This blog is from one of my harder days last year. There's a method to my introductory madness, promise.
I'm not good at "belonging". I'm good at making friends, I'm fairly good at keeping friends - I guess I'm not that good at being friends, being with friends. But this doesn't surprise me in the least.
It's no exaggeration to say I was the class scapegoat, growing up. Even when I would get along privately with many of my peers, publicly I was outcast. I had a few incredible friends, and that was it. That was all I needed, but I didn't get very well socialized.
That lack of socialization has manifested itself in various ways at various times in my life. As a child, I had a Charlie Brown complex - y'know, "why's everybody always pickin' on me?" As a teenager it was much the same, until I got burned out on caring at all. I really got okay with being "unpopular". I thought I didn't deserve friends, being as uncool as I was. Then I left my little Los Angeles private-school bubble for a few weeks a year, those last years of high school, and found that both in Indianapolis with my father's family, and in a little town on the outskirts of Monterey, CA with my best friend, I belonged - people liked me, for who I was. I discovered I was funny, I was talented, I was a unique human being with something to offer the world. I started to wonder if I just changed when I hit the city limits, when the plane touched down or the train began to brake.
I never found an answer I could believe in. I knew that I found myself unattractive physically, but that I really liked just about everything about me on the inside. I was a smart kid, I had real talent on stage, and amongst my small group of close friends, I was funny.
I got tired. I ran low on the energy I devoted to over-analyzing my social identity. Then my oldest, best friend handed me a Heineken and told me to lighten up. I got drunk for the first time, and while it didn't immediately turn me into everybody's buddy, it certainly made me think I was.
It wasn't until I started college that the "social lubricant" factor of alcohol (and pot, and even a little coke a few times toward the end) took over. I developed this identity - I don't know if it was really me, although I like to think it was. I don't think I was a phony - I just wasn't totally wracked with social anxiety anymore. I came out of my shell - I wasn't afraid of people and what do you know? I had friends, hundreds of them. Many of them are still friends, nearly ten years later. I was a social cipher - I was an athlete with the jocks, a music geek with the choir kids, a frat boy with my a cappella group, theater snob with the dramaramas, etc. I didn't worry about whether or not all of these people liked me. Of course, I had the occasional issue surrounding that with my roommates, but the fact that they chose to live with me for the first three years of school was a good indication that we had a good bond. And we still do - I'm going to see one of them and his longtime girlfriend sometime next week.
So alcohol really greased my social wheels. I was invincible; I was even a success with girls, to hear others tell the story. (Sex wasn't quite as important to me as drinking, eventually.)But a little over two years ago, that stopped working - well, no it didn't, but my body was going to die. My spirit pretty much already had, and so would yours if you'd spent years effectively telling yourself you were only good for anything with poison in your body.
So out with the old, unsuccessful, lethal coping mechanism, and in with the 12-step social model of recovery. Taking the steps outlined in those programs, I've learned who I really am. I've learned not just to like what I see in the mirror, but to love every aspect of myself. I've even learned to love others,
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