Explain Yourself

Entering into high school was a big step for me, in part because I was in the last leg of lower education, but mostly because I was transferring to a new school where I didn't know anyone. I ended up falling into quite a large group of people, became good friends with some of them, bitter enemies of others, and either ignored by, or romantically entangled with, everyone else.

I was quite shy, and very quiet, when I first met these people, and it wasn't long before Liz, a new acquaintance of mine, told me that I was creepy. Liz was an outspoken, blunt, and came to regret almost everything that she said. Apparently, when she said creepy, what she actually meant was that she wasn't comfortable speaking to me because she didn't know anything about me. At first, I mistook her bluntness as confidence, and since that was an attribute I myself was lacking, I figured I could use someone like her in my life. So when she told me that she wanted a "written explanation of who [I was]," I figured "...why not?" and went to the computer lab to type it up.

What I ended up printing out was an eleven-page document detailing my childhood, my relationship with my family members, what movies and books I liked, and a short page explaining the first impressions I had of most of the friends that I had made that year. When I went to hand my life story over to Liz, she snatched it out of my hand and scampered out of the room. At this point I assumed she was so confident in herself that she could withstand being judged for acting out so strangely.

I went to my next class, during which Liz wandered in, sat down beside me, handed me back my papers, and said "thank you," before exiting the room just as silently as she had entered. I spent the next few weeks thinking that she must be extremely cool, but I eventually learned that that was most definitely not the case.

Liz never offered to give me her own written life story, and a part of me assumed that, by forcing me to learn about her through actually...getting to know her, that it was some sort of mentor/student-like relationship, as though she were the Mr. Miyagi to my Karate Kid. What made our friendship interesting was that, since I was already used to telling her about my personal issues, we became very open with each other about pretty much everything. Nothing was taboo, nothing was too much information, and we both had someone to talk to at all times.

This would have been a very big step for me, as I had never before found myself willing to open myself up to others on a personal level. Unfortunately, many other people started insinuating things about me in conversation, and it wasn't long before I learned that Liz was unable to keep a secret to save her life. This made me very closed off, and I started trying to pump her for information in order to avoid giving up anything about myself.

What Liz had managed to do to me was build up my confidence, and then destroy it, over the course of a few months. But the really sick thing is that I still really wanted her to like me, even though she had betrayed my trust and proved that she couldn't really be trusted. It was this breach of trust that would ultimately doom our relationship, but at first I wasn't quite sure that I wasn't just overly paranoid and imagining that everyone else knew more about my business than they truly did. Years later, after talking with some friends from high school, I learned that Liz had blabbed their personal details, too, so at least I know it wasn't just me that she was talking about.

It was because I wanted so badly for her to like me that I never confronted her about what she did to me, even though it could have helped her grow to be a better person, too. I would soon manage to destroy her confidence too, albeit accidentally, when I refused her kiss and ended up not speaking to her for two months. She got her revenge by giving me mono. But that's a much more interesting story for a different time.