Intimacy

There comes a point in a kid’s life when it’s all about popularity and having a lot of friends. It happened to me in 8^th grade when I was just coming out of being a shy, quiet kid. I needed to be on okay terms with everyone in my class; I needed all of them to like me and think I was nice. It was all pretty wannabe but that’s how it was. But I wasn’t able to do it because deep down, I’ve always been like this, bitchy, sarcastic, outspoken and kinda crazy. Some of my closest friends couldn’t deal with it. I’d hear things like, “Why does she always think it’s about her?” “Why does she have to be the right one all the time? “ “Why is she talking to HER?” “I’m so much fairer/thinner/smarter than her”. I probably could have taken it from anyone else but this was my ‘et tu brute?’ moment.

When I changed schools in 10^th grade, I still cared a lot about people liking me, but now it didn’t have to be everyone, it had to be all those kids whom I liked. I didn’t want to repeat the faux pas of my previous years so I changed who I was. I become a compliant, nice, polite, sugar-coating, sensitive pushover. It won everyone over. I got all my friends to love me as much as I loved them even when they hated each other. But it’s like trying to shut an overflowing cupboard, you can push and you can hold everything in for some time and then eventually you tire and you release the pressure a bit and the cupboard spring open, the backlog blows you away. I am who I am and I could lie to myself and everyone else for just that long.

Then, I went through the year when everyone thought I was a drug-addict-whore and I had one friend. And then a complete reversal of that.

What I learnt was that, there’s no point in having friends when you don’t value them and just keep them around and then fuck up with people you care about. I pushed away at least 25 people, people whom I didn’t care about, people whom I couldn’t trust and people who had hurt me. I kept everyone I really cared about close in some way or the other. I thought I had figured it all out. I wasn’t pretending to care anymore, I wasn’t spending more time with random people than people I cared about, I felt free and happy.

That worked pretty alright for some time, I had my bestest friends and then I had other people whom I loved. This year, I haven’t had time to talk to everyone but I thought I had made sure I was there for everyone whenever they needed me. I thought everyone was as fine with that as I was. But I guess, I was being too clinical, too selfish about it again. I guess, you can never really meet all the expectations.