It's become blatantly obvious that I won't be getting to sleep until I get these thoughts out of my head, and I really need that sleep soon, so I apologize if this comes out incoherently.
It's come to my attention recently that I was what can only be described as a creepy, creepy dude in high school. For a while I figured it was just a phase I had to go through back then, so I could become a somewhat socially normal (Ha!) adult. Now, I'm not so sure. I realized that before I moved up to Livonia, I never really had any of the problems that would later develop. Maybe I did, and it's just the rose colored glasses that I'm looking at my time in Westfield with that have affected it. I don't know, and I may never be able to get an unbiased opinion on it. Goodness knows I had my crushes back then, and I didn't necessarily deal with them in the best ways, but still... It seemed to get worse after I moved. Not immediately, of course, but later, after I found myself somewhat settled. And it certainly wasn't that my feelings were drastically different... it was more that the expression of them changed. In fact, I'd have to say that the major difference was... well, the fact that I actually had female friends. Oh, sure, I'd known girls before, and talked with them, but the fact was, our group that sat and ate together and were, in fact, the only kids I regularly had dealings with outside of school, was entirely nerdy boys. I suppose that wasn't the best group to grow up in, but we managed, and really, were all pretty close friends. I think, in the end, that was the transition that probably messed up my chances and actions the most. I moved, and went from a small school where everybody I spent any amount of time around was my friend, and I was acquaintances, with most of the school, to a larger school, were most social groups were made up of acquaintances, with close friends making up sub-groups within groups. And in the end, that single factor, and the fact that I didn't realize it until after I left school (did not, in fact, conciously make the connection until now), probably caused more trouble than anything else. You see, because I'd managed to join a social group, which probably had a few people who would consider themselves my friend, I automatically thought of myself as the close friend of any single person in the group, no matter how tenuous the connection or strange the behavior. This, in turn, screwed up my actions towards any of them with whom I had crushes, since I had no idea how to deal with an attraction for a friend that was, at least in actions, not really my friend. Again, none of this actually occurred to me, and therefore my way of dealing with it was to attempt to become a better friend, I guess theorizing that if I became good enough friends with someone, the courage to actually ask them out would materialize (as it turns out, I was correct in that assumption. It just took a while to figure out how to actually become friends with girls, and how to be a better friend). Of course, since these girls considered me, at best, an acquaintance, all my attempts to become a better friend (since I was doing it the only way I thought it could be done, i.e. being around them more often, and attempting to talk to, or at least around, them as often as I could) were inevitably going to simply alienate them more. In the end, this lack of knowledge, inability to read people's feelings about me correctly, and more than a touch of denial resulted in me realizing the worst parts of this at the worst place, in the worst method that it could probably have happened. I'd have to say that my self esteem, never exactly high in the first place, is probably still recovering from this.
In the end, it's not all bad news. Although I probably could have figured it out another way, I still learned a lot from this. I learned that not everybody you hang out with is going to be your best friend, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's plenty of people that are much better suited to be my acquaintances than my friend. I learned to watch myself when I'm making friends with a girl I'm attracted to, and be careful about what I do and say. Not in the sense of censoring myself, but more along the lines of... pulling back the throttle. And, honestly, learning what not to do, such as being silent about the whole issue, even to myself, has probably helped me make friends with people much better than anything I could have learned about how to do so one particular way. I'll consider myself happy that I'm where I am today, and do my best to ignore the past, even if I do wish I could patch up the holes that are now so glaringly obvious to me. Oh, well.
-Finally, sleep! Wally C.
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