Scary Stories, Rituals, and Urban Legends

When you have a bad feeling...trust it

I was brought up very sheltered. Homeschooled until high school. My only social network outside of my family was my southern baptist church. As you can imagine, this led to a few issues where social interaction was concerned.

My mother was a stay at home homeschool mom to four children, so of course she had mommy meltdowns sometimes. Because my area of experience was rather small, in my mind those meltdowns (getting angry, yelling, sending us to our rooms) were a BIG deal, and I thought she hated me. That was before I knew I had anxiety. Or even what the word anxiety meant. I just knew that people were a lot to handle and it made me feel overwhelmed.

When I entered high school I was a social outcast. Though I hung out with the band geeks and weirdos, when they didn't really like me. I was too weird. My grandma passed away when I was in 9th grade, and I didn't really process that loss until 11th grade. I talked about her so often that my teacher ended up making fun of me about it in front of my whole class. I never talked about my grandma again. Not even to my family.

When I graduated I decided I didn't care if I had friends anymore. I was just gonna be cool and hang out with whoever I wanted to. Screw them if they didn't like me.

This led to me having tons of friends. Because I didn't care, and wasn't trying to get close to them, they flocked to me. Told me all of their secrets. Trusted me.

I fell in and out of friend groups quickly. I was finally someone people enjoyed being around, we would become insanely close, and then I would do or say something to end the friendship. It was easier that way. I figured if they got too close to me they wouldn't like me. So I dropped them before they could drop me.

They all knew me differently. To some I was a mother figure, to others I was a cool, introspective girl, some thought I was punk rock, others saw me as artistic. None of them knew me. The insecure girl with anxiety. The one who talked too much about the wrong thing. The one who was laughed at by her entire class and a teacher she looked up to. The one who thought her mom hated her when she was young, because she didn't know yet that she had anxiety and everything was magnified.

They couldn't know that girl. So that girl hid. That girl ran away and died.

That worked for awhile. Then I met my husband. He liked me. He liked me when I was worried about something. He liked me when I thought he was mad even though he wasn't. He liked me when I was insecure. When I was sad. When I was scared. He saw me.

So that girl came out. We laughed about what a difficult child I must have been, always giving my mom trouble because I was paranoid. We bitched about how a teacher could EVER do that to a student. We laughed about my awkward nature. We were awkward together. And we loved each other.

I apologized to my mother, for all the times I blamed her for the way I was feeling when it was nothing she could help. I wrote and burned a letter to that teacher that laughed at me. The only thing I couldn't do was get rid of the girl that all of those "friends" met.

When I ran into one of them in the street I would feel pangs of anxiety. Sometimes, because our friendship was so brief, they wouldn't recognize me, but other times they would. They would walk up to me and say "hey, don't I know you?" To which I would always respond "haha, yeah! Remember (insert bonding experience here)?" And then I would be pulled into a conversation I never wanted.

It happened so often I started to get agitated. Was the universe trying to tell me something? Should I apologize to these people for pretending to care about them? They didn't even know if they remembered me, it couldn't be that important to them that we had once been friends.

The thing is, I'm too nice. Always have been. It's just one of my quirks, and the main reason I couldn't just tell people that I didn't want to be BFF I just wanted to hang out for awhile. So when I ran into these old friends, I couldn't just say no when they asked if they knew me, because I knew they did. I always recognized them no matter how brief our friendship.