Milestones

Can negativity be terminated from thoughts? Can someone live a life purely influenced by optimism? There’s always seeing the bright side, and then there’s only seeing the bright side. It’s a life without caution, without a second spared to the thought of consequences. I’ve always found caution to play quite a relevant part in my life, and it’s caused a limited, yet strangely enriching, experience.

By being cautious of my own actions and of others’ actions towards myself, I’ve been impartial to questioning most decisions made by either party. Moments meant to be milestones were quickly followed with a ‘but why did it happen like that?’, ‘why now?’, and ‘is this really it?’.

Events meant to be climactic were all but. Perhaps it was due to my over anticipation of them, and of the outcome. Or maybe my graduation was anticlimactic due to a 15- turned 50-minute recursive speech. But the significance of other events also never quite hit home. My first day as a university student was made ordinary by a well-timed fire alarm. My first big party was not spent by making regrettable decisions while under the influence, but by laughing along with my sober companions at the actions of our drunk fellow graduates. I never got into the drug(s) one of my major friend groups indulged in, and that resulted in an impenetrable distance between my friends’ intoxicated experiences and their time spent with me. I could never relate to the things they experienced. I never wanted to. That distance only led to betterment of relationships with my other friends.

Without having that caution, without consideration of the negative impacts of actions, I wouldn’t have the most influential experiences of my life thus far, both exceptional and excruciating.

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My first best friend in junior high was the person who changed my perception on myself. In the beginning, she was my biggest supporter at a time where I had no confidence, no sense of self-love, and really messed up teeth. Two years of braces came in to fix the last problem, but the first two were started in on by her demeanor of not caring about what anyone thought, and my own need to replicate that in myself.

We were inseparable. My teachers, parents, and other friends all coined her as my sidekick and I as hers. They saw two people who had an unbreakable bond and the strangest friendship to ever grace the halls of that school. But underneath that façade of laughter and countless inside jokes was the most toxic relationship I’ve encountered so far.

She lifted my spirits so often, only to be the one who came around to crush them periodically. My insecurities were pitted against me. I should’ve noticed the red flag she had strapped to her back by how she treated my other friends, but I never thought much of it because she had her own deprecation crew. I admired her blatancy and she craved my naivety, that’s why we stuck together so well. But her blatancy only went as far as personality, the rest of her was shrouded in pathological lies pertaining to her family life, her personal life, and, for whatever reason, her allergies. She made up awful tales about her family life to keep me at a distance and she had fantastical lies about how much better her personal life was outside of me to further diminish my self-esteem. In grade eight, I was too desperate for a friend to care how I got one. In grade nine the confidence she gave me came into action along with a burst of puberty to make that one of the best years I had at that school. I thought of her as a catalyst to my confidence, as the prime reason why I stopped caring about others’ perceptions of me. But, I didn’t actually stop caring about everyone, I desperately wanted my best friend to like me, to see me as an equal.

Grade nine also brought along my first boyfriend, my first kiss, and a couple of dates. Love is blind, especially that of a first love. A scruffy guy from another school was the first person to call me beautiful in a romantic sense. He seemed to mean it until he also mentioned that I’d be even more beautiful with a different hair colour and a different sexual orientation. Our relationship had a lifespan of under three months and ended with a text overall stating that he ‘didn’t love me anymore’. That blow was made worse when it later came to light that my best friend had fallen for him. They began talking more and started to date an exact month after the break-up. She and I had a brief fallout that was hastily patched over the following summer vacation through her addition of me to an online chat group for a game server we both frequented.

Grade ten brought along so many changes that it’s no wonder it was finally when her full toxicity was revealed to me. We started out the same inseparable pair only to have the insults escalate and the entrance of genuinely better people in my life cause a revelation near the end of the school year. We were barely on speaking terms when she suddenly introduced me to my (now ex) boyfriend. It turned out she just wanted a distraction for me as she went after the guy I was previously interested in. The guy she set me up with would also end up simultaneously increasing and degrading my self confidence for the greater part of the next two years.

She began dating a close friend of mine the following year. The forced interactions with me caused her to attempt to distance my best friend from me. It worked for a few weeks until she hurt him more than he anticipated. The friend and I became closer than before on our shared disdain and she appeared to have disappeared from the school altogether. The occasional view of her on the grounds were sparse enough to allow me to delve into better friendships and to increase my self-confidence with aide from them and, most importantly, my own ambition to better myself for myself, and not for anyone else.

May 2016 to January 2018 encompasses the time frame of my relationship with the boy my ex best friend had set me up with. I’ve never thought to think of that time as a complete waste because there was so much that it taught me and so many amazing experiences that came from both the part of my life that revolved around him and the parts that didn’t. Our relationship was one where I aspire to find the best parts of it again and I hope I never have to deal with the worst of it.

We did what most teenagers in love did, we planned a future together we thought to be inevitable. The only non-traditional aspect was the distance. Around 1500 km of it. We were a nearly a straight vertical line away from each other in neighboring countries. My lack of a passport and my mother’s preference of him coming to visit first was a strain on the relationship he never seemed to mind, but he pressed on it more when it was convenient for him to guilt trip me.

He played on his haphazard family life, his depressed mental state, and on things I told him in confidence to further guilt and degrade me. Our relationship was never degraded by him, only my part in it.

I justified every negative interaction by comparing it to the much more positive ones we had. I saw genuine emotion in his eyes for me, the love was real, but it was also hazardous. I can never be sure of what caused it for him, what caused the affinity he had for me to dissipate, but I knew that I couldn’t continue in a one-sided relationship. I tried for around a month and a half to video call him, to talk it through face to face. On a few occasions, I caught him at the right time, but they were rushed, filled with reassurances, and it worked until his next negative spout. Guilt trips became more frequent. He tried to push me to break it off by deprecating himself at times; playing at my sympathy and love for him. It never worked. I didn’t break it off because I stopped loving him, I did it because I had to begin to love myself. Ultimately, it was never infidelity that made the final push, it was my own self worth reclaiming what it had lost and leaving space to grow further.

I got over him by putting the love I had left into my friends, my passions, and myself. I know it has been reiterated a few times already, but I had, and still have, this incessant need to find who I am without the people that tried to structure my personality to benefit them. The question of ‘who do I be for me?’ is one that I answer everyday with how I choose to spend the hours.