You don't have to be "relatable"
A "cute" little essay about the tumult of friendships while growing up
It’s funny to think of my first known encounter with phone anxiety happening at such a young age. I still remember the scattering of times in elementary school where I was handed someone’s landline number, scrawled out in permanent marker on a bright sheet of construction paper. How carefully I would press each button on the phone, my hands shaking harder with every ring that came after.
“Let’s call after school at four o’clock!”
“Okay!”
“If my brother answers, tell him to give the phone to me!”
“Okay, I will!”
Growing up, I always felt like I had to work hard to create and maintain new friendships. Whenever I did manage to make a new friend, it felt like a miracle. Even my phone number made me feel alienated. Almost everyone at my school had a number that started with “875.” (Actually, the entire town started with “875.”) But for some reason, the street I lived on was too close to the next town over, so my number started with “776.”
It took me a long time to learn exactly how to act and what to say in group settings–how to operate within the socially acceptable cadence of words and phrases that made up childhood conversations at school. I was a graceless kid, for sure. It became obvious as I got old enough to read and watch “grown-up” movies with my mom that the way I viewed the world around me was very, very different from the way my classmates viewed their world. It felt like my interests rarely aligned with theirs. My sense of humor often didn’t land with them. Too many times I would find myself shrinking in my seat on the school bus home as I choked on my word vomit.
It’s definitely just a stupid phone number. I know my “776” doesn’t mean a thing. But it is puzzling to me considering I never have and never will feel like a real member of my small New England town. A great imposter with good grades and a polite enough personality to “fit in” though? Absolutely! The adults in my community were never the people I had to worry about; it was the people my age I had a hard time convincing to love me.
Even the friendships I kept for years growing up still felt like a mirage at times, as if I would discover one day that I had been tricked, or perhaps that I was wrong the entire time in thinking they were real. I almost reached a point as a teenager where I finally thought I didn’t have to worry anymore–until the summer after my seventeenth birthday when all my late nights filled with intrusive thoughts came to fruition. It’s been over six years since the realization struck me and I still have no idea what I did wrong. Maybe it all goes back to that same socialization cadence from elementary school and I just couldn’t keep up any longer. Or, maybe the way I viewed the world–my curiosities, my plans for the future, the jokes I would tell–were simply not of any interest to my “friends” anymore. I’d like to think I was too complex for them to want to understand, but my intuition knows that I was actually too boring.
College was like a deep inhale of oxygen after trying to find out how long you can hold your breath underwater. In my mind, the four years ahead would be filled with nothing but pure transformation and self experimentation. The day I moved into my Syracuse dorm on the hill felt like the opening scene of a bildungsroman–my Ladybird era was beginning! (Or technically, ending?)
I decided to stop centering my outward disposition around what others might find to be perfectly “socially acceptable” and instead turn it into a true illustration of my inner self, or at least as true a version as I could externally muster. (I suppose some versions of ourselves will always remain hidden, no matter how hard we try?) Regardless, my strategy worked, despite the fact that it can be difficult to decipher which college friendships are built in reality versus proximity. I’m not going to say it was easy, nor did everything go exactly as planned the first, second, or even third time around. I also can’t say that I was flawless in sticking to my strategy the entire time. My anxiety from elementary school has followed me around like a starving mosquito into my adulthood–sometimes I find myself in hesitant situations where I simply lose the capability to be myself.
But aside from the hiccups and stories that can be saved for another time, I still moved out of my house in Syracuse four years and countless drunken weekends later with an actual understanding of the type of friendships I plan to prioritize for the rest of my life. Gone are the days where I would do anything to be liked and appreciated by people whose kindness for me does not flow uninhibited. Instead, I bask in the newfound days of focusing my energy on people whose appreciation for me bubbles up and overflows like a shaken soda can. They’re much fewer and far between–oftentimes so rare that it can be easy to assume they don’t exist–but over the years I’ve found that accepting my unique “un-relatability” can actually make them turn up a lot sooner.
There have even been a remarkable few who were around the entire time. We used to skate near each other, just trying our best to follow the crowd and never crossing into the other’s path, until finally our shared un-relatability allowed us to break off and head in a different direction together.
