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Love vs. In-Love

Growing up, I sort of always hated myself. I hated the way I talked and the squeaky, unsettling pitch of my voice. I hated how distinctively awkward and different I was in comparison to everyone else, and I especially hated how everyone knew it as much as I did. I hated how alone I felt all the time, and how I could never make any friends no matter how hard I would try. I hated that I always acted like my brothers, and that the only people who would talk to me were boys. I hated the way my hair would fall, or why it wasn’t as pretty as the other girls’. I hated that I wasn’t pretty like the other girls in my year, and I couldn’t help but notice it every day I went to school. I could really just go on and on about how miserable I felt about myself for ages. 

This deep discomfort with myself and my place in life lasted until my second year in high school, where I met my then boyfriend, Andrew. Andrew was the most incredible person I’ve ever met, and to this day still is. He was kind, funny, charming, tender, and loved all the parts of me that I despised. He made me understand what it felt like to be loved for everything you are, something not even my parents instilled in me. He made me feel so comfortable in my own skin, the most comfortable I had ever felt at the time, and because of that I thought that I too was growing. At this point in my life, Andrew had given me something I had been without my whole life; he gave me confidence. 

With this confidence, I felt myself bloom into someone I actually appreciated. I had friends, I was doing well in school, I was performing well in school sports and most of all, I had one person who I could always count on when I started hating myself again. I never hated myself again when I was with him, even when we would fight, and for the first time in my life I felt whole. 

That’s when university happened and, as it turns out, I didn’t love myself nearly as much as I thought I did. In fact, without Andrew, I thought the same of myself as I did from the very beginning - I was back to square one. While he and I were trying long distance, I was slowly realizing the difference between what it means to love, and be in-love. 

I was so in-love with Andrew and everything he valued, which, in that list of things included me. I placed value on myself via him. So, the more distant we grew, the further I strayed from such confidence he had given me, and the more I grew spiteful towards the relationship, and myself. It was only then that I realized I’d lost myself in the relationship. Despite the fact that in it, I flourished more than ever had before, I still wasn’t my own person. I realized that I actually didn’t love myself at all, and that instead, was just so in-love with Andrew that I valued his opinion much more than mine. If he loved me, then I did too.

Since our break up, I’ve been blindly feeling my way through the whole process of self-love. Its been a daunting, difficult and confusing task, but something I’ve learned is that nothing will ever be more important than the love you have for yourself. So, I keep at it every day, and you what, I can wholeheartedly say that I’ve never been happier.

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Screenshots from the book I’m writing right now

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Best (Boy) Friend

In my first year of university, I had a best friend who was a boy. A straight boy. Let’s call him Mason. 

I know that the whole “can guys and girls be just friends” debate usually ends with a consensus favouring the side of no, but this situation was a bit different. You see, he was my (then) boyfriend’s really good friend, and as one wise prophet once said, bros before hoes, right? Before I say anymore, I suppose you can say that I chose to be ignorant or that I put myself in the mess I ended up in. And you know what, you’d probably be right. I wasn’t ready to face potentially losing someone so important to me, but I should’ve at least thought about the possibility of it turning out that way. Who knows, maybe if I did things wouldn’t have blown up in my face, but now I think I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. 

To make matters worse, a large part of my justification was based on the relationship that Ron and Kim had from Kim Possible. They were the best male-female duo of my childhood, and they maintained a completely platonic relationship with each other since they were kids, so, why couldn’t Mason and I do the same? What was ironic about that whole justification was that, as it turns out, they actually did end up dating at the end of the series… Apparently, not only was I ignorant, but also completely stupid. Not only did I base my rationale on fictional characters in a children’s TV series, but even more so, I based my rationale on fictional characters in a children’s TV series that still ended up dating in the end. You can see where this starts becoming problematic. 

Beyond the basis of my rationale being built on somewhat shaky foundations, I also figured that everything would be fine since I referred to him as my sibling quite a lot. I mostly did it to dispel any awkwardness that came up when we’d talk of each other’s more endearing qualities. I thought it cleared up any grey areas in our relationship. Unfortunately, at the time I was too naïve to see that our whole relationship was a grey area, and that calling him my brother did virtually nothing. How would slipping in a “bro” every now and then change the fact that we spent more than every waking moment together, as in we’d even sleep in the same room together. Granted, we’d sleep in separate beds, but it was still a pretty abnormal amount of time for a guy and a girl who claimed to be “just friends” to spend alone.

Despite the hundreds of warning signs, I only found out that he had feelings for me when my boyfriend and I broke up. When I told Mason, he wasn’t nearly as supportive or emotionally available as I thought he was going to be, or that he always usually was. Instead, he just had this dismal look washed across his face. He paused for what felt like days, and then finally, in a shaky voice, he told me that we couldn’t be friends anymore. His reasons were valid, and that’s what made it so bad. He had feelings for me that he didn’t want, and despite the fact we both unquestionably loved every moment we spent together, it needed to stop. It was too much. It was so much that it was as if we were already dating. But when did we even cross that line between friendship and dating? How could I have not seen it? 

To this day, I still don’t really know when we crossed that line. But I learned now just how important it is to be conscientious, especially in situations like that. I haven’t learned where the line is drawn when it comes to friends and more than friends, but I do know that when ignorance ends, conscientiousness can begin. In order for any situation to yield success, you not only need good intentions, but also the knowledge in which to pursue them.

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// Now I just abuse substances //

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Use and Abuse

It all starts off with exposure. You don’t need to take the drug to be exposed to it, it’s just there at the same time and place as you. Maybe your friends are using them, and you’re just there to hang out. When it’s offered to you, you politely decline and stammer a circumstantial excuse about how you “have work to do” later. Maybe they give you a bit of a hard time, maybe they don’t. They don’t necessarily have to for you to grow curious or inquisitive. “How does it make you feel?” “Is it dangerous?” You ask questions and end up developing a deeper understanding for the culture and those who use it. You no longer look down upon it because it makes those you care about feel “good” or “relaxed”, and isn’t nearly as dangerous as other legal substances like cigarettes and alcohol. You appreciate how it helps your friend forget that one time they tried to kill themselves, and it makes you feel especially good since, with that, they probably no longer feel such compelling feelings to end their life. You feel that it’s capable of doing things not even you can, like keeping the lurid thoughts of your loved ones at bay. 

One day, you too get depressed. Nothing severe enough to address with utmost urgency, but you feel it almost every day. Next time you’re exposed, you feel a heavy weight in your chest that you can’t seem to shake off. One of your friends notice something different about you and asks you what’s wrong. You just brush it off and tell them, ‘just a little stressed, don’t worry about it’. That’s when you’re offered again. This this time you accept. It wouldn’t hurt just to try it out once, right? You take it all in, and as you do your friends applaud. It takes a few minutes until you feel it, but when you do, you enjoy it. The pain in your chest melts away and the unpleasant voices in your head are brought to a hush. You smile and laugh with your friends like it’s the first time in years. But then you sleep, and as you awake you feel it all again. Your heavy with pain and your head bursting with the crude voices, but you can tolerate it enough to go to class. 

Weeks pass until you feel its unbearable to continue on, and you’re exhausted. In complete desperation, you ask your friends for more, and just like the first time, the aching all over your body dissipates. At last, you’re okay again. 

At first, you’d take it only a few times a week and only at night. That soon turned into every other night, to every night, until finally, several times a day. Every morning it just keeps gets worse and worse. The voices grow louder as the pain in your chest makes it almost impossible to get out of bed. It’s so awful and truly unbearable. That is, until you’ve had your fix. Then, your friends sit you down to talk about how often you’ve been doing it. You don’t know when or how, but now you realise you have a problem. 

To this day, I still don’t know when use became abuse.

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y o u r   h a n d   i n   m i n e.

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