Day Twenty: What a military kid adepts to in the friendship field

Sometimes having an addictive personality sucks. 

Combine that with a military kid's background where they're used to leaving friendships behind and being left behind by friendships, and you get a combination that doesn't just suck, it really really sucks. 

Let me put a disclaimer in here before I go any further: This is not one of those topics that I want to write about. I think about these things a lot, I wrestle with them in the car on my hour-long drive home from Knoxville, I yell at God over them. But I don't want people to actually know I think this way. 

But here's the honest truth: I like being honest. 

I didn't always like being vulnerable and honest. I was a walking cliche in high school and quite a bit of college, and that meant that I didn't want to show a lot of things to people. I would rather fight to the death to have people think I'm super cool than be honest about how weird and geeky and demanding and bratty I can really be. 

But I'm learning that honesty is perhaps the greatest trait one can have. Honesty leads to expressing love for someone, expressing when one is agitated and needs to hash a relationship with someone out, and it leads to real connections with people. I'm realizing that the older I get, the more I crave honesty in my interactions with people, and if I can't get you to be honest with me, I will most likely leave you alone. 

So after a week of intense honesty with some people I really have come to love and a lot of showing myself to people in ways I never ever thought I would and being raw because of lack of sleep but also because it was just right, I realized that for the sake of some of my old friendships and new friendships that are beginning to become something grand, I need to be honest, to myself and to others. 

I've never done friendships very well. And I'm always frustrated as to why. But that's not quite true. If I'm honest, I know why. 

When you grow up a military kid, change becomes your best friend. You get so used to making new friends only to say goodbye to them a year, two years later, you come to expect that. You adapt to that. 

That's what I've done. 

I still have a few friends I keep in contact with that I knew from previous military moves, but for the most part, I lost contact with nearly everyone I knew growing up. Nearly all of the friends I had growing up were also military kids, so you both just knew to be besties while you were together, and move on when you moved. 

Pause for humour. 

25-signs-you-grew-up-as-a-military-brat

I went to high school when I was a junior, which meant I was with those people for two years. That was the normal amount of time I was friends with someone, so I lost contact with nearly everyone I went to high school with because honestly I thought that was what you were supposed to do. That was what I had always done in the past. 

I went to college for a year and a half before transferring to a different college, and when I transferred, I lost contact again with nearly everyone I went to college with because that is what I have always done. It just felt natural. 

I went to the college I graduated from for a little over two years, and to be honest I don't keep up with many people I went to that college with. I have a few college friendships I've clung to and absolutely refused to give up, but that took so much out of me to keep those longer than two years. I am so, so thankful I did because these few people are my best friends in the world and I literally don't know what I would do without them. 

So here's where the addictive personality trait comes in with my friendships. 

I'm so used to meeting people, becoming friends fast with them, and loving them fiercely. For a short time. 

It's like my brain is programmed to loose friends every two years, so it has to make up for all the time I WON'T be friends with them that it becomes almost addicted to the friendship. 

And then after I've been friends with them for a little while, a year or so, my brain thinks, "All right, you're going to loose them soon, so whammo! You are getting tired of them. You are annoyed by them. You are no longer addicted."

Like it's trying to save me the hurt of loosing them. 

Like it's thinking that if it makes it my choice to no longer be friends with them, that somehow makes it better. I'm going to lose them anyways, might as well make it my choice. 

So I'm stuck in a cycle of loving fiercely quickly to try and compensate for the fact that we'll only be friends for two years tops. 

I'm seeing that in some of my friendships now. 

Ugh. Pause again for humour.

The funny thing is that by becoming addicted to friendships and loving that fiercely means I also push them away by trying to force myself to hold back. 

I've typically always been the Friend Who Loves More, if that's a thing. It's partly to do with the fact that I sometimes have a self-deprecating relationship with myself and always consider myself the less cool person in the friendship. 

To give an example of this, whenever I hang out with nearly any friend or acquaintance, I normally give myself a pep talk before that goes something like this: 

"Okay, what have we talked about before? Hold back on the geekiness. Don't get weird. Let them go in for the hug first. Please don't be too annoying. Ask them questions to keep them talking about themselves, but for the love of god, don't drill them like you have a tendency to do. This isn't Jeopardy. Just, just try to be cool, okay?" 

Because I am trying to remember that I am cool also, sometimes my pep talks go like this these days: 

"Okay, what have we talked about before? People are just people. They shouldn't make you so nervous. If they don't like you, it's okay. Not everyone has to like you. Just, just try not to be so nervous that it makes you weird, okay?" 

I met someone recently who I really enjoyed their company. I just liked them a lot. You know when you just get that feeling the first time you meet someone that you could be best friends with this person? That's how I felt. 

At first I was so excited. I went for a long time after college with no friends that lived within basically a 200 mile radius of me, so it's been so refreshing having friends, or at least potentials if nothing else, nearby. So just being with other human beings who are around my age and nice is wonderful. 

It wasn't that I didn't think I was cool enough or worthy enough for their friendship. I just didn't want to get addicted again. I'm terrified of overdoing it. 

I want desperately to find a balance. I enjoy being the friend who suggests we hang out first, who calls a friend up to ask them to hang out. I know I feel loved when someone does that for me, so I want to show them I care. 

But I don't want to call them up every day, even though I may want to. I don't want to bug them, even though I just want to be hanging out with them all the time. Maybe that will keep me from getting too addicted, only to find a way to screw it up in a year or less. 

To be transparent for just a moment, I sometimes feel like I really suck at friendships. 

But I don't want to. 

Aaaaaaand humour pause again. 

I want to be the kind of person that you WANT to be friends with. I want to bring you peace from my presence. I want to be like Moses and have God shining through my face so it's all you can see when you look at me. I don't want to be fake with you, I want to admit when I've just had a crummy day and it's put me in not the best of attitudes. I want to comfort you when you've had a crummy day. I want you to never ever think that my friendship is a burden to you. 

But I struggle on an hourly basis on how to do that and not throw myself at you. 

I had a very real very raw very eye-opening conversation with one of my dearest and most treasured friends several weeks back where I admitted some of this to her and told her that I was always afraid in college that I was bugging her to hang out with me too much, that now I send her too many emails, that I am being that annoying little sister friend who always wants to tag along, even when she'd rather not be hanging out with me. 

Funny thing is, after I admitted this, she confessed that she was always afraid that SHE was bugging ME too much. 

I felt like the wind had been knocked out of my sails a little bit with that one. 

What? Other people think like me? Other people have the same insecurities as me? Other people want to hang out with me just as much as I want to hang out with them? 

So that is one reason why I wanted to get all of this down. I want my friends and potential friends to read this and maybe understand me a little bit more in ways that I never could verbally express. 

Because maybe other people also have addictive personality types and are used to loosing friends every year or so. 

Day Nineteen: "Life is long, and you are hot."

It is really late and I am exhausted.  

But I needed to write. 

PS, I got my nerd on and the quote is from Doctor Who. Just so you know. 

This might come out in a jumble. 

No. 

This WILL come out in a jumble. 

But blogs are the gateway to jumbled workings-out. So. 

I had a conversation with a beautiful friend the other night about relationships and sex and physical attractiveness and the whole shebang. It was a very raw, real conversation for me, and left me with a lot of wonderings, but also a lot of things worked out in my head a little better. 

One thing we kept coming back to was this issue of purely physical attraction. Without going into too much personal detail, she confided to me that she had been told before that she wasn't "pretty enough" to be taken into consideration by boys for a romantic relationship. 

This utterly baffled me. 

First off, this particular friend is beautiful. I'm not saying the old cliche that she is beautiful on the inside like a cop-out. Granted, she is simply gorgeous on the inside and has one of the most beautiful and caring hearts I have ever come across, but to me, she is beautiful on a purely physical level. 

She is not your cookie cutter, Barbie lookalike, unrealistic supermodel. She is so much better than those fakes. She is refreshing looking, to me. 

So it confuses me on a purely physical standpoint why on earth she would ever be overlooked by a boy. 

But this is the part that really confuses me. 

I get that everyone is attracted to different things. Even in the midst of conversation between this friend and I, I told her I think red-heads are attractive, and she doesn't. 

I get that. On a surface level, we all like different things. And that is fine. 

I am not trying to bash physical attraction, please don't hear me say that. I don't like Matthew McConaughey simply because I do not find him attractive. And his voice gets on my nerves, but whatever. But I adore Benedict Cumberbatch because of his looks. 

Well, okay, there are like a million reasons why I adore Benedict Cumberbatch. His looks are like 197 of those millions of reasons. But you see where I'm going. Maybe. 

Physical attraction is important. We cay say till we're blue in the face that it's all about what a person looks like on the inside and inside only, but I'm calling bullcrappy on that one. 

Physical attraction matters. It just does. 

But. 

We should be better than just physical attraction. 

This is what just blew my mind during my conversation with my friend: She had had someone tell her that they loved everything about her - her personality, her sense of humour, her relationship with God, her outlook on life - and they wanted to be in love with her, they just couldn't because they weren't physically attracted to her. 

That was literally the only hangup for them. 

What the what. 

No. 

If you see that many good things in someone, if you can honestly say that you love who they are on the inside and are falling in love with who they are on the inside, but can't accept them for what they look like on the outside, you are a truly cruel, hopeless human being. 

You do realize that your Barbie doll supermodel will in fact get old, right? They can have all the plastic surgery they want and starve themselves as much as they like, but unless they off themselves at 60, yeah, they're gonna get old and not-Barbie-like. 

If you are attracted to someone's "insides" so much that you think you are falling in love with them, then you ARE attracted to them. 

Thank God my friend has been smart enough to know she's gorgeous and cool and not tried to hurt the amazing body image she has by changing for a boy. 

You know that cliche where you don't find someone attractive but then you spend a few years getting to know them and you fall in love with who they are and then boom you suddenly realize that they are attractive on the outside? 

Well. Yeah. Not really just a cliche. 

Again, don't misunderstand what I'm saying. 

I would love a man to stop be at a coffee shop and say he just had to come over and talk to me because he saw me sitting there and thought I was gorgeous. Yes, I would fall for that line and talk to this man. 

But I hope that that's not where it would stop. 

I hope that he would think I was kind of pretty, and then spend a few hours talking to me, and think I was even prettier when the conversation ended because he became attracted to my words and thoughts and ideas. 

I dress for me. I wear the clothes I want to wear that make me feel pretty or the makeup that makes me feel pretty or the hairstyle that makes me feel confident. I do this for me, but I also do this because I know I am my prettiest when I am confident. And yeah, I want people to think I'm pretty. If they don't. that's fine, because I feel pretty. 

I'm not a raging feminist. I have another beautiful friend who I won't name here (but if she's reading, yeah missy, you know I'm talking about you) who probably wishes I was more of a feminist. 

But I do wish boys would respect the way women look a little bit a lot more. 

We are different. Just like you. We are attracted to some of you and not attracted to some of you. Just like you with us. 

But let us not go so far as to brush off feelings we might feel spring up in us because you are not who we thought we would fall for looks-wise. 

One of my absolute favourite examples of this is with Jim Gaffigan and his wife. 

Allow me to state it: Jim Gaffigan is not as attractive as say Benedict Cumberbatch. 

But he is funny. 

My gosh is Jim funny. 

I honestly don't know of anyone funnier than Jim Gaffigan. 

And this is why his wife says she first fell for him. She was attracted to his humour. And that turned into attractiveness all over, and now they're married with five children. 

I want to be physically attracted to my boyfriend or fiancee or husband. And yes, if I am physically attracted to you, I will flirt with you upon meeting you. 

But I have disliked many a hot hot hot of a man I have known because he is a total and complete prick. 

Physical attractiveness is a fine place to start. 

But heaven forbid it is where we end. 

Day Eighteen: The Puddle

“Oh no!”

Emory looked down at her dress, now covered in mud, then up at me, tears in her eyes.

I felt like crying at her tears.

She had slipped, that’s all. The ground was slippery from the rain, and she had been singing away, not paying a bit of attention. She hadn’t even seen the end of the sidewalk and stepped right into the mud puddle, falling instantly to her knees as a reflex.

I wanted to explain to her that that was my fault, that we could wash her dress before her mother found out and was harsh to her, that it was just an accident.

But the words seemed lodged in my throat as I looked at her terrified, teary face. And the words that threatened to come out instead had more to do with Emory’s mother being cruel for instilling such fear into her daughter over a dress than with comforting Emory.

Before I could say or do anything, Bird took one look at Emory’s scared eyes and, without a moment’s hesitation, jumped into the puddle herself, ruining her own dress.

Both girls stood for a moment just staring at each other.

“Already ruined them now,” Bird said, looking down at her dress. “Might as well have some fun!”

With that, she grabbed a pile of mud and threw it at Emory’s stomach.

For a split second, none of us moved. Then Emory blinked and a smile began to form on her tear-stricken face. Then a soft giggle. Then a full-on laugh.

Without another hesitation, Emory reached down and pictked up a mud pile herself, throwing it at Bird. Bird shrieked in delight, then began splashing Emory with the muddy water.

I stood watching them for a moment, trying to remind myself that I was a respectable, dignified, professional, adult father.

And then I jumped into to the puddle.

I lunged at Bird and Emory, taking them both down with me, all trepidation drowned out by the pearls of laughter.

“Da, Da!” Bird screamed. “Catch, Da!’

I turned just in time to get a mudcake square in my face.

Both girls froze.

I ran my hands across my face, smearing the mud.

“Oh, it’s on now!” I cried, grabbing two handfuls and dumping them on Emory and Bird’s heads, smearing it into their hair. “That’s a good look for you two.”

Bird shrieked again good-naturedly and Emory just grinned as the mud ran down the back of her neck.

“All right,” I said a few minutes and splashes later. “I guess we should get cleaned up before your mom picks you up, Em.”

I grabbed both girls’ hands and lead them back towards my apartment, smiling.

Day Seventeen: The Rantings Of A Somewhat Delusional Writer

[Fair warning: These are the rantings of a delusional writer who prefers to have characters walk up and introduce themselves in my mind. Just so you know.]

I can’t figure out this man and it’s irritating.

Normally, they come easier, they introduce themselves to me better than this.

But this guy.

I don’t even know his name. He hasn’t told me.

I thought I could get to know him, I thought maybe he was just playing hard to get.

I’m getting irritated by this character. I just want to write him.

So I called him Jeffrey.

But maybe he got mad because I tried to name him. Jeffrey’s not his name.

I’m really sorry, mister.

All day today, for the past several days, actually, I’ve thought about him.

I was picturing Woody Harrelson from True Detective. I thought maybe I just had the picture wrong.

But that’s not right either. It’s closer, but it’s not him.

Is it David, friend? Is that your name? Boy, I wish, you’d just tell me.

I’ve never had this much trouble meeting a character.

And I’ve never wanted to meet any of them more.

No, not David, is it?

Brook.

Brookes.

Your last name is Brookes, isn’t it?

Okay, good. We’re getting somewhere.

Come a little closer, friend.

Regan.

Is your name Regan?

No?

Sorry, sorry!

How do you spell it then?

Reagan?

And she calls you Rey?

Yes.

No.

Oh. That’s her name.

You’re telling me her name.

Reagan.

And you call her Rey.

I get it now.

All right. What say you, friend? Try again?

Sal? Norman? I wish you would just tell me, Brookes.

Wallace? Walter?

Wait, Walter?

Is that your name, Walter?

Why didn’t you just say so, Walter?

Walter’s a fine name, don’t be ashamed of it.

Oh, sorry.

Sore spot.

Your dad named you Walter. And then left. I didn’t know, friend. I’m sorry.

Walter Brookes. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.