I justified those (in)actions by convincing myself I was perfectly fine without the added anxiety of forming real connections with others.

It's so obviously a defense mechanism in retrospect, it's right out of the goddamn textbook -- a textbook I was actually studying in a class as a high school junior. I vividly remember the day Ms. Thornton went over defense mechanisms, but not because I realized what I was doing -- no, no, unfortunately no. It's because I took it as the key to simplifying people around me. God, it's so terrible how terrible I was, and how terribly that lesson got inside of me.

I went from extreme childhood shyness to the point of staring at the ground when talking to others, to deep insecurity about my pubescent and blobbish physical presence, to having my tween heart broken to bits. And it was around that time that I started starving myself with the discipline of a high-ranking Nazi in some ungrateful attempt to exert control over my life, because I'd forever been passively dropping the reins whenever anyone or anything so much as looked my way. I saw it in that fucked up positivity for as long as I was doing it, and I'm not entirely sure I'd have ever stopped if my mom hadn't hauled my journal out from its vault.

By that point, I was far beyond depressed -- if left unattended, that condition melts down to the deep selfishness and arrogance that had turned my family's sweet, shy little girl into a complete and total asshole. All before the sweet 16 surprise party they threw for me a few months later. I can't believe anyone showed up.

A year or so later, my relationship with Nick didn't really allow me to have any friends, and many of them had graduated on to college anyway. Before Nick, a lot of boys started to flirt with me, but they were all too cute to have good intentions. I had some girlfriends, but most -- well, all -- of them did the boyfriend disappearing act as well. I was wildly unhappy in that traumatic relationship, but I suppose the textbook would say that I didn't believe I deserved better. That's a hard conclusion to swallow...10 years later, I still don't completely buy it, but there is no other explanation that makes better sense of it.

And college, and vicious breakup, and Ross, and booze, and more heartbreak on my end, and downward spiral, and lost scholarship. Lots of making out with random dudes at parties and bars, in parking lots, on pool tables, in...pools. Lots of spinning around drunk holding sharp objects, scarring everything I ran into, possibly permanently. At the time, I felt like I had learned so much about myself and about life. Looking back, I had mostly just showed up to class wasted, then stumbled back to the bar to celebrate all that I had learned about defense mechanisms. God, fuck.

I woke up in a relationship that had apparently gone sour a year or two earlier, and I complained about it for another year before I did anything about it. I ate some mind-blowing acid the first time I tried it. My long-lost first love payed me a month-long visit. Half a year later, I had a job as an editor of a magazine, I had adopted a completely different approach to life, and I have no fucking idea how it happened.

Maybe one massive, spirited revival is all I get in this lifetime. Maybe I had just ended up in such a deep hole before then, that the only conceivable escape route demanded a complete 180. Maybe I just flipped a switch somewhere that made me believe in myself...maybe I decided to draw the switch myself, just to see if it would work. Maybe it was the acid!

Whatever it was, I'm happy it worked. I'm happy that I didn't think too hard about all those people wanting to be my friend so I might write about their band. I'm happy that I met those people, because if they only wanted me for my press powers at first, they became real friends at some point. The lot of them still invite me out, though I don't go out much anymore. Most of them are incredibly interesting people who I still have incredible conversations with. When I walk into a room full of mixed company, I no longer have to drown my demons to tolerate it, because I no longer see it as a room full of assumed rejection.

All I ever needed was a reason to ask hundreds of total strangers questions about their lives. Lots of people don't need a reason, but I wasn't one of them. Sometimes I wonder how many great friends I could have made in high school if I had only given them a chance. That town sucked, but no two people are alike -- and actually, the more people I met later on in life, the more interesting they all became.

There's a lot I might not have right now if I hadn't spent so many years in my head alone, transcribing the echo of my own voice bouncing off the walls. I fell in love with my future husband there, in that school, staring at the ground, afraid of my own voice.

And, you know, maybe it was better that he didn't hear it back then, because I was batshit crazy.