You're Not Special Page 14
Let’s start with the simple truth that sometimes it’s just in your head. I know sometimes it’s not, but hear me out. At least for me, I know I’m one to build things up in my head and let them snowball pretty far out of control. I tend to read a little too much into things, and if I indulge that, it won’t be long before I’ve come to the conclusion that the person or people in question hate me. I find myself projecting those fears when I’m in the early stages of a friendship. When I’m going through a big life change, I begin to worry about the longevity in every relationship around me. So how do you figure out if you’re being shut out or if it is all in your head? Well, it takes some blind trust, patience, and a little perspective. I know, probably not what you wanted to hear. Let’s say you wait it out for a while and you discover you had not blown things out of proportion and your inklings were correct. Even with that as the outcome, your ability to control and silence that negative and neurotic voice in your head is far more valuable than a spot in any coveted clique.
It’s easy to retreat into a corner when you feel like you’re being pushed there. If we start to feel like we’re being left behind, we do our best to become the least offensive versions of ourselves. We hope that if we don’t make a peep, nobody will notice that we tagged along. Most of us could stand to be a bit more assertive when it comes to the course of our own lives, so make the first move. The easiest way to be left behind is by letting it happen. I’m not saying to start crying and screaming but rather bite the bullet before it gets to that point. So much of the drama I experienced growing up boiled down to an epic game of he said, she said. Even adults will tell you how much communication plays a part in their issues to this day. If you feel animosity coming from a friend, there is a huge chance that it stems from a major misunderstanding. And maybe it’s not even that! Maybe it goes back to this fear being all in your head, and just by reaching out and spending some time together you’ll come to that conclusion. On the flip side, asking someone straight up what their deal is is without fail the quickest, easiest, and most straightforward way to get your answer.
Let’s say both those options or suggestions completely don’t apply to your situation, because, honestly, they won’t always. Sometimes people grow up to be worse people than when they started. I’m sure Hitler and Stalin were cute babies, but, shit, look what they became. There isn’t always a reason behind why people do the things they do. As hard as that is to accept in daily life, it’s even harder when you’re a pawn in the game and you get crushed wizards chess style. As painful and confusing as it is, take solace in the fact that it happens to everyone. Seriously, everyone. Norah Jones wouldn’t have the career she does today if socializing was easy, and therapists wouldn’t keep the chaise longue furniture industry afloat. I know being told that what you’re going through is normal doesn’t make it feel any less shitty, but at least humor me and let me try to force some fake adult enlightenment on you.
First of all, friendships should be mutual. If somebody doesn’t want to be your friend, why on earth do you want to be their friend? If you are the only one invested in this, not only are they going to treat you like a moldy everything bagel, you’re going to feel like a moldy everything bagel.
Stand up for yourself. You are an active participant in your life, and you are entitled to remind people of that. I am all for setting a better example than what was done to you and being the bigger person. I think that’s great. But I also think sometimes Becky needs to be called what she is—a bitch.
Don’t squeeze if you don’t fit. I won’t go so far as to say that socializing is easy, because that would be a downright lie. But the right relationships should be easy.
Finding your people is like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. Sure, there are some pieces you could soak in Kool-Aid and let get all soggy and squish them together so they kind of fit even though it makes the sky look like it has the chicken pox. But why go through all that effort when there’s a piece that fits perfectly? We’re quick to accept our current reality as our lot in life and we learn to settle without even realizing we’re doing so. So know what you’re worth, what you deserve, and rest assured it’s out there. Don’t settle for anything less, because being surrounded by the wrong people is far lonelier than being alone.
growing up(ward)
KARMA’S A BIGGER BITCH THAN I COULD EVER BE. AND I CAN BE A MASSIVE BITCH.
chapter 12 the first time i got drunk
The first time I ever tried alcohol I was twelve. My best friend Sydney and I were feeling rebellious at my family’s Christmas party, and we snuck a teacup filled with spiked eggnog into the bathroom. Oh, we also snuck in the six-year-old girl we were responsible for watching over. Meghan Rienks, role model since 1993. We locked the door behind us, all three of our bodies crammed over the toilet, and began to drink. Do I need to clarify that it was just me and Sydney participating? Like, if you read that and assumed that we were passing the booze to a first grader, then I think I really need to evaluate how my character comes across. The teacup couldn’t have held more than four ounces, but Sydney and I barely made it through half before we agreed we were already “drunk.” We flushed the rest down the toilet. Let the record state that we were nowhere near inebriated. I’m pretty sure I had felt stronger effects from a shot of NyQuil and my eucalyptus humidifier. But I mean, I was twelve. If I had decided I was drunk from three tablespoons of a slightly spiked holiday beverage, so be it. We spent the rest of the night AIM-ing our crushes and misspelling words in our away messages. We thought we were the fucking shit.
The next time I drank alcohol was about two years later. It was the summer I turned fourteen and I was spending it on a mother-daughter vacation in Mount Shasta with my mom, her best friend, and her two daughters, Ruby and Mia.
Her older daughter, Ruby, was the responsible one of our trio. She was sixteen at the time. She had a boyfriend and was in a band and she was way too cool for her little sister, Mia, and me. Naturally, Mia and I wanted to spend every second with Ruby. Usually we were pretty good at latching onto her and piggybacking on her social plans, but this year she had brought her boyfriend on the vacation. While that fact did not deter us—if anything, it made us more determined—their combined effort to escape us was ultimately successful. Ruby’s absence, paired with our mothers’ laissez-faire attitudes, meant that Mia and I were left to entertain ourselves. I could lie and say we spent the first hour playing an innocent game of go fish, but in reality, the second we realized we had been left to our own devices, we made a beeline for the ample alcohol stash our mothers had packed. Being two fourteen-year-olds without cable or access to MTV, our knowledge of alcohol was pretty slim. So, as if we were selecting books from the Scholastic fair, we based our picks entirely on which bottles had the most enticing packaging. We both agreed that the pretty white bottle decorated with oranges and flowers seemed like the best bet and was the closest thing to tasting like a Slurpee. We unscrewed the cap and swigged a sizable gulp of triple sec. We were then met by the immediate burn and regret one has when they drink a sweet liquor straight, and we reached for the closest thing to mask the taste: a jar of Betty Crocker vanilla frosting. With teenage taste buds about as sophisticated as Buddy the elf’s, we found this unlikely pairing to be quite palatable. Before long we were scraping Betty’s nooks and crannies. I don’t think we even began to feel the effects of the alcohol before we felt the effects of the pounds of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup we had just ingested. We barely made it to the campsite showers before Mia and I felt the repercussions of our rebellion by way of the murky white liquid that burned far more coming up than it did going down.
I spent the next two years of my life standing strong against alcohol, drugs, and any other related rebellion. No, I did not find Jesus. I found the Jonas Brothers, and they had found Jesus. Naturally, I upped my morals to up my chances in joining Nicholas in holy matrimony. This is a slight exaggeration, but honestly not by much. My freshman year of high school I became close
with this girl named Kaitlin and her sister, Juliana. And yes, this is the same girl from the “Toxic Friendships” chapter.
I don’t know the origin of it, but at that time both Kaitlin and Juliana were really, really against drinking and drugs. It was refreshing, in a high school full of kids experimenting, to have friends whose interests spanned more than fuzzy memories of house parties. We spent our weekends making bad music video parodies and quoting Johnny Depp movies. It was innocent and fun and it lasted for a good two years. Which was just about as long as Kaitlin and I stayed friends.
I can still remember the expression of sheer excitement when I told my friends Emma and Sydney that I wanted to get drunk. They had made me swear months before that when I grew out of my “phase” they could be the first ones to get me drunk. I obliged and held up that promise. Emma enlisted her boyfriend to buy us bottles, and I told him to pick the fruitiest vodka he could get his underaged hands on. Thinking back on it, it’s honestly laughable how big of a deal it was to us at that age. Texting in T9 under our desks about what he had picked out and how he was going to get it to us and where we were going to drink it, we put more thought into this plan than I had into my entire high school career. We were going to have a sleepover at Sydney’s house and we’d ask her parents if we could sleep in the guesthouse for a “change of pace.” They agreed because, honestly, looking at Sydney and me, I’m pretty sure they thought we could stand to rebel a little more. So that Friday night Emma arrived at Sydney’s with her sleepover bag packed with the standard supplies as well as a fifth of watermelon Smirnoff wrapped in a pair of summer camp sweatpants. For some reason the seclusion of the guesthouse didn’t seem safe enough, so we went the extra mile and locked ourselves in the bathroom and proceeded to drink while sitting in the shower. We took it slow, both their eyes on me with excitement and nerves as I took my first sip, to which I reminded them this wasn’t my first taste, just the first time I’d (actually) be intoxicated. I’m sure I was only about three swigs in before I started to feel the warmth in my fingertips and easy laughter escaping my lips. And that was it. Three sixteen-year-old girls sitting in a shower, giggling, drinking, and feeling far cooler than we looked.
In less than a year I had gone from the antithesis of a party girl to the party queen herself. It started off pretty gradual, a couple of shots before the school dance, a low-key after-party, the occasional “My parents are out of town; let’s have six people over” kind of thing. But we got older and our parents assumed with age came wisdom and common sense. We were allotted freer rein and we just got sloppier and sloppier. I’m generalizing here; this mostly applies to me. I felt like the best version of myself when I was drunk, the person I always had wanted to be. No longer was my confidence a ruse; I actually felt it. I felt cool and, for once, I didn’t second-guess everything I said and did. If I was drunk, the thought of conversation didn’t make my palms sweat. Flirting with a boy didn’t seem so panic inducing, and not giving a fuck was so much simpler. I thrived on being the center of attention for something other than being ridiculed for a bad grade. I was never going to be the smartest girl in class, or the prettiest, but suddenly none of that mattered. It didn’t matter that only the year before I was not worth a first kiss or a second glance. Now I was crazy and reckless and fun. I was a hot fucking mess, but I didn’t care. For once in my life, I felt like I knew who I was. I had an identity, and she was fucking cool.
I was that girl your parents were terrified of you becoming, so they locked you in your room until your eighteenth birthday. I’d make out with a thirty-year-old dude to get us into a hookah lounge. I’d be the first to suggest body shots and I’d be the first to offer myself up as the body. I loved the reactions of the guys at my promiscuous behavior and I loved the jealous looks of the girls. That validation and false confidence was like a high. The more I drank, the more I liked the girl I became. Despite the amount of alcohol I had consumed in my short yet potent drinking life, I had no idea how to drink. Up until my twenties, I had never gotten drunk without blacking out, or at least browning out. I was a total lightweight. I could easily get comfortably inebriated from two to three shots, but I never stopped there. While it didn’t take much to get me drunk, I could handle a lot more alcohol. I held it like some NASA-grade impenetrable tank. I rarely got visibly sloppy. Even in a blacked-out belligerent state, I could seem dead sober, thus raising no objections from my friends. I didn’t fall or stumble or pass out with my shoes on. I was the last one standing and I was the first one awake the next morning. I had finally become the best at something; it’s just not the thing you really want to be best at.
Party girl Meghan took a (much-needed) ten-month hiatus due to mono. I could hardly stay awake past nine, let alone climb on top of a table to sing Miley Cyrus. By the time second semester of my senior year rolled around, I was newly single, free of academic responsibilities (or at least the ones that would affect my postgraduation education), and ready to reclaim my title. If you thought I had had no inhibitions before, subtract a long-term relationship and factor in the vengeful freedom of singleness. You’ll have a whole new kind of beast. Let it be said that my ex-boyfriend was not controlling or overbearing by any means. With the rest of the guys, he egged us girls on to make out. He had no issues with my perpetually half-naked nature, probably because a lot of that time the circumstances favored him. Thankfully, I was blacked out for most of this period. It’s not something I’d love to share, but for the sake of the story, I’ll give you three highlights (retold to me) to paint a picture:
1. My underwear was found in a VCR player and posted on Facebook for me to claim ownership of, which I did.
2. I crawled into bed butt naked with my best friend. When she asked where I had been, I told her a freshman was fingering me while I played Bubble Trouble.
3. I tried to convince my friend Austin to make out with me after prom while his date (and girlfriend) sat next to him. I proceeded to tell him that I didn’t think she was that cool, anyway.
I’m not proud of some of the stupid shit I did, but that’s just the learning curve of teenage rebellion. There’s a part of me that really wants to skip over this next thing, but I don’t think you’d understand my future relationship with alcohol without it. So here it is.
In the spring of senior year, my friend Claire threw a house party. I had originally gone with my two best friends, Sydney and Jake. Early in the night they went home to study, and I assured them I was fine to crash there, as I had done so many times before. Without the social comfort of my best friends, I compensated for my awkwardness with more alcohol. Honestly, I hardly remember them leaving. As the night went on, it just got fuzzier and fuzzier. At some point I’m sure I deemed none of the boys make-out material, so I tapped out, settling into the extra bed in my friend’s room. I don’t know how long I was out for, but at some point I began to realize that one of my male classmates had slipped into bed with me, half-naked, his hands and lips all over me. I was wasted. That was a fact. I didn’t know how much I had drunk or what time it was, but I knew I didn’t want this. I don’t know if I said no. I don’t know if the reason I don’t remember how far he got before he passed out is because it wasn’t too far or if it was because my brain chose to spare me from replaying that night more than I already do right now. The last thing I remember was the rustling of sheets. My friend Claire was in the bed next to us the whole time.
I woke up the next morning to Sydney and Jake at the foot of the bed. They had returned to the house to reclaim me after they hadn’t heard from me all night. I blinked away the sleep, and before the tears could even come, they were silently peeling the covers off me, collecting my belongings, and guiding me to the car. We never really talked about it. We didn’t have to. They knew. It was written all over my face. The guy told people we hooked up, and I didn’t correct him. Part of me wanted so badly for that to be the truth. I tried to rewrite that night in hopes of ditching that weight I felt in the pit of my stomach. I told mys
elf that I was asking for it, that this was just another stupid thing I’d done while drunk. I’d made out with my fair share of embarrassing guys, but this was different. I flinched anytime anyone tapped me on the shoulder, and I fought to swallow bile every time I passed the guy in the hallway. I couldn’t deal with it. For a long time I didn’t. It took me four years to relinquish the entirety of the blame onto him. I was too drunk to consent and that’s all that matters. To which you’ll probably wonder why I felt the need to include this story in this section. If I don’t assume any guilt for what happened, why group it here? Because, at seventeen years old, I refused to be a victim of a sexual assault. I couldn’t erase it, so instead I vowed to be that promiscuous, wild child of a girl who was “all for” whatever had happened that night.
By the time I began my freshman year of college, I had officially succeeded in becoming that girl. Any constraints or limitations I may have had in high school, such as parents and curfews, were eliminated with college. I moved 449.9 miles away from home and I had never been more terrified. When it became abundantly clear that my parents weren’t going to pick up and let me bail on the whole “higher education” thing, I made the most out of a terrible situation. If you have never been to Riverside, California, congratulations. If you love Riverside, California, you’re lying—or your idea of a good time is chugging Four Lokos in 106-degree weather. I fell into line with the latter.