Here we are. The pinnacle of life! We are now intelligent human beings who are capable of anything; an unstoppable barrage of people who are in a position to change the very fabric of our understanding of the world and finally establish global peace and civility.
Oh wait, who am I kidding! High school's full of pimpled-faced, hormonal-driven teenagers who are just trying not to wreck their parent's car, let alone devise a plan to eliminate world hunger. I mean, let's be reasonable, here, high school is just a slightly more difficult version of junior high school. You could virtually copy and paste everything I said about junior high school, switch out some words to more accurately represent the demographic of 16 to 18 year olds, and this chapter would virtually write itself; just slap a bow on it and say Christmas came early this year.
But, high school for me was different. I was entering a transitory period of my life where I was migrating from the "AJ" I knew to the "AJ" I wanted to be. Or more the "AJ" I thought I wanted to be. Or even more the "AJ" my parents thought I should be. It's tricky to say, really. I had a cloudy understanding of what I wanted to be -- merely that it WASN'T who I was at the time. Yet, as I ran from that person, I kept with me the actions and thoughts and emotions that accompanied him. I could change my looks, my friends, my voice, my entire persona, but I couldn't change who I was. I couldn't change my view on reality and the way I synthesized my experiences. Quite frankly, what I had experienced to that point was the only reality I knew; I didn't know how to behave another way.
My way of behaving could be summarized in one word: faithlessness.
You can see, up to this point, that I'd developed trust issues when it came to my interactions with others. How quickly had my world been repeatedly shattered by instilling faith in them, and watching them dash it to pieces. And even more so, how quickly I had taken the faith of loved ones, and left them dangling for the appeasement of society. Experience after experience revealed to me that putting your confidence in others would only lead to heartache and suffering, and that a better way to live was out there.
So I went looking. It wasn't long until I found a new group of friends who were popular enough. But little did I realize just how incredible these new friends were. They were smart, and funny, and just a riot to be with. I cherished the times we would get together to "study" physics -- my parents were a bit tyrannical at the time and wouldn't let me out of the house on a weekday unless it was school related. Well, of course we played Settlers of Catan instead of physics. I mean, physics, or Settlers. Mind-numbingly droll schoolwork, or watching your friends loose their minds because the number three was rolled seven times in a row and they thought it'd be smart to build on sixes and eights. But it was Settlers of Catan, and Nertz, and pizza, and movies that I just could never stay awake for, and dances, and wow was it awesome.
Yet, my reality centered on a lack of trust. It was centered on abandonment and disdain. I finally got what I wanted, but the person I was, the reality I lived in, pushed me away from that happiness. I didn't trust them. I constantly feared that they were off having a grand old time together away from me and that I just wasn't important enough to be invited. I mean, they did. They would go and watch a movie together and I wouldn't be invited and hearing about it later just crushed my heart.
I still remember that two of them, Seth and Travis, were totally inseparable. Yeah sure, the group would get together and play frisbee or get ice cream or what have you, but the escapades these two went were unfathomable. Oh, how I wanted to be like them, how I wanted to be with them! I so dearly wanted to be accepted by them and have what I couldn't. The magnitude of my friendship with them was so insignificant by comparison that it was all too easy to say that because I was not at the grandeur of their friendship, my relationship with them was inferior; I would much rather remove my trust in them than to invest and be rejected. I would rather restrict my happiness and have something, then to devote myself, and have nothing.
I think it's important to note the reality of the situation. I don't want to interject as hindsight, but perspective here is critical. I was dancing almost 20 hours a week in both a formation and individual setting, was a state officer with FCCLA, was taking three different AP courses, and was part of my school's audition choir and culinary arts program. So let's look at this again. My value as a person was based on how society perceived me, yet I hungered for the acceptance and love of others. There were two paths I wanted to take, and in trying to take both, I lost myself. I lost my happiness.
In no way had I lost these friends. There is no and will never be empirical evidence that says I was valued any less than any other person in that group, much less by the two I so idolized. My value came from my perspective, and I choose to see that value as worthless. I choose to accept faithlessness as my means of coping with my observed reality because it was the only way I knew how to comprehend what I view and be able to respond appropriately. And not even respond appropriately; just respond period.
But, in the midst of all of this turmoil, there was someone who was uniquely different. I still remember this haughty, narcissistic woman named Kathryn who was elected as NJHS president, beating me by one measly vote in the elections. And she had the gall to not even show up on election day! Oh, did I make her life a living hell that year. If she was going to be tyrannical as president, I was going to be ruthless as a club member.
Yet, there was this placid, beautifully-talented piano player named Kathryn who was a member of my piano team and was just the most tenderhearted person you'd ever meet. Of course, it would take me almost a year to realize that Kathryn and Kathryn was just Kathryn and that I was a dolt, but I digress. She was there through all those physics "study sessions", through the movies, the food, the good, the bad. Easily, we'd burn hours at a time talking on the phone while working through calculus. Seriously, the paint on my cellphone began chipping because we would talk for so long it would get stuck to my face and peel off when I would go to hang up.
Something about her gave me faith when I couldn't have faith in myself, much less faith in anyone else. To this day I don't know why I could trust her. With everything I've learned, looking back I still can't figure it out. Of course we were with our hardships and misunderstandings. Like when Seth took her to the homecoming dance and convinced me they kissed at the doorstep, and I was so livid at the two of them I couldn't see straight. It came with its own trials but there was an element of faith that underlined the relationship that somehow superseded everything else I had experienced in life.
This book would be much shorter if we had stuck together, if I had just been able to keep that faith going and put my trust in someone else, to take a risk again and gamble on my future happiness. But this book exists, and I sit here just as single as the day I was born, and she's married and of having the time of her life. Fear, as it were, found a way to ruin my relationship the most beautiful person in my life. That lack of trust that so plagued my childhood and went on to define every aspect of my persona crept into the relationship that was just too good to be true. I let it happen, and I still pay the consequences.
The fear I ran away, that faithlessness I so desperately sought shelter from, is the fear that capsized the relations I had so desperately been looking for.
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