“I’d Be Alone” Was The Wrong Name

I used to think that finding your person would fix everything. Or at least all the loneliness.

In college, I felt alone more often than not, and I always blamed it on anything but what was actually happening, what I know now was happening.

I was desperate for attention, from really anyone, and it showed. I craved a friend who would crave me more. I longed to date a boy who would be so overwhelmed with every kind of desire for me that he could never get enough. I wanted to be loved, admired, popular, adored, looked at.

But anxiety wasn’t in my vocabulary yet back then.

Looking back, I see so many times where I clung to moments because I didn’t know how to enjoy them for the simple, fleeting pleasures they were. I ate up experiences and attention wherever it lived. I would go home and cry because the moment wasn’t continuing forever. The moment could be as simple as dinner with another student or a late-night walk with someone from my publication lab or a flirtatious encounter with some boy I’d been crushing on from my playwriting class or a movie night with some girls from my dorm. It didn’t matter, I just begged silently for the moment to never end.

Because then I’d be alone and I'd have to analyze every word spoken.

I’d be alone and I’d wonder if that boy thought my haircut was dumb and oh god did everyone think my haircut was dumb.

I’d be alone and I’d convince myself that those girls in my dorm were texting each other about how annoying I was and could I change everything about myself before seeing them again so that this time I wouldn’t be so annoying.

I thought then that the common denominator in all this was the “I’d be alone” part.

For a semester senior year, I was friends with a boy named Harrison. We were bonded in a way I couldn’t explain because we weren’t romantically involve. We didn’t even hang out that much. We would email and text, and had a class together, and would occasionally spend hours together. Whenever we were together, it felt like we both felt a tug to the other person. I couldn’t explain it at the time, but it always seemed like he could, like he knew something that was deep inside us that we shared. I often shrugged it off as both of us being dramatic.

I remember being at a pizza place with him one fall day. We had been there for close to two hours, but neither of us seemed in a hurry to leave. We weren’t even talking the whole time, sometimes just sitting and people watching together. He was unlike any other friend I had, mostly because it seemed he didn’t want to leave and experience the “I’d be alone” moments either.

After a while, he just started talking and telling me things. He talked for a long time. He talked about things he had been figuring out, about chemical imbalances in your brain, about darkness in him that he had thought you were supposed to keep hidden but now he knew it wasn’t his fault. He told me he used to call these things names like freak and weirdo and stupid, but he had learned they had real names, like Depression and Anxiety and PTSD.

Something inside of me felt like it was breaking in the best way possible as I listened to him talk about these thing. Eight years later and I still have such a strong memory of this day, sitting in that booth, my palms sweating from things I was starting to understand myself.

But then he told me that he was dropping out of school and moving back home to focus on his mental health. He was moving that weekend, he told me. I never saw him again.

I wrote him a few letters after he moved, but after just a few weeks, he stopped writing back. I learned things years later that helped explain why he stopped writing, but that was later. At the time, I just went back to thinking of course he stopped, I’m incredibly annoying and I bet no one likes my haircut and why did I say that thing in middle school and surely if I could just find a boy to love me then I wouldn’t feel these things anymore.

It took years before I found another friend like Harrison who had found names for what they were experiencing. Maybe it took so long because none of us said our names out loud.

It took years before I worked out names of my own, before I realized that “I’d be alone” was actually named Social Anxiety Disorder, before I found a boy who knew he wouldn’t and couldn’t fix this like I wanted him to and instead encouraged me to see a doctor. And even after that, even after I married this boy, even after talking to a wise and Believing doctor, even after numerous medications, seeing a counselor, learning more names like Separation and Panic Anxiety Disorders, I still wasn’t fixed.

I was and am realizing that things sometimes don’t always get fixed. But giving yourself acceptance while realizing it’s not your fault still gets you somewhere.

I‘ll always be grateful to Harrison because not only was he the first person to tell me it’s not my fault, he showed me how bravery in honesty is how we can help each other. Not fix each other, help each other.