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Last years' Resolutions! or what happened last year and why we're happy it's gone
Seaborn111
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So i figured i'd start a thread to share those things of '08 we're saying good riddance to. Those things you did that you either regret, dislike or honestly didn't think you could do...
LET ME START US OFF!
i've got a twofer. one leading to the other.
First mistake, literally of the new year (hey, midnight jan 1st 2008!)
I got back together with my Ex-girlfriend. not terrible in and of itself, but the timing couldn't have been worse. Was just about to move, had just broken up with my current G/f, she had just (the day before) broken up with her hubby. you know, these things happen.
Turned out ok though, after a little break.
Second mistake!
my closest friend from college got married last year. we had always been very close, bordering on fucking married ourselves.
so what happens when her husband goes to iraq for 12 months? she comes and stays with me in another state for a week and we do things that should not have been done. whoops.
in my defense she was really attractive.
that's a terrible defense.
***super quick edit, mistake number three
I bought the probot CD. my bad.
so yea, story time if you've got em!
LET ME START US OFF!
i've got a twofer. one leading to the other.
First mistake, literally of the new year (hey, midnight jan 1st 2008!)
I got back together with my Ex-girlfriend. not terrible in and of itself, but the timing couldn't have been worse. Was just about to move, had just broken up with my current G/f, she had just (the day before) broken up with her hubby. you know, these things happen.
Turned out ok though, after a little break.
Second mistake!
my closest friend from college got married last year. we had always been very close, bordering on fucking married ourselves.
so what happens when her husband goes to iraq for 12 months? she comes and stays with me in another state for a week and we do things that should not have been done. whoops.
in my defense she was really attractive.
that's a terrible defense.
***super quick edit, mistake number three
I bought the probot CD. my bad.
so yea, story time if you've got em!
</bush>
It's impossible for us to without a doubt prove the non-existence of God. We just have to take it on faith that he's imaginary..
Seaborn111 on
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2008 was a hell of a year for me. Both the best times and by far the worst, and definitely some of the most...formative in my 24 years have happened in the past year.
I don't even know where to start, because I feel to really explain how much it's meant to me, I need to provide some context.
I've always been someone who is often pretty introverted and found it difficult to really 'connect' with people, and have never really had many true friends (not trying to sound melodramatic, but right now I'm not even sure I have any...I'll get to that later). It's not that I don't like talking with people, because I do. It's just that that vast majority of people don't interest me, to put it bluntly, and that connection seems to happen so rarely. I don't mean to sound like I have a superiority complex or something (I'm more likely guilty of the opposite, if anything), but so many people just seem so...shallow and self-centered, oblivious to anything that doesn't immediately affect themselves. Then again, I'm guilty of being selfish at times, and maybe I often see others this way because I've surrounded myself with people who are this way.
In highschool, I started using drugs; at first just smoking pot and drinking, then mushrooms, acid and ecstasy a few times, and by far the worst, coke. I think I see now that a big reason I did was for the social aspect, to feel like...part of a group I guess. I just wish I could've seen at the time how stupid and necessary that was.
Not surprisingly, I've also had some times of pretty bad depression since highschool, and especially in the past couple years. It's never been too serious; I've never attempted suicide or anything (although I'd be lying if I said I never thought about it), more just like a general inability to feel 'good' about my life, to put it simply. I think much of it has been because of drug use and effects on brain chemistry more than anything. As you might know, though, this can easily become a 'vicious cycle' kind of thing, and it definitely did for me.
Fast forward a few years to the end of 2007.
A 'friend' that I knew from highschool who had moved away got in touch with me and told me and told me he wanted to rent a place nearby for awhile. I had just got kicked out of my parent's house (for drug related reasons; they've known since highschool, but I was being an asshole and we were fighting a lot) so I stupidly thought this would be a good idea. I say stupid because there's a reason I put quotation marks around the word friend above. The guy was a dealer, and I knew it; I had been getting shit from him occasionally for the past couple years, and it's pretty obvious now that the biggest reason he was still in contact with me or kept up any pretense of friendship was largely because I knew enough people in the area for him to sell to.
So this goes on for a few months, most of which was characterized by me sitting in the apartment alone for days or weeks at a time while he was gone scoring or selling more shit. This was by far the worst period of drug use for me as well, and in fact last new years eve I think I might have almost OD'ed; I had drank about 6-8 beers, smoked who knows how much pot, then ate a gram or two of shrooms and a pill of X (that probably either wasn't or was cut heavily with meth) and did about a gram of coke, all over the course of a few hours. I remember suddenly pouring sweat and feeling light headed, then stumbling to bathroom and puking. I remember my last conscious thought as I passed out a little while later being that I should probably lie on my stomach in case I vomited while asleep. Definitely not one of the prouder moments in my life.
Anyways, this guy turns out to be pretty dumb and ends up selling some shit to an informant. In early April, I happened to be with him in the vehicle when he was arrested, and it wasn't pretty. Several police pointed weapons at us, told us to get on the ground, and cuffed us. I was then taken aside, un-cuffed, and told I was not being arrested or charged with anything, while he was driven off. I then spoke with two DCI agents, who I cooperated with to the best of my ability in the interest of retaining my anal virginity. To date, this was the last time I have heard about any of this, although I have since learned that in late August this guy was sentenced to several years in prison.
Needless to say, that I spent a large part of 2008 wondering if I was going to be arrested, and felt extremely anxious and depressed nearly every day, while being very conscious of the fact that I've brought all of this shit down on myself. Believe me, you don't need to tell me how fucking stupid I've been. I quit using drugs the day this happened in April and have been clean since, although I started drinking pretty heavily.
This was also when I realized that the 'friends' I had gathered over the years were…not very good friends, to say the least. Since I've quit using, I've heard from them about enough times to count on one hand, and more than one of those times was to try and borrow some money or my Xbox. I would say that I have at least two friends that are more genuine than those, but they both live about 1000 miles away, and we only talk a couple times a year…
So, in the middle of all this I realize I need to try and keep moving, and took a job as a cook at a local restaurant in May. Things keep going the same way for awhile, working all day then going home to my parents and drinking myself into oblivion.
Then, this girl started working there as a waitress. At first, I didn't really notice her. I was in the worst phase of depression I'd ever had, and was pretty drawn into myself. But she actually approached me after work one night to play some darts and have a drink, so I did. We spent the next week or so going out after work, having drinks and kind of getting to know one another. Then, she told me her parents were gone for a few days and asked if I'd like to come out to her house. I said yeah, of course.
Now, here I need to be clear. Although I had some experience before, I had never had sex or been in a relationship. To be honest with myself, I think this was another source of the depression I had been feeling. As I found out, sex really isn't a big deal, but that's not easy to see for someone who's 24 and never had it before.
And although we didn't actually have sex that night (not for lack of opportunity; I slept in her bed and we did plenty of other stuff, I was just to too nervous and/or drunk to actually fuck) we did a couple nights after that at my house. We began to spend a lot of time together soon after this and as I got to know her better, I found that we shared a lot in common. Similar taste in music, books, movies, and games, and somewhat similar personalities (both kind of introverted and a little misanthropic). I realized I was more attracted to her than any girl I'd ever met, and told her exactly that. I also told her that I'd never been in a relationship before (but not that I'd never had sex) and that I really wanted this to work out. She was the first ask where the relationship was going, and reciprocated the feelings of attraction and a desire for something more than just 'casual'.
I was told her openly early on about the above situation, and how I'd been depressed and in a shitty place in life. She told me she was in a somewhat similar place, having quit using drugs a earlier in the year, was drinking heavily by herself, and that she had recently broken up with an ex-boyfriend who she had been with for seven years (she was 22, so since 15) 'off and on' and had been living with for a while after highschool. He also had apparently been a dealer and had introduced her to drugs (coke and meth she said…). I made a big mistake here and didn't ask anymore about any of this, assuming it hadn't been a good situation, and that she would tell me if it was important.
Things were moving pretty fast at this point. Within about two weeks, I went out to her parents to have some beers and meet them, and about 4-5 weeks after that; she came with me to a family gathering/cook-out thing several hundred miles away. We were spending about 4-5 days a week together, many of those she would spend the night several days in a row. She gave plenty of signals that she felt very attracted to me, saying things like how happy she was we met, how much she loved being with me, even phrases like 'if you ever break up with me' and 'falling in love', and squeezing me when laying on the couch together and saying 'mine'. Generally just giving me an impression that she felt as strongly about her as I did, all of which I reciprocated. So, I think it's fair to say that there was some emotional attachment on my part.
Things went on like this for a couple months, and the summer came to an end. We had both been planning to go to the local community college in the fall, and since we shared similar interests, ended up with three classes together. Then, about a month into the semester, she started communicating and coming over less, which is understandable as the courses were getting more difficult, until abruptly she stopped completely. She also had been missing class a lot, so I tried calling several times, with no answer, and eventually sent a email that basically said, 'look, I don't know if anything's wrong, but it seem like you're forcing us to break up, and I don't know why'. She responded with something like 'I just don't know what to say to you right now, so not talking was easier. I am feeling lost and not sure what I'm doing anymore, please don't think it's you.'
A day or two later she was in class, and I thanked her for the reply, and asked if we could talk over lunch. We did, and she told me that she wasn't sure about being in a relationship right now, or 'settling down and having to worry about someone else', and that she 'didn't expect me to wait for her.' She also told for the first time that she had only been broken up with her ex for a month when we met, and that some 'fucked up things' had happened, and that for the last couple years with him she had just wanted to be single. I didn't know what to make of all this, and responding by acknowledging that things had probably moved too fast, and said that I'd still like to try to make it work. I think I kind of just 'panicked' at the thought of us breaking up.
I haven't spoken to her once since then. She also stopped coming to college completely, despite having just recently paid off her tuition (not to mention books and whatnot).
The first few weeks were really hard, and I fell into a pretty bad state again, drinking really heavily, which led to another idiotic decision on my part. One night, I had drank a little too much, and got the idea that I would drive by her house to see if she was even there still. Well, it was raining out and I was driving on a slick, muddy road. You can see where this is going. I ended up in a ditch against a telephone poll, with the car (my parent's actually; I hadn't finished paying them for it) pretty much totaled. I called the cops to report an accident, and was arrested for DUI. In the end, I'm just thankful that I didn't wreck into anyone else, and wasn't hurt myself. It could've been a lot worse.
Well, this didn't stop me from thinking about all of this and after emotions settled a little, I realized that breaking up with her was probably best, for both of us. I think I had been starting to see her as an 'answer' to my depression, and that we probably both need to be happy without someone else. I would've liked to try and give a relationship with her another try, though, and I sent another message to her explaining this, with no reply.
Honestly, I think what hurts the most isn't even that I'm not with her anymore. I mean yeah, the idea that I'll never be with her again hurts, really bad. But what is worse is that someone who I felt I connected with more than anyone I'd ever met will never even speak to me again, and I really don't even know why. It's just confusing to me. The only reasons I could see for never talking to someone again like this would be if they cheated or were abusive. The worst I did in the relationship was respond to her incommunicativeness in kind during the last week or so. She also still has one of my books that I let her borrow, which I'd like to have back. I've been thinking about leaving her a message on her phone, but I'm not even sure what to say anymore.
…
Whew…still here? I think that about all I can say about 2008. Like I said, it was a hell of a year. Some really shitty things happened, to say the least. Say what you will, though, but my time with this girl was by far the happiest I've known. The single best memory of my life (so far) was laying outside with her one night during the summer, and watching like a hundred shooting stars (after having some fucking awesome sex).
I finished the last semester with pretty good grades, and have been trying to move on as best I can. I haven't been feeling as depressed as much lately, although sometimes I still can't shake the feeling that I'll never meet another girl I can feel the same way about. I can hope I will, but that's about all I can do for now. At least I should be much better prepared for it if it does happen.
And 2009 is already shaping up to be a much better year. I have really gotten a kick in the ass from life on more than one occasion the last year, and have finally woken up and seen how stupid I've been. Seriously, talk about new year's resolutions; there's not much I don't want to change about my life right now, or haven't already been trying to change. So, here's to a new year, and all that it might bring.
...
Something here does not fit.
Whoa... you know, it always amazes me (especially evident on these forums) when I read a well constructed, thoughtful and generally intelligent post dealing with what is essentially, absolute misery... misery almost solely perpetrated on the posters by themselves.
It's like... don't you realise you actually have some talent? Why waste it, why let anyone stop you from using it? I know this story is you basically promising not to live your life they you have been doing it. I really hope you do.
As for myself well, I wish I could say good riddance to my knee rehab... but it turns out I am in for further reconstructions (including a shoulder recon yay) and years of reduced mobility. So I guess my resolution is to keep a laser focus on my health and come back better than ever... which will take some doing.