Eyes

For as long as I can remember, people have always complimented my eyes first. Always. From a very young age I learned that not only were my eyes my widow to the world, they were also the biggest thing on my face. My eyes are HUGE. The better to look upon the wonders of life, I guess.

Anyways, everyone commented on them. My parents' friends would do it, my friends wild do it, and most commonly, boys would do it. Many times it was my friends that did, but many times it was a stranger- and it was the second thing out of his mouth after his name. 

"Hi, I'm him" 

"nice to meet you" 

"can I just say that you have the most gorgeous eyes I've ever seen?"

All. The. Time. It's become something I take as a given, and if someone does compliment my eyes it's unappreciated

Recently, I met someone who drunkenly one night, told me that he loved my eye contact. Not my eyes, my eye contact. This was the first eye-related compliment that I had ever gotten that made me stop and appreciate it. He told me that when he was talking to me, he really felt like I was invested and interested in what he was saying. That my eye contact was amazing, and not commonplace. That single compliment made me feel heard, and not just seen. It was unique and very, very meaningful.

Aftershocks

Have you ever really thought about the past and pointed to a relationship and said "I was in love then. That must be what love is" but absolutely not realized it at the time?

Sometimes clarity is convenient. And sometimes clarity comes almost four years later. 

Oh well. C'est la vie.

Timing

Tonight was a rough night.

I was trying to unwind after the most confusing and scattered first-day-back ever, one that began with a fifteen-mile bike ride (Bike the Drive in Chicago, everyone should do it) and ended with this. After going in my hot tub with a friend of mine, C, I settled in to bed with half a cantaloupe to catch up on my life.

The first thing I did was catch up on the news. There was a shooting in Isla Vista on Friday night, one that left many of my peers shaken (UCSB is still in the UC system, and many students at Berkeley know students at SB, so many people that I know were personally affected by this awful, awful tragedy). I have no words of my own to attempt to process this event, but I will link you to articles here, here, here, and here. For a world where news travels so fast, I was vastly under-prepared for what I was about to read. It's a horrific thing in and of itself, and as a female member of the Greek system at a closely-linked university, it was particularly hard to stomach due to the targeted attack on sorority women in the area. My LITB and Panhellenic love goes out to all women at UCSB; I cannot even imagine having to be in your shoes and am extending love and support your way.

After taking a minute to process one person's devastating lack of value for other human life, I turned to Amazon Prime Instant Video. Wanting to watch a movie that would allow myself to relax, clear my mind, I skipped past all the action movies and settled on a comedy about high school life in the eighties. Made in 1988, this movie was cited as the precursor to Clueless and Mean Girls, among other films, and existed in the same time frame as John Hughes movies, so without any more information on the subject matter or the plotline of the movie, I began watching Heathers.

Forty minutes in, I was horrified. The timing of my processing of the shooting, then watching the movie, could not have been worse. For those of you (like me) that are unaware of what Heathers is about, the plot follows a girl named Veronica who has succeeded in joining the popular clique in her high school called the Heathers: a group of beautiful popular girls all named Heather. After a college party night goes awry and alpha Heather makes fun of Veronica (in a very clever, scathing way), Veronica plays a game of strip croquet with the new-to-the-neighborhood psychopath, JD (whom has jokingly "shot" two people with blanks in the school, already, with no consequence), to whom she gripes about Heather and vocally wishes alpha Heather dead. Now JD takes things literally, so in a well-intentioned prank to make alpha Heather throw up the following morning by having her drink a mixture of orange juice and milk (Veronica's idea), JD decides to ratchet up the stakes and feed alpha Heather drain cleaner instead. She dies, and JD convinces Veronica to help him pass it off as suicide. After killing two more students at the school (this time, misogynistic football players, killed by shooting them) and also passing them off as suicide, Veronica and JD have a relationship reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde.

Without going too much into detail and ruining the movie, let's just say I was appalled. I took to the good ol' interweb to see what the fuss was about Heathers (specifically, if my disgust was shared by the mass populus), and was floored. Reviews of it as a cult classic were overwhelmingly positive, lauding it as an important dark comedy, a necessary piece of cinema, and a gem, even 25 years later. All I saw was a movie glorifying suicide and murder, which left a horrible taste in my mouth. I didn't understand how the movie could have ever been made, let alone celebrated, let alone labeled a "classic", with or without the world "cult" in front of classic. I was shaken, shocked, and appalled.

Then I took my surroundings into account. I don't know that I would ever love Heathers, given its dark subject matter and my reluctance to personally jump on board with the whole murder/suicide thing, but had I seen it on a different night (i.e. not right after hearing about Isla Vista), I would have felt differently. I will say that I appreciated it for it's biting wit and it's cleverness, and it's commentary on social cliques in the high school scene. It's a well-done movie, and though I won't throw the word "important" around, definitely has earned it's place in the history books, in my mind.

Maybe I'll try again to watch it, give it some time, and see what I think. For now, I'm just going to bed. I'm on Pacific time, and even for that, 2/4 am is too late to be awake.

God bless.

EDIT: I did do some reading on Heathers that changed my mindset just a little, or at least put my viewing of Heathers in the correct frame. I'll link ya: here, here, and here.

This Year

This year was the worst year yet. This school year. It had it's ups, but it had its deep downs as well.

This year:

My depression came back in a really hard-to-deal-with way, and I was luckily able to call someone when I most needed it.

I changed majors. Which is definitely for the better, but the academic courseload got about three times harder, and I got less and less sleep as I progressed through the year and the semester. Which made life hard to deal with.

My baby sister's growing up and that's freaking me out because she's going to college.

I was sexually assaulted by someone that I trusted.

I got a concussion. The week before finals.

A friend that was really close to me was just generally very very shitty and out of left field. 

For the first time in my life I've had to come to terms with some things that weren't so pretty, namely that I am human. This means that from time to time, I fuck up. Bad. I make choices that I can't stand behind the next day, and there are times where I look in the mirror and I'm not proud of the person that's looking back at me. I've been trying to learn not to beat myself up about it, but it's taking time. It's a process.

Mistakes

Mistakes suck.

I'm not talking about the simple embarrassing spelling error on a letter to your grandma, or forgetting to write the subject line in an e-mail to your TA which took you two hours to compose because you're in love with your TA. I'm not talking about forgetting to call your sister on her birthday, or not paying your credit card bill one month.

I'm talking about huge huge mistakes, gargantuan fuck-ups, things that you can't, at the end of the day, tell yourself will be okay. Things that society frowns upon, things that make your skin crawl and make you wonder if you'll ever be okay. Mistakes that ruin friendships, mistakes that ruin relationships, mistakes that ruin lives.

Okay, maybe I'm being a bit dramatic, but I've made a few mistakes. Very recently. That have had serious shockwaves. That weren't able to be brushed off by a simple apology, or justified by the fact that I had good intentions. They're things that I can't go to sleep at night and not think about, and they're things that make me cry one, two, four, seven months in the future. I've had to accept the fact that I'm a human that makes large mistakes from time to time, and that this is a part of learning and living.

And it fucking sucks. Coming to terms with the fact that I'm imperfect is horrible. And not an endearing imperfect, not the fact that I make light of my flaws, really, truly, horribly imperfect.

E, J, and how I learned my life was a joke.

A year ago, I did not know myself.

A year ago, someone else wanted to know me.  His name was J.

A year ago, I don't remember what happened, but J stopped talking to me, out of the blue, showed up with another girlfriend, and we cut contact.

In this year, I've grown closer to E. He knows most of my secrets, supports me when I need it, encourages me, makes me laugh, and best of all, does all of this in a platonic way. He's one of my best friends.

That is, until about four months ago.

Four months ago, E changed. He turned harsh, callous, insulting, and complacent. He stopped answering my texts, both when they were trivial and when they were important. He stopped answering my phone calls when I needed someone to talk to. It seemed like he stopped respecting me as a person, and I have no idea why.

To top it all off, E accused me this weekend of throwing myself at J when I knew he had a girlfriend. Not only is that not his place, that's not who I am, at all, and it felt like shit. This person, who I had trusted, loved platonically, helped, opened up to, and made myself vulnerable in front of betrayed me. It hurt worse than any breakup with any boyfriend, any fight with any other friend, anything else, ever.

It fucking sucked. And it threw me off my rocker completely. I have literally no idea what to do, where to go from here, or what to say. I feel so used and emotionally manipulated, and for someone who prides herself on being strong and able to see through bullshit, this is not a fun place to be in. I feel taken advantage of, both physically and emotionally. I don't know what to say.

This sucks.

I'm Emotionally Unavaliable

That thought terrifies me, absolutely. And I never thought that it was true, until about five minutes ago.

I spent high school bouncing between boyfriends, never spending more than around seven months single before I got a new boyfriend. Which was fine by me, it was a casual way to spend the time, I learned an awful lot about myself, and I had a lot of fun in the process.

Which in my mind is exactly what high school relationships should be like. Fun, relatively non-commital, and positive. My longest relationship ever has lasted eight months. Looking back on all of them, I realize I was always the one to break it off (read: run away first). In more than one instance, I pulled away because things were getting too serious. Other times I would convince myself that I "got bored", or "lost interest", both of which were absolutely true for all but two of my relationships. But I think what that ended up meaning is that I was terrified of making a commitment that was lasting and real and profound.

I like to believe that at 18 I was in no shape to start committing myself to another person. I didn't know shit about who I was, who I wanted to be, and what I wanted to do with my life. I still don't have answers to two of those questions. But since I've been single (it's been almost fifteen months), I've learned so much about myself.

One of these things is that I'm emotionally unavailable.

I'm not sure why I didn't figure this out sooner, because it's so obvious. I broke up with my summer fling when I got to college because I didn't want to do the long distance thing with him. While at school, I would meet guys and then just never follow up with them. In the first example I had of college "dating", I'm pretty sure the guy is gay and just doesn't know it, and I'm 100% sure that I was friend-zoned on the second date when he offered me a bro handshake instead of a hug at the end. In the second example, I ran away because he was looking to make me his girlfriend and I just didn't feel the same way.

Has college turned me into an emotionally unavailable person, or was that how I always was?

I can tell you that college has caused me to get a thicker skin, to decide things for myself, and to become a lot more self-aware and self-sufficient. I don't have anyone to lean on here, so I have to do a lot of things by myself, which is super hard and frustrating at times, but also is so good for me. Throughout all of this, I see my friends with long-term boyfriends, and the majority of me just kinda cringes a little bit. The sentence "we've been together for three years!" is more terrifying to me than the sentence "holy shit look at that huge spider over there I think it's going to eat us." The thought of knowing who I'm going to marry already is absolutely terrifying. At face value, I define this thought something like "well, I'm so amazing and I know I deserve so much out of a potential life partner, and there really isn't anyone I've met that can give me everything I need and/or is compatible enough with me to last a year or more, so it's fine if I just keep brushing things off." The problem with this logic is in the sense that I haven't really gotten to know any guys very well since I've been here.

The "dating scene" here is very much one of "let's hang out at a few parties, start making out on the reg, eventually have sex, then we can start hanging out sober and doing things like watching movies together, but not in public and we can't put a label on it until way way later when people won't find it weird." That's so not even close to how I approach things it's not even funny.

I keep my feelings close, because I don't like having them hurt. Nobody does. But instead of advancing me into this new realm of being amazingly self-aware, it's hindered me in a lot of ways. I'm very straightforward when it comes to guys here. I hate playing games, I won't take it as a marriage proposal if you say you want to see me again, and the fact my most recent flirtation took offense to the pronoun "us" is incredibly out-of-line (I referred to the two of us in the sense that I told him I showed my mom a picture of us and she showed her college class. His response to that was ...."us"?? I then had to spend an incredible amount of time convincing him that we weren't an "us" and it was just a weird scenario. My mom is also super embarrassing, which doesn't help anything). But I don't open up and get emotionally close to people, especially guys, very easily. And in an environment such as the one I'm in, there isn't really much merit to getting to know girls well if you can just make out with random drunk girls at your party the next weekend.

But there's a guy right now that I really really like. We get along really well, and I want to see him again. He feels the same way (or so he told me). I trust him, he's funny, we talk, and although I'm not trying to make him my boyfriend this second, I can see the potential in the relationship in the long term.

This sounds completely contrary behavior to everything I just described, and it is, but there's a reason: four weeks ago, this guy got out of a long term relationship with a psycho girlfriend and is so freaked out by the thought of a relationship that he pretty much stopped talking to me over my use of the pronoun "us".  He's completely and utterly emotionally unavailable, in every sense of the world.

You wanna know what type of people fall in "like" with emotionally unavailable people? Emotionally unavailable people.

This means that when things eventually don't turn into anything and I have to deal with the boo-boo on my heart and in my life, it'll, again, be my own damn fault. But it will also mean that there's a scapegoat for my hurt: he wasn't in the wrong, and neither was I, but he was just really emotionally unavailable! Nothing anyone can do about that, right? Which means that I'm not left with the confusing tangle of feelings associated with a break-up. I still win. I still protect my emotions, my feelings, my head, and my heart from getting hurt by another person.

I don't know that I've ever been in love. But I'm in love with the idea of being in love. And I really want to be in a relationship now (on the surface). But deep down, I'm still the same emotionally unavailable person that I've always been, and I don't know how to change that.