When I was young, a lot of people thought I was really going somewhere. In high school, it became very apparent to me that I didn’t have what it takes to really go somewhere, whatever that means. I did read a lot and had little to no actual friends, so I guess that made me seem more mature in some weird and infrequent way. But all I really wanted was to be liked for who I really was–loved was an afterthought.
You hear things like “you’re gifted” or “you’re smarter than other people your age,” and when you’re young you really start to internalize those kinds of declarative statements. When I didn’t get into the school for science and math my sophomore year of high school, like most of my close acquaintances did, I stopped believing in the idea that I was gifted at all and accepted the fact that I was a maladapted overcompensator who was too anxious and depressed to ever really make it anywhere. I don’t say this to make people feel sorry for me, it’s just something I realized. Let me back up a bit to when I first realized that I struggled with depression and anxiety. When I was in kindergarten, I started feeling like something was off. Not that I had any of these words in my vocabulary at the time, but I was too introspective, reactive, and mercurial. I was constantly being told that I was too sensitive. I had two siblings who were more than a decade older than me, and my parents barely had time for a young child. I was often overlooked and overshadowed, and I eventually learned to overcompensate. I was–am–smart, and I think too hard about things some people never think about at all, but my emotional growth was stunted.
Anyway, near the end of my sophomore year of high school, I was reeling with inadequacy and just wanted to graduate and get as far away from my parents as possible. My mom is a very loving woman, but her anxiety has a tendency to creep into everything around her, like a tree whose roots cause the sidewalk to crack and buckle because of the pressure. Her anxiety would find all the microscopic crevices in my mind and grow there until it pushed the anxiety to the surface and erupted through. My dad was a silent partner, allowing it and always looking the other way so he wouldn’t be a target for her unyielding anxiety. I started experiencing separation anxiety when I was about 4 or 5 because I just wanted my mom to be around more, and I feared something awful would happen to her when she was gone on business trips or out to bible study. I became acutely aware of how much time fits in between events and the time you actually have with the people you love. As I got older my anxiety manifested in different ways, and I began to understand that the less time I spent around my mother, the better I felt–but the fear of her anxiety was persistent.
When I left for college I felt this strange sense of being too free. Like the emotional space I was so used to filling with anxiety was suddenly sentient and very heavy, and the gravity that my mind had was pulling it in on me. My feelings of anxiety and depression had reached the limit of how close they could be without collapsing and suffocating me. Although I had never done drugs, partied, stayed out late, or hardly even socialized in high school, I quickly discovered that drinking and smoking weed were the only things that kept me from feeling like an alien. The first time I smoked, I remember feeling like I didn’t care about anything but myself, which was strange and new, and I liked it. I started getting high everyday and drinking nearly every weekend. Being able to escape was so new to me. I also happened to be really good at college, which was no surprise because there was no other option if I wanted to maintain my fallacious sense of freedom. All through high school, I wanted to major in psychology and become a therapist. By the time I was three quarters of the way through senior year and had scored a 5 on my AP Psych test, I realized I didn’t believe in psychology anymore and didn’t care about going to a good school, which was the only thing my mom cared about. I picked the first major on the list of majors at App State that seemed even remotely interesting because I had burnt myself out trying to prove something. I was always ahead on assignments, always studying, always doing sports, playing an instrument, reading a book, working on my resumé, doing SAT prep. I was just tired. So I majored in apparel design and merchandising. Taking art classes all the time sort of broke me. Art was all I wanted to do after that, and only wanting to do art is a scary thing.
Shortly after smoking for the first time, it became the bedrock for my closest relationships. If there wasn’t weed, I wasn’t going. My friend Milo, who I had known since we were in 6th grade, was my dealer and best pal in Boone. Everyday, he would pick up our friend Sawyer, who went to high school with us, and then me, and then we would go park his shitty Honda at their friend’s house and pass around Sawyer’s bong that he kept in the console of Milo’s car. My ambitions crumbled with each hit as I rapidly started forgetting that I wanted anything better at all. It would be years before I realized I had dreams that I was throwing away.
Milo and I met when we were 11 at an indoor soccer camp, and although we had drastically different lives and went to different middle schools, we managed to maintain a friendship for seven years before going to the same college. He went to App because it was the only school he applied to; I went because my girlfriend went there and because my mom wanted me to go to Chapel Hill. I did get into Chapel Hill, but the thought of living in Chapel Hill made me feel dead inside. The high school we went to was very small and very strict compared to the other schools in our town. Milo and I didn’t exactly fit in. He didn’t hang out with anyone from school because he got a job downtown and spent a lot of time doing drugs and partying with his work friends who were mostly homeschooled. I didn’t hang out with anyone because my mom wouldn’t let me and because I started to adapt to being alone and generally preferred it. There was one time freshman year that I showed Milo my boobs in this coffee shop bathroom for no good reason other than to do something my mom wouldn’t like if she found out–and because she would never find out. Milo was one of the only people I could do weird things around and know that he wouldn’t care.
Our high school had this tradition called the senior play, which was a theater production that all the seniors were supposed to be involved in in some way. Milo and I were the only two people in our class who didn’t participate. We both had jobs and a fervent distaste for being told what to do. I had so much structure at home I felt like I was being walled up in cement; Milo had little to none. When we ended up at App together, I wasn’t surprised and felt incredibly grateful to have him around. Sawyer was a mystery. Milo and Sawyer’s parents had a law firm together when they were young, and Milo knew him since 4th grade, but I barely knew him in grade school. He was a work boot wearing, book hating, trouble causing nuisance as far as I knew, so I stayed away from him. The only real memory I have of him from high school is from AP English class our junior year. He was pretty lanky and would wrap his legs all the way around his desk to prop his feet up on it until our teacher noticed. She would say to him “Sawyer, get your feet off my desk. Why the hell did they even allow you into my class?” Based on his grades I figured his mom had come in and demanded that he be allowed into the AP class. He disappeared after junior year, and even though we hung out everyday in Boone, I never built up the courage to ask why.
The three of us clung together and reminisced often on the fact that we were outcasts. We smoked together everyday and found our common ground. I like to think we all loved each other in a compulsory way, like loving family members you didn’t choose. In the back seat of that Honda, I felt liked for who I was, even when I was being made fun of for getting too high and getting paranoid, or when I was too quiet just so I could listen to Sawyer’s absurd stories with the music as a backdrop. For the first time in a very long time, I felt like I belonged with these people and that weed was the lynch pin.
I thought college would be different and that I would be able to fit in with people who didn’t know me or my reputation in my small town, but I think I was so broken that I’d lost all hope of ever having a normal friend group or fitting in with my classmates. Weed made me not care about any of that because, for the first time, I felt like I had a friend that would always be there. Since DARE in the 5th grade I had been told that weed isn’t addictive, so I never thought about the fact that reliance on a substance, no matter what science says, is addiction. I remember my mom saying to me one time after she found out about me smoking, “I don’t want you to live the life of an addict. Dope is only going to desensitize you to that lifestyle.” At the time, I thought she was nuts.
So. I went on with my lifestyle, got good grades, and hung out with burnouts, because those were the only people I could relate to. Everyday we’d go to the gas station closest to campus. Sawyer and Milo would alternate putting five dollars in the gas tank and split a pack of Traffics. We’d go to the bank once a week so Sawyer and I could get cash out to buy weed. The guy we were buying from then–since Milo could only get weed when he went back home to Hendersonville–was also named Sawyer. We called him Asian Sawyer. He was a dental student who worked at the diner on 105 in Boone. We usually met up with him behind the restaurant, and he would give us the weed in McDonald’s bags or take out boxes. One time he gave me my share stuffed between the pages of a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Everyday, before and after our classes and once before bed, Milo would pick us up, we’d drive to the house that we called the octagon house, and smoke. Milo and Sawyer would smoke cigarettes and we’d all pass the bong around three times. Eventually, I broke up with my girlfriend because I stopped loving her. She got in the way of my routine, and I was getting tired of always feeling the need to people please. I called Milo and asked him to pick me up after I broke it off with her. He happened to have broken up with his girlfriend on the same day, so we walked around campus late that night in the freezing cold talking about high school and our ex-girlfriends and how funny it was that we were there together after so many years of knowing each other.
A couple weeks later was Thanksgiving break, so Milo, Sawyer, and I went back home to Hendersonville. It was the first time I’d been home for more than a day or two since leaving for college. I hated it. It only reminded me of why I felt so trapped there and all the emotions I was trying to escape from. I spent a lot of time hiding in the woods behind my parents house smoking weed and sneaking out in the middle of the night to lay in the grass and wish I was sitting in the back of the Honda with Milo and Sawyer, getting high and listening to them bicker over the music selection. A couple days before classes started back, I drove home earlier than I planned because I was so bored and lonely. On the drive back to Boone, Milo called me and asked when I’d be back in town. He was already there and when I told him I was on the way he mentioned that his mom had given him a bottle of Crown Royal and that he picked up an ounce of weed while he was home for Thanksgiving. I drove straight to his dorm when I got to town. We stayed up late listening to music, drinking whiskey, and taking periodic trips to his car to get high. When the two of us were finally sated with laughter and intoxication, we decided to get some sleep. He said I could sleep in his bed with him if I wanted to, which was a lofted twin bed that smelled like feet. I guess I was drunk enough to say yes because I climbed up to his bed and snuggled in next to him. After a few minutes of laying there in the dark letting my buzz rock me to sleep, Milo said he really wanted to kiss me. We did kiss. Earlier that night he said “my mom always told me that I’d end up marrying my best friend,” and after he said that a strange tension bloomed up in between us. After we kissed he asked if I wanted to have sex, and after I said yes he said things would be different forever if we did. Things were different. Since then, they always have been.
About a month later we were in a relationship, and I spent most of my Christmas break at his mom’s house with him. I’d sneak out of my house before my parents were awake and crawl into his bed. He’d wake up and I’d be smoking his weed or all balled up in his sheets. I rarely slept a full night because I couldn’t quiet my mind, but laying in his bed wide awake was a thousand times better than trying to sleep in my old bedroom, staring at the ceiling and remembering the trauma of feeling completely and utterly alone–helpless.
When we got back from Christmas break, things between Milo, Sawyer, and me were different. Not in a good way, but in the way that there was a tangible tension under the surface of every interaction. I got to sit in the front seat and Sawyer had to sit in the back. When Milo and I got in the slightest bit of an argument Sawyer would butt in and try to drive a wedge between us, making the most insignificant of conflicts seem like an ultimatum. I started feeling less and less like I belonged. I would lay awake in my bed at night missing the times when we could all just smoke and I could silently bask in my rare and newfound comfort in the back seat of the Honda.
