Sexing While Awkward - A Letter to Teenage Me

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Not Alone

This is in response to the too-many people who are wrestling with their own brains, resigned to their solitude. To those who have opened up about their struggles, and to those who lock them so deeply they can barely feel the jagged edges. You are lonely, but you're not alone.

As I've gotten older, I've noticed it takes me longer to recover from system shocks. An evening of drinking will leave me nastily hungover where I could once pop back with a shower and a stick of gum. An afternoon of crying, similarly, will fill my head with cotton and my eyes with dust for the remainder of the day. It's probably best for my health that I try to minimize both activities, but the ideal doesn't necessarily change the reality. Life is hard, anxiety is hard, depression is freaking hard. There are sneaky brain weasels hiding in the creases of your life, waiting to pull that tripwire a little tighter. The sneaky brain weasels are cunning - they know every doubt that flickers through your mind, and they're armed with butterfly nets and magnifying glasses.

Sometimes my mind feels larger than my skull, and I need lie down outside and be absorbed by the grass. Sometimes the world hits me so hard that I feel the edges of myself curling in. Sometimes my bedroom is my only haven, and sometimes it's my self-guarded prison cell. I relish the quiet hum of loneliness as I stretch my arms to press against the invisible, seemingly-impermeable walls of my bubble. I stare at unsent text messages before deleting them. I stare at unwashed dishes before crawling back into the safety of my blanket nest.

Please note that I am fine. Not necessarily always Fine, but fine. I have a great support system and a great therapist. I am extraordinarily lucky for both. Not everyone is as lucky as I am, and not everyone has the ability to talk about it. And that's why we must talk about it as much as we can. Talk about mental health, and the struggles we face. Talk about our hopes, our sadness, our desperation. Empty our darkness into the ether until we're not even sure where ours ends and the worlds' begins. If we spilled our thoughts the way wrists spill blood, we would all be better off. We, the anxious, the depressed, the flat-out sad, the past-the-breaking-point, the weakest links, the stronger-than-we-know.

We are lonely, but we are not alone.

Reasons

In my sophomore year of high school, I ran for the regional executive board of the youth group I was involved in. Since eighth grade, I had attended every event, often traveling over an hour on my own. Mostly a loner within my high school, USY comprised 95% of my social life. I had been planning this campaign for over a year, along with my following campaign for presidency of the organization. I made posters, wrote a speech, and handed out plastic harmonicas that said "remember that your vote is key, vote Gabrielle for SA/TO VP" (I've always been a sucker for the wordplay). It was the big day. I gave my speech with as much confidence as 15-year-old me could muster - which, in retrospect, was likely far too much or not nearly enough.

And...I lost.

The election, much like most others, was a popularity contest, and popularity has never been a currency I trade in. I was crushed. Devastated. I considered calling my mom and asking her to pick me up from the convention early. I wrote a sad poem (I think I still have it. You're not reading it.).

Fast forward a few months. SADD, an organization I was also highly involved in, was organizing a first-ever Massachusetts Student Advisory Board. My SADD adviser had basically written me the recommendation before I even approached her with interest. I made it in; I was one of 10-15 high school students from across the state picked to serve.

And you know what? It was, to date, one of the best experiences of my life. I remained involved in USY for the remainder of my high school career (and even beyond, as staff). I still loved USY with all my heart and spent an inordinate amount of bandwidth on it. But I also had the time for this completely new project. Senior year, I helped plan the national SADD conference. I organized and ran leadership workshops. I got the chance to learn and grow in ways I hadn't even known existed. I met Steven Tyler as his limo pulled up at a hotel we were preparing. There's no way I would have had the time or energy for these new experiences if I had actually won my election. Oddly, the thing I had wanted so badly would likely have kept me more within my comfort zone.

I think about this a lot when things don't go my way. If I hadn't gotten laid off, I wouldn't have been able to spend the summer learning about the solar industry and climbing on roofs all over the state. If I hadn't been dumped at a certain time in a particularly devastating way, I wouldn't have met my next partner and embarked on an adventure greater than I knew possible.

If, if, if. In reality, I can't say for sure that any one of these things lead to the others. I can't say that the option I was deprived of wouldn't have been better in the end. I really don't know that. And I'm definitely not of the mind that "everything happens for a reason". However, sometimes I need to believe in Reasons. Sometimes I need to believe in new opportunities rising from ashes. I'm not a particularly optimistic person - I often assume things are going to go catastrophically wrong for me. But it gives me a warmth in the innards of my lizard-brain to think that maybe, just maybe, there are surprises ahead yet.

Stock photo Gabby says "expectations are useless!"