I had remembered why I'd started drinking.
I'd given up. I felt paralyzed by my own inhibitions. I saw opportunities, good and bad, all around me and only knew I was missing out on all of them.
Several years earlier I'd come to terms with intimacy and vulnerability terrifying me. I had messily broken up one girlfriend, and then another, and another, all ending the same awful way.
Opening up would make me feel so vulnerable that I felt I had to be on constant alert to avoid being hurt. Eventually, I'd build my defenses up so fiercely that they became offensive. I jumped from skepticism to paranoia. Pretty soon, unable to deal with the constant fear, I would crack.
I began to hate those that I loved for making me feel so weak. I blamed them for bringing out the hateful, paranoid delusions in me. In that hate, I'd tear the relationship apart so viciously that they'd never want think of speaking to me again. In a sense, I made sure the bridge was burnt because I never wanted to cross them again. It was too painful.
My first 'girlfriend' was in 5th or 6th grade. Relationships at that age are utterly ridiculous. For me it was a two day stint of sitting next to the girl. That was it. Nevertheless, I'd grown found of her those two days, and spent time daydreaming about her listening to R&B love songs.
When I went to school on the third day, her friend told me that she was breaking up with me. My little, stupid heart was broken. I felt it sink coldly into my stomach, and that might've been the first time I ever depersonalized.
Somehow, the whole situation flipped from tragic to comedic for me in a heartbeat. Everything was a joke. Every vulnerable, sad thought became material for self-depreciating humor. Every quality I'd fancied about became a flaw or a weakness. Those qualities, in particular, made great fuel for the insulting, hateful jokes.
I made plenty of my classmates roar with laughter as I felt myself float from ground zero to cloud nine by the end of the day.
Whatever I had learned that day stuck with me for the rest of my life. I hated feeling vulnerable more than anything. Vulnerable, to me, meant weak. To know someone and love them, to be their friend, takes vulnerability. Those words echoed in my mind in regards to getting to know God or Christ and being a family member of the Church. Unfortunately, I hadn't known that back then, or if I did, I didn't care, because over the next seven years from that day I started slowly trying to make myself completely impervious to vulnerability.
Vulnerability, I'd found, or rather the fear of, had shaped most of my actions my entire life. All throughout grade school I'd feared being bullied.
I wish I could go back and time and tell my younger self that would never happen.
Starting in kindergarten, I didn't feel like I fit in. I didn't get upset about it to anyone, because I'd never felt like I fit in anyways.
While the other kids would, well, do whatever the other kids did, I'd be writing stories or making picture books. Mrs. Green, my kindergarten teacher, told me she liked them, and she was glad I did that in my free time instead of playing video games like the other kids. She'd told me I had to be pretty smart to do that, but in my head I disagreed. All I was doing was re-illustrating and rewriting stories I'd already been told with maybe an added twist, more out of forgetfulness than creativity. Still, she thought it was remarkable. I liked that kind of remark.
I digress, this is about vulnerability. I remember feeling separate, outcast from everyone else. At some point I realized that if you were smiling, people were a lot more likely to mess with you. Mess with you, meaning anything from horsing around to saying Hello to giving you a hard time. I knew that horsing around only meant trouble, and I hated being given a hard time. By that logic, it only made sense to scowl, because that meant avoiding two negatives, and being told Hello? What was any good about that? I'd thought. Keeping up a scowl meant keeping myself away from most horse play, 'hard-time-givers', and Hello's, and whatever indefinite consequences those things might've had. No indefinite consequences, no vulnerability.
To me, vulnerability meant exposing the thread and fabrics of your true self to be either sown together with or snipped to pieces by another person.
As a kid, this threw a lot of honesty out of the window. In Sunday school, when gI'd drawn myself as a vampire, my mom hadn't liked it enough for me to remember decades later. When I drew figures attacking others from the sky at my grandma's kitchen table, and when my mom asked what they were, told her it was 'the bad guys killing the good guys' because 'I was a bad guy', she'd gotten really mad, and told me I couldn't draw them anymore. When I visualized my own fantasy world in public, and began fighting off my enemies with my imaginary sword, I'd been told to knock it off because people weren't supposed to do that. When my parents took me out and I'd run my hands along everything from walls, racks, shelves, and everything on the shelves, on the racks, or hanging from the walls, I was scolded because we were supposed to look with our eyes, not our hands.
I'd liked looking with my hands better, because feeling things resonated within me much more vividly than simply seeing them. Seeing felt more cold and judgmental. Seeing felt mean. Mean meant to signify, and people see signals. I don't believe I've ever felt a signal in my entire life.
For example, think about this. If you were to cross a bridge encased in wire fence next to the road over the highway, you have two options: See your way across or feel your way across. Seeing meant watching the cars drive by, constantly staring at your destination or the sky, feeling nothing but your stride against the pavement as you walk along. If you closed your eyes, and like me, ran your fingertips against the wire fence, you'd feel the unique vibration as your stride carried your arm across the fence, your fingers creating a nameless harmonic as they drummed across every single wire they brushed by. Your arm would be left feeling tingly, like it had been in a massage chair, but your fingers would be rough, slightly raw from all the friction. (See? Feel?)
My parents would see what I was doing and see why other people would think it was wrong. They wouldn't feel what I was doing and feel it was wrong, probably because they were my parents or they simply didn't think it was wrong. Because they saw rather than felt, they had to be mean to get me to stop.
I grew to believe that there was nothing wrong with being mean, as long as it was meant to educate. Being mean for the sake of offending someone was wrong. I couldn't hold it against my parents for wanting to educate me, but everyone has their breaking point, and eventually I couldn't handle any meanness from my parents.
Since they were only mean because they thought if other people saw me they would think it was wrong, I felt self-conscious, abnormal, and wrong. It didn't matter if my parents thought it was okay and only trying to raise me 'right', they were signifying to me that I was weird, different, and wrong to the rest of the world. I started to keep everything bottled up, because if it didn't come out, I wouldn't be vulnerable.
I cried myself to sleep a lot. It felt like the biggest relief I could feel. Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, for letting me grow up in a house where it was okay to cry. I never had to deal with that 'boys don't cry' horseshit, but I knew that it was good to be strong. My dad would tell me not to cry, but not because of some cultural expectation. It was just because you gotta be strong. That was in regard to injuries. When it came to personal things, though, like punishment, crying was a no go. You don't cry if you're the one in the wrong. I could understand that too. Even though crying around other people would make me feel vulnerable, I was glad I at least have that release in my solitude of the night. It wasn't until years later I couldn't cry anymore.
There were tons of other things that made people vulnerable, all of them relating back to being open. I learned to hide the majority of everything I really cared about, becoming a chameleon to learn which interests and values you could have that people wouldn't think were wrong and therefore take advantage of your 'vulnerability'.
If you didn't show anyone what you wanted, what you felt, what you believed, what you liked, what you cared about, what you valued, or what you thought, you were invincible. No one could tell you that you were different or wrong for simply being unsure, or happening to only be interested in self improvement and learning.
Unfortunately, constant uncertainty was maddening. It lead to obsession, which only begot great and terrible things. Critical thinking skills, wild fantasies, zealous ambitions, love, fear, and hatred. I was synthetically invulnerable to a point and felt an infinite distance between me and every other person on the planet by the time I was in kindergarten. I was told in third-grade that I possessed a twelfth-grade reading level, and was very mature for my age. I was also told I looked like I hated everyone, even my favorite teachers. I was told some of my stories were too dark and that I read too much.
As far as I knew, those were good things. Of course, I was uncertain. My parents, though, thought it was all well. They didn't express as much concern as they did annoyance at the looking like I hate everyone thing. Really, they just wish the teachers would talk about my grades. My grades were never brought up, though, because they were great.
The first time I'd ever drank was in sixth grade. My dad's computer was in the basement, and beneath it a cupboard. One of those cabinets had some peppermint schnapps in them. I'd drank a bit and screwed around on MySpace, played some RuneScape, all the while parousing a hidden tab of porn while my little avatar would have at a tree for some logs or whatever. Half the time I'd play RuneScape it was to watch porn. MySpace only interested me because it took socializing and made it into a quantifiable thing. Your popularity became a value rather than a quality. It seemed to make personality a tangible thing. It made figuring out how to remain invulnerable easier and faster. All you had to look at was the prettiest girls and most popular guys and you had a formula for success.
The next time I drank was in seventh grade. I'd taken up skateboarding, and was probably thirteen years old, going on fourteen. Girls and jocks alike digged skateboarders, so I was in the zone. I'd read about some skateboarder who was famous for skating infinitely better while drunk. I did a little research as to why that might be the case, cracked open my dad's bottle of schnapps and gave it a shot.
I'd never ollied so high. I immediately called Gabe, inviting him over to witness.
"Whoa! Holy shit dude! How did you do that?" Gabe was halfway amazed, halfway pissed because he still struggled getting the board fully airborne. I'd gotten at least a solid twenty-eight to thirty-something inches in the air, rising my knees to my chest and carrying myself for a good five feet at least forward.
"I'm drunk," I told him, exaggerating a bit.
"You drank?!"
"Yeah, just a bit of my dads liquor and smirnoff."
"
You idiot."
I didn't drink again until high-school. I'd tried, once or twice, to achieve the same affect again to skateboard, but couldn't. I didn't have the money or access to enough alcohol or know how to get it, so I gave up.
Going into freshman year, Timmy brought over a bottle of Hawkeye disguised as two bottles of water to Jackson's. Most of the gang were afraid of it, but Chandler, Timmy, and I downed the vodka in less than five minutes.
I'd known full well that alcohol kicked your inhibitions to the curb, but this night really showed the truth of it more vividly.
It felt like I depersonalized instantly. As if in those dark moments when my heart sank and I did it out of natural defense I had been inhibited from being happy, or making jokes. Whatever the alcohol had done, though was another ballgame. Timmy and I started playing catch with a dead rabbit. If that wasn't gross enough, we threw it at Steph and whoever was making out with her at the time, too. A whole lot of ridiculousness ensued, climaxing with nearly everyone puking out of the window and onto the rooftop. I managed to maintain the illusion of sobriety, though, only puking when I went outside with Caleb to smoke my first cigarette.
"Is that supposed to happen?" I asked.
"Yeah, usually everyone does their first time."
"That's disgusting." I said as I continued to drag on it.
Another thing I noticed about alcohol was that everyone liked making out under the influence of the stuff. Hanging out with girls transformed from sitting awkwardly watching movies to the chance of getting some action wherever the hell you might be able to drink. People with introverted, unappealing personalities became warm, friendly, outgoing strangers. Relationships started that probably never should have. Girls demanded sex. Spontaneous sex.
Halfway through freshman year I'd given up on practicing religion or following any bit of it. I'd prayed obsessively about my relationship but didn't get what I was asking for, and at the time I truly didn't know better. I hadn't even had sex with the girl because I wanted to wait. I decided I wouldn't be doing that shit ever again.
I wasn't as promiscuous as some, but I was more than I should've been. After high-school, I only got worse. Aside from several bouts of sobriety because of probation, I really didn't drink. I'd partake, but I'd grown to hate the stupidity of my actions on it. That is, until I started taking care of myself.
I'd followed a regimented workout routine and gotten abs, build up my muscles to be swollen but still lean. I had a baby-goatee, a short, messy-yet-preppy hair cut, and a cocky attitude. Girls wanted to be with me and I had an idea of why. I couldn't bring myself to do it, though. Sex to me, still meant vulnerability. I hadn't ever depersonalized for sex, unless you'd consider thinking about baseball depersonalizing, which I didn't. Sex was an intimate thing that I didn't want to share with just anyone, and still is. I wasn't interested in half of the girls I talked to and was turned off emotionally by the simplest of things.
It could've been a number of things, but it was probably the uncertainty. I only truly wanted to be with the girls who looked certain of what hey wanted. Most of the girls I talked to didn't. I'd assume it was because of my uncertainty. While they would try to read me for what I felt, wanted, or thought I'd have my mask of invulnerability on. It would either be a scowl, a look of distaste, or a look of uncertainty. Either way, the uncertainty was in my eyes. When I drank, that fell away. Uninhibited, I was a dog. I wasn't afraid to ask for what I wanted. I wasn't afraid to be immoral.
Kelsey was my best friend. So was Kristen. I had recently come to the conclusion that morals were worthless. Gabe had developed a pattern of going wherever the most freedom and benefits were, and he'd ended up with a girl who gave him the world after jumping around between several friends. Gabe and I had always had several characteristics in common, and the ability to use charisma, good deeds, a silver tongue and warmth paired with our good looks to our advantage.
Gabe would elude to using Halley like that until roughly that year. Two years later he died.
I'd seen that in Kelsey and felt absolutely no remorse for anything anymore. I took whatever she gave, took whatever anyone gave, and gave nothing back.
Kelsey and I had a bit of a thing when Kristen and I were also talking. There wasn't any sex involved at this time, but I wanted there to be. So after the night I brought the liquor over to Kristen's so we could fuck, I went and stayed with Kelsey. I fucked her too. I didn't feel bad about it because she did so much for me and clearly cared. I felt like a professional.
Even though she insisted she'd never give anyone head, just like she had insisted we were just friends, I woke up to her sucking me off. It felt like a token of rarity, not a single intimate thing about it.
I remembered another reason I'd started drinking. It was becauseI felt guilty. Even though 99% of the time I didn't feel anything special about sex, I still thought it was supposed to be. I dreaded the day someone would hit me with the, 'What are we?' To which I'd honestly have to reply, 'Absolutely nothing!'
Everyone wants to feel special. I felt vulnerable during sex because I got off on the idea of making someone else get off. If I didn't I felt like a failure. Girls always want to feel like the only one. Drinking made it easy for me to pretend that they were.
I lied to good people. Making myself invulnerable over the years had mad me cold, calculating, mean, and mad.
What I'd fancy about her for a moment is what I'd use to justify hating her the next. I got off on the realization of betrayal. It makes me sick to my stomach, now, but at the time I had spent so long turning myself into a monster that I had finally started becoming one if I wasn't already. Worse than that, it seemed no matter how far I had fallen because of my own sins, I'd find someone to help me believe I was a victim and provide me whatever I needed.
I felt rotten inside, even though I'd learned how to appear unphased to everyone else. I'd use the guilt to push everyone that cared about me away and lied to myself that they were just as bad as me.
I hadn't cared about hurting anyone but Kristen, and as soon as she started struggling, I convinced myself that she was rotten so I could walk away from it.
It didn't work for long, and within a couple weeks I'd fallen into fit of depression so heinous that I got back into partying and harder drugs.
I didn't believe in anything. My mind and faith were idle, but they wouldn't be for long. I'd fallen the farthest I ever had from God.
I didn't even believe at all anymore, until one night came that would haunt me for years to come.
That night, I might've died. Sometimes I still wonder if I did.
That night turned into a morning that would change me forever.
That night, I, an unrepentant sinner, heard the voice of God invite me into the eternal.
The thing is though...
I don't think it was God.
Next
I'd given up. I felt paralyzed by my own inhibitions. I saw opportunities, good and bad, all around me and only knew I was missing out on all of them.
Several years earlier I'd come to terms with intimacy and vulnerability terrifying me. I had messily broken up one girlfriend, and then another, and another, all ending the same awful way.
Opening up would make me feel so vulnerable that I felt I had to be on constant alert to avoid being hurt. Eventually, I'd build my defenses up so fiercely that they became offensive. I jumped from skepticism to paranoia. Pretty soon, unable to deal with the constant fear, I would crack.
I began to hate those that I loved for making me feel so weak. I blamed them for bringing out the hateful, paranoid delusions in me. In that hate, I'd tear the relationship apart so viciously that they'd never want think of speaking to me again. In a sense, I made sure the bridge was burnt because I never wanted to cross them again. It was too painful.
My first 'girlfriend' was in 5th or 6th grade. Relationships at that age are utterly ridiculous. For me it was a two day stint of sitting next to the girl. That was it. Nevertheless, I'd grown found of her those two days, and spent time daydreaming about her listening to R&B love songs.
When I went to school on the third day, her friend told me that she was breaking up with me. My little, stupid heart was broken. I felt it sink coldly into my stomach, and that might've been the first time I ever depersonalized.
Somehow, the whole situation flipped from tragic to comedic for me in a heartbeat. Everything was a joke. Every vulnerable, sad thought became material for self-depreciating humor. Every quality I'd fancied about became a flaw or a weakness. Those qualities, in particular, made great fuel for the insulting, hateful jokes.
I made plenty of my classmates roar with laughter as I felt myself float from ground zero to cloud nine by the end of the day.
Whatever I had learned that day stuck with me for the rest of my life. I hated feeling vulnerable more than anything. Vulnerable, to me, meant weak. To know someone and love them, to be their friend, takes vulnerability. Those words echoed in my mind in regards to getting to know God or Christ and being a family member of the Church. Unfortunately, I hadn't known that back then, or if I did, I didn't care, because over the next seven years from that day I started slowly trying to make myself completely impervious to vulnerability.
Vulnerability, I'd found, or rather the fear of, had shaped most of my actions my entire life. All throughout grade school I'd feared being bullied.
I wish I could go back and time and tell my younger self that would never happen.
Starting in kindergarten, I didn't feel like I fit in. I didn't get upset about it to anyone, because I'd never felt like I fit in anyways.
While the other kids would, well, do whatever the other kids did, I'd be writing stories or making picture books. Mrs. Green, my kindergarten teacher, told me she liked them, and she was glad I did that in my free time instead of playing video games like the other kids. She'd told me I had to be pretty smart to do that, but in my head I disagreed. All I was doing was re-illustrating and rewriting stories I'd already been told with maybe an added twist, more out of forgetfulness than creativity. Still, she thought it was remarkable. I liked that kind of remark.
I digress, this is about vulnerability. I remember feeling separate, outcast from everyone else. At some point I realized that if you were smiling, people were a lot more likely to mess with you. Mess with you, meaning anything from horsing around to saying Hello to giving you a hard time. I knew that horsing around only meant trouble, and I hated being given a hard time. By that logic, it only made sense to scowl, because that meant avoiding two negatives, and being told Hello? What was any good about that? I'd thought. Keeping up a scowl meant keeping myself away from most horse play, 'hard-time-givers', and Hello's, and whatever indefinite consequences those things might've had. No indefinite consequences, no vulnerability.
To me, vulnerability meant exposing the thread and fabrics of your true self to be either sown together with or snipped to pieces by another person.
As a kid, this threw a lot of honesty out of the window. In Sunday school, when gI'd drawn myself as a vampire, my mom hadn't liked it enough for me to remember decades later. When I drew figures attacking others from the sky at my grandma's kitchen table, and when my mom asked what they were, told her it was 'the bad guys killing the good guys' because 'I was a bad guy', she'd gotten really mad, and told me I couldn't draw them anymore. When I visualized my own fantasy world in public, and began fighting off my enemies with my imaginary sword, I'd been told to knock it off because people weren't supposed to do that. When my parents took me out and I'd run my hands along everything from walls, racks, shelves, and everything on the shelves, on the racks, or hanging from the walls, I was scolded because we were supposed to look with our eyes, not our hands.
I'd liked looking with my hands better, because feeling things resonated within me much more vividly than simply seeing them. Seeing felt more cold and judgmental. Seeing felt mean. Mean meant to signify, and people see signals. I don't believe I've ever felt a signal in my entire life.
For example, think about this. If you were to cross a bridge encased in wire fence next to the road over the highway, you have two options: See your way across or feel your way across. Seeing meant watching the cars drive by, constantly staring at your destination or the sky, feeling nothing but your stride against the pavement as you walk along. If you closed your eyes, and like me, ran your fingertips against the wire fence, you'd feel the unique vibration as your stride carried your arm across the fence, your fingers creating a nameless harmonic as they drummed across every single wire they brushed by. Your arm would be left feeling tingly, like it had been in a massage chair, but your fingers would be rough, slightly raw from all the friction. (See? Feel?)
My parents would see what I was doing and see why other people would think it was wrong. They wouldn't feel what I was doing and feel it was wrong, probably because they were my parents or they simply didn't think it was wrong. Because they saw rather than felt, they had to be mean to get me to stop.
I grew to believe that there was nothing wrong with being mean, as long as it was meant to educate. Being mean for the sake of offending someone was wrong. I couldn't hold it against my parents for wanting to educate me, but everyone has their breaking point, and eventually I couldn't handle any meanness from my parents.
Since they were only mean because they thought if other people saw me they would think it was wrong, I felt self-conscious, abnormal, and wrong. It didn't matter if my parents thought it was okay and only trying to raise me 'right', they were signifying to me that I was weird, different, and wrong to the rest of the world. I started to keep everything bottled up, because if it didn't come out, I wouldn't be vulnerable.
I cried myself to sleep a lot. It felt like the biggest relief I could feel. Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, for letting me grow up in a house where it was okay to cry. I never had to deal with that 'boys don't cry' horseshit, but I knew that it was good to be strong. My dad would tell me not to cry, but not because of some cultural expectation. It was just because you gotta be strong. That was in regard to injuries. When it came to personal things, though, like punishment, crying was a no go. You don't cry if you're the one in the wrong. I could understand that too. Even though crying around other people would make me feel vulnerable, I was glad I at least have that release in my solitude of the night. It wasn't until years later I couldn't cry anymore.
There were tons of other things that made people vulnerable, all of them relating back to being open. I learned to hide the majority of everything I really cared about, becoming a chameleon to learn which interests and values you could have that people wouldn't think were wrong and therefore take advantage of your 'vulnerability'.
If you didn't show anyone what you wanted, what you felt, what you believed, what you liked, what you cared about, what you valued, or what you thought, you were invincible. No one could tell you that you were different or wrong for simply being unsure, or happening to only be interested in self improvement and learning.
Unfortunately, constant uncertainty was maddening. It lead to obsession, which only begot great and terrible things. Critical thinking skills, wild fantasies, zealous ambitions, love, fear, and hatred. I was synthetically invulnerable to a point and felt an infinite distance between me and every other person on the planet by the time I was in kindergarten. I was told in third-grade that I possessed a twelfth-grade reading level, and was very mature for my age. I was also told I looked like I hated everyone, even my favorite teachers. I was told some of my stories were too dark and that I read too much.
As far as I knew, those were good things. Of course, I was uncertain. My parents, though, thought it was all well. They didn't express as much concern as they did annoyance at the looking like I hate everyone thing. Really, they just wish the teachers would talk about my grades. My grades were never brought up, though, because they were great.
The first time I'd ever drank was in sixth grade. My dad's computer was in the basement, and beneath it a cupboard. One of those cabinets had some peppermint schnapps in them. I'd drank a bit and screwed around on MySpace, played some RuneScape, all the while parousing a hidden tab of porn while my little avatar would have at a tree for some logs or whatever. Half the time I'd play RuneScape it was to watch porn. MySpace only interested me because it took socializing and made it into a quantifiable thing. Your popularity became a value rather than a quality. It seemed to make personality a tangible thing. It made figuring out how to remain invulnerable easier and faster. All you had to look at was the prettiest girls and most popular guys and you had a formula for success.
The next time I drank was in seventh grade. I'd taken up skateboarding, and was probably thirteen years old, going on fourteen. Girls and jocks alike digged skateboarders, so I was in the zone. I'd read about some skateboarder who was famous for skating infinitely better while drunk. I did a little research as to why that might be the case, cracked open my dad's bottle of schnapps and gave it a shot.
I'd never ollied so high. I immediately called Gabe, inviting him over to witness.
"Whoa! Holy shit dude! How did you do that?" Gabe was halfway amazed, halfway pissed because he still struggled getting the board fully airborne. I'd gotten at least a solid twenty-eight to thirty-something inches in the air, rising my knees to my chest and carrying myself for a good five feet at least forward.
"I'm drunk," I told him, exaggerating a bit.
"You drank?!"
"Yeah, just a bit of my dads liquor and smirnoff."
"
You idiot."
I didn't drink again until high-school. I'd tried, once or twice, to achieve the same affect again to skateboard, but couldn't. I didn't have the money or access to enough alcohol or know how to get it, so I gave up.
Going into freshman year, Timmy brought over a bottle of Hawkeye disguised as two bottles of water to Jackson's. Most of the gang were afraid of it, but Chandler, Timmy, and I downed the vodka in less than five minutes.
I'd known full well that alcohol kicked your inhibitions to the curb, but this night really showed the truth of it more vividly.
It felt like I depersonalized instantly. As if in those dark moments when my heart sank and I did it out of natural defense I had been inhibited from being happy, or making jokes. Whatever the alcohol had done, though was another ballgame. Timmy and I started playing catch with a dead rabbit. If that wasn't gross enough, we threw it at Steph and whoever was making out with her at the time, too. A whole lot of ridiculousness ensued, climaxing with nearly everyone puking out of the window and onto the rooftop. I managed to maintain the illusion of sobriety, though, only puking when I went outside with Caleb to smoke my first cigarette.
"Is that supposed to happen?" I asked.
"Yeah, usually everyone does their first time."
"That's disgusting." I said as I continued to drag on it.
Another thing I noticed about alcohol was that everyone liked making out under the influence of the stuff. Hanging out with girls transformed from sitting awkwardly watching movies to the chance of getting some action wherever the hell you might be able to drink. People with introverted, unappealing personalities became warm, friendly, outgoing strangers. Relationships started that probably never should have. Girls demanded sex. Spontaneous sex.
Halfway through freshman year I'd given up on practicing religion or following any bit of it. I'd prayed obsessively about my relationship but didn't get what I was asking for, and at the time I truly didn't know better. I hadn't even had sex with the girl because I wanted to wait. I decided I wouldn't be doing that shit ever again.
I wasn't as promiscuous as some, but I was more than I should've been. After high-school, I only got worse. Aside from several bouts of sobriety because of probation, I really didn't drink. I'd partake, but I'd grown to hate the stupidity of my actions on it. That is, until I started taking care of myself.
I'd followed a regimented workout routine and gotten abs, build up my muscles to be swollen but still lean. I had a baby-goatee, a short, messy-yet-preppy hair cut, and a cocky attitude. Girls wanted to be with me and I had an idea of why. I couldn't bring myself to do it, though. Sex to me, still meant vulnerability. I hadn't ever depersonalized for sex, unless you'd consider thinking about baseball depersonalizing, which I didn't. Sex was an intimate thing that I didn't want to share with just anyone, and still is. I wasn't interested in half of the girls I talked to and was turned off emotionally by the simplest of things.
It could've been a number of things, but it was probably the uncertainty. I only truly wanted to be with the girls who looked certain of what hey wanted. Most of the girls I talked to didn't. I'd assume it was because of my uncertainty. While they would try to read me for what I felt, wanted, or thought I'd have my mask of invulnerability on. It would either be a scowl, a look of distaste, or a look of uncertainty. Either way, the uncertainty was in my eyes. When I drank, that fell away. Uninhibited, I was a dog. I wasn't afraid to ask for what I wanted. I wasn't afraid to be immoral.
Kelsey was my best friend. So was Kristen. I had recently come to the conclusion that morals were worthless. Gabe had developed a pattern of going wherever the most freedom and benefits were, and he'd ended up with a girl who gave him the world after jumping around between several friends. Gabe and I had always had several characteristics in common, and the ability to use charisma, good deeds, a silver tongue and warmth paired with our good looks to our advantage.
Gabe would elude to using Halley like that until roughly that year. Two years later he died.
I'd seen that in Kelsey and felt absolutely no remorse for anything anymore. I took whatever she gave, took whatever anyone gave, and gave nothing back.
Kelsey and I had a bit of a thing when Kristen and I were also talking. There wasn't any sex involved at this time, but I wanted there to be. So after the night I brought the liquor over to Kristen's so we could fuck, I went and stayed with Kelsey. I fucked her too. I didn't feel bad about it because she did so much for me and clearly cared. I felt like a professional.
Even though she insisted she'd never give anyone head, just like she had insisted we were just friends, I woke up to her sucking me off. It felt like a token of rarity, not a single intimate thing about it.
I remembered another reason I'd started drinking. It was becauseI felt guilty. Even though 99% of the time I didn't feel anything special about sex, I still thought it was supposed to be. I dreaded the day someone would hit me with the, 'What are we?' To which I'd honestly have to reply, 'Absolutely nothing!'
Everyone wants to feel special. I felt vulnerable during sex because I got off on the idea of making someone else get off. If I didn't I felt like a failure. Girls always want to feel like the only one. Drinking made it easy for me to pretend that they were.
I lied to good people. Making myself invulnerable over the years had mad me cold, calculating, mean, and mad.
What I'd fancy about her for a moment is what I'd use to justify hating her the next. I got off on the realization of betrayal. It makes me sick to my stomach, now, but at the time I had spent so long turning myself into a monster that I had finally started becoming one if I wasn't already. Worse than that, it seemed no matter how far I had fallen because of my own sins, I'd find someone to help me believe I was a victim and provide me whatever I needed.
I felt rotten inside, even though I'd learned how to appear unphased to everyone else. I'd use the guilt to push everyone that cared about me away and lied to myself that they were just as bad as me.
I hadn't cared about hurting anyone but Kristen, and as soon as she started struggling, I convinced myself that she was rotten so I could walk away from it.
It didn't work for long, and within a couple weeks I'd fallen into fit of depression so heinous that I got back into partying and harder drugs.
I didn't believe in anything. My mind and faith were idle, but they wouldn't be for long. I'd fallen the farthest I ever had from God.
I didn't even believe at all anymore, until one night came that would haunt me for years to come.
That night, I might've died. Sometimes I still wonder if I did.
That night turned into a morning that would change me forever.
That night, I, an unrepentant sinner, heard the voice of God invite me into the eternal.
The thing is though...
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