"What a strange break it's been."

Jan. 3, 2015 | Ninze Chen & Noah Paul. Bullet, Volume. III: The Golden Issue, Summer MMXI.

Notes to Self are longer journal entries from Seven Yrs Ago. I was 21 early 2015.

            What a strange break it’s been. Wonderful, illuminating, tiring, shifting. It feels strange and almost juvenile to journal, but that’s what I gotta do at this moment, and why should I or anyone trivialize such needs?

            I was watching The Perks of Being a Wallflower (3/4☆s) tonight with Dad (2.5/4☆s) and it made me think about the people in my life and the relationships playing out over break. God, under where do I start (my pauses with my pen hand over my evacuated eyes)?

            Let’s just start with Tanner. He could be at the end, but hell, he’s the impetus. Of this at least.

            Right now, he’s on a long road trip with all(?) his friends going up to San Fran and back and he’s got all his pals Frankie and Sam and Greg and Molly (that person I unfairly think is a cuntface). Conscious bigotry aside, he’s off having a good time with his friends and has been doing that with them all break and that’s good, that’s great. Really. I mean that, even though my ink stains with sarcasm. It’s funny because yesterday I was with Winona (dollface) plucking around How Sweet It Was on 4th Ave. and I finally got around to his Snapchats and I see pics of him and his car including Frankie and Molly CF and I gotta say, I got a little cold inside. Like a frost you can clear on your windshield with one wipe, but the tips remain. Anyway, that more or less dissolved after a cathartic monologue to Winona about relationship anxieties and watching that movie. It was a lasting thud on the head of what I’ve been telling myself for months: No one person could be my everything because the rest of my everything belongs to other people and myself.

            And if he has other people, I need to find myself so that no matter what, I have me, and at this time in this relationship I have chosen, he can hopefully have me too, and not just merry me or cool me, but all of me, my fleshy human parts.

            So I hope he’s having a lot of fun with his friends over there. I will not take the sudden absence of Snapchats as the elimination or forgetting of me, but as his giving into the present, the ongoing moment around them. Let him be happy; I hope he is. But, let’s get back to me.

            So that Perks movie was good, though I knew it was something I would have appreciated and fallen more for as a teenager. However, tonight it capitalized on my perspective and recent feelings that I just

want

people

again.

            Like the main character, I want a great group of friends and as any forgiving woman knows, size doesn’t matter, but the breadth of the greatness does. I feel like I haven’t had that since high school and even then there was a sense that were such a small class that we had to either love or exclude each other so we made our choices and were more or less 2 social factions with occasional kickback bleeding. I guess middle school then would be the last time I had a legit group and based on the (sorta) surprise gathering at Robin’s graduation party, it was a nice albeit naturally offbeat reminder that were all friends as a group once. I say, “offbeat,” because we hadn’t seen each other in years. Even though it wasn’t a Welcome Back, Kotter special, it was a warm catch-up.

            Anyway, I feel like there’s a natural antisocial instinct in me. Perhaps “natural” and “instinct” aren’t the words, because I don’t know if it came from my dad or it just grew from only-childom, but either way, groups weird me out. Like, all-the-way-the-fuck-out.

            Like when in Junior year, I was super tight with Rae, Ben and Kelli and we hung out as a group and did most, if not all, things together, and in most, hell all, things there was always a nagging feeling in the back of my throat/head/cervical system that I did not like hanging out with them like this. I loved them all incredibly, individually, but we simply did not work together as a group to me.

            Lo and behold, we fell apart and even though we could blame Kelli for turning on them first, I weirdly was okay without it because I saw it coming (in my POV) and also I was okay with just letting it split like that. Obviously we all made choices and ours was not to be together like that anymore.

            Later those 3 would recall privately with me how much fun Junior year was because I believe it was the group and party aspect, but I didn’t see it like that, recalling that year as fun memorial fodder mainly cause A) I was going thru Hell with arch and Jason/life but also 2) the group dynamic was just blank to me.

            Now though, drumroll please, I feel like I’m ready to do that, to have a group of friends who are actually friends with each other. I know it may take some time to get them, but I’m willing to put in the effort and caring and patience necessary to get to that ECP with myself and equally important with others. The greatest thing I’ve remembered this break is how it feels to be with people who really care about you. I don’t know why, but they do and I’m grateful. It makes it easier to care for them back, when I already intellectually know that’s what I should do.

            When you look at yourself through therapy or coping, you can’t help but be critical, always analyzing how you are and were. That’s how I look at my relationships here now too. Though this hometown love and care has blown my mind, it also reminded me that I can’t return, I can’t go back to this place again right after college. I’m just not the person I used to be anymore and I can’t gauge myself well by putting myself with people who want to maintain a certain way and preserve me too.

            Hana and my dad jump to mind, but even some of the people who I love are not who I need to grow right now. They care and I know it and I know to like those who like me (thanks Amy Poehler) but continuing too act in the same ways as I have before to please them and make peace in our relationships is not gonna cut it for me anymore, particularly if those ways are a return to detriment.

            I should stop doing things I don’t want to do with people that I don’t want to do those things/anything with.

            So here’s the deal Nicole—figure out the people you want to be with and the person you want to be.

            Chances are this will be simultaneous, but take what you can as you go. Open, go through, exhale.

For commentary seven years later, go here.