Author's Note

Of anything I have ever written, this has taken me the longest.

I had no idea where to start. I gave up multiple times. Maybe these stones were better left unturned. Maybe writing this would dig up too much. Maybe it would dig up comically little. I became quite comfortable with the fact that maybe this was not worth writing at all… for years.

There were so many chapters in this story that trying to write anything conclusive felt nearly impossible. I knew I had no intention of opening up a whole new chapter, but I also knew that I had to figure out how to be done with it, someway or somehow. I began thinking that, maybe, instead of a chapter, epilogue, or that sequel that nobody wants (trust me), I would write something that would act as my own personal Deus ex Machina to finally resolve this situation and put it to rest along with these writing analogies: an author’s note.

So without further ado, here is my reflection on and framework for a story that I went full Dickens on and made as long as possible for reasons that were not apparent at the time.

It is a story in which I know I am a villain.

And it’s about time I own up to it.

.

.

.

Over the past few years, I have put a lot of work into letting myself be hurt.

No, I don’t mean I am learning how to get myself hurt. I mean that I am learning how to be with my hurt, something I always used to bury as deep as possible. I used to think acknowledging my pain made it too real and worsened its severity. The words “that hurts me” or “you hurt me” did not exist in my vocabulary. I did not have the words to say it because I had never let myself feel it, which usually caused more trouble, and more hurt not being felt, and more words not being said.

Repeat. And repeat some more.

All that changed after some therapy and a healthy dose of soul-searching. I got more and more comfortable being hurt. Chilling with it. Getting to know it. Reaching to the bottom of it and pulling it out of hiding from those deep dark corners of my soul and looking that bastard in the face.

Far easier said than done, might I add.

That bastard turned out to be a lot of things, ugly things. They were parts of me that I had no idea how to admit without self-deprecation. It took me quite a while to realize that confronting evidence of your faults was not inherently negative, and therefore it does not inherently require a joke at your expense to soften its blow. In fact, the only thing you need to soften self-criticism is the same kindness and understanding you would give others. This is particularly salient advice for those who tend to be far too hard on themselves, like I am.

Alexa, play “My Own Worst Enemy” by Lit.

What I have learned from letting myself be hurt is that, much like the iconic song above says, I had a habit of kicking the living shit out of me. I left a lot of emotions unacknowledged in various corners of my mind until they rotted and spoiled weeks and months and even years of my life. That I knew, though. Emotional fermentation came as no surprise to me.

What shocked me was how much I had unconsciously hurt others.

Namely one.

This author’s note is about and for that one.

There was a lot of hurt on both sides of our story, but I have never held myself accountable for my side before, and I have certainly never apologized for it. And, believe me, I have made myself the victim in every previous telling of this story. Every single one. And, quite frankly, that sucks.

So I think an apology is long overdue.

Now, I urge anyone reading this to proceed to this next part with caution. A lot of caution, for some of you…

Apologizing to someone who hurt you is tricky business.

I encourage anyone who has felt that they have endured abuse - emotional and/or physical - to not entertain even for a moment that they need to apologize to their abuser. I would be mortified if my words were twisted in such a way. I want to be abundantly clear that all I have said and will continue to say pertains only to instances where the harm done would fall under Newton’s Third Law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

There was no imbalance of power between the two of us. There was no abuse. The pain pendulum swung back and forth equally between two equally immature idiots.

What I have to apologize for, and why this author’s note is entirely necessary, is that, for too long, I did not see how equal the opposition was. It was always there, but it was subtle. It was quiet. I did not see my actions as carefully disguised temper tantrums, and I did not see the manipulation of which I was capable. I was blind to how I bottled up my healthy and normal reactions to rejection, gave them a shake, and waited for them to blow.

That is the beauty of growing up, I guess.

You look at who you once were and those bottles you shook and think, “...dear God, what was I thinking???” You look back at all those nights you spent sharing the hot goss with your friends in a Sonic drive thru. You hear yourself making you the hero in every tale you tell. You hear your friends being furious on your behalf, reassuring you that you were always in the right. You watch yourself listening to Mayday Parade while following the raindrops rolling down a window in your mom’s Camry. You hear every joke that you made at your own expense. You see those crystal clear signs that someone was not interested, and you wince as you remember how you saw those red flags and grinned, just knowing red was your best color.

What was I thinking? Spoiler alert: I wasn’t. My best color is lilac. Red rarely does me any favors. I wish I could have seen that, and I wish I had just left and saved myself nearly seven years of wearing a color that washed me out.

Seven years… that seems like an accurate time frame. That is at least how long my side of the story lasted. I have known this person since I was very small, but we only became friends in our mid-teens. I think it started with an easy Sunday morning acquaintanceship, and it probably ended the last time we spoke. So I think that is in the ballpark of seven years. Some of high school, most of college, and a concerned, concise phone call about a friend nearly two years ago.

I think back to those seven years often, especially when I scroll past a playlist I made in their honor; it's truly some of my best work, creatively speaking. It has the ebbs and flows of all my feelings from their innocent inception to their shitty finale. The good, the bad, and the humiliating… all of it.

I could write about all of that today, but, this being an author’s note, I have no intention of reiterating all of it. We were literally children; I will not make this a laundry list of crimes we committed against each other in our youth. That seems just as juvenile as we were, even though I am sure you are waiting on juicy details. There are many details, some juicy and some not, and I will be naming only a few.

For starters, I treated this boy like shit.

This is really what this is all about, the context of how I voluntarily backed myself between a rock and a hard place, and how, when that position became uncomfortable, I blamed the person I claimed to love for it. Probably without him knowing it, I blamed him for all of it, and I blamed him for nearly a decade.

I poured all of that blame into that playlist, which used to be titled "It's Complicated" after one of my favorite songs at the time by A Day to Remember. I gave that song a listen while writing this to remember how all of it felt, and, yikes. The song is still incredible, don’t get me wrong, but it supported my idea that what we had was complex, nuanced, and complicated.

God, did it feel complicated.

But I made it that way.

Me.

That was all me.

In reality, it was all very simple: I loved him, and he loved me… but not like that.

I should have rolled the credits right then and there, but, alas, I did not.

Somehow, we grew even closer after a conversation in which we finally opened up about my feelings and his lack thereof.

After that chat, we continued talking… constantly. We talked everyday about everything and nothing. We talked in between classes. We talked at 1am. We did so much talking. About this, about that, about him, about her, about us. He talked about me. He told me that I inspired him. He told me that the way I loved people was Christ-like. He told me he had never known compassion like mine. He told me I was brilliant, and he told me I was kind. He told me how his college friends heard so much about me and how amazing I was that one day in the cafeteria they asked “...why don’t you just marry her?”

Why don’t you just marry… me.

It was an honest question I had swallowed for years, but the passing of those years eventually became my answer. Year after year of growing closer and closer but never close enough, and day after day of saying “Love You” at the end of our calls, I became more and more convinced that my waiting was in vain. Many people encouraged me to stay, and to wait, but I knew the waiting would never end until I ended it myself.

And end it I did.

I ripped our friendship out from under him without having the dignity of telling him to his face that it was simply time for me to go. He was my best friend and confidant, and as far as he knew I was done with him. I left him in the dark, and I believed I had every right to do so.

Ironically, years before, I blamed him for doing just that.

This era, between our conversation and my leaving, is when things got dicey. After we discussed how we felt about each other, I blamed him for not telling me his side of things sooner, after I found out that he had known how I felt all along. I blamed him for telling me every intimate detail of his feelings for other girls; I had a right at the time to blame him for that last bit, no question. I blamed him for using that tactic as a means of letting me down easy when, eventually, he admitted that that was exactly what he was doing. I blamed him for being hurtful and careless while I had been oh so careful to keep my mouth shut in order to avoid making him feel uncomfortable and ruining our friendship.

Letting me down easy.

Years ago, I would have said that word - easy - with the heaviest sarcasm. It was never easy for me to hear any of that. But it was truly the easier option for him, an immature and selfish but ultimately well-intentioned option. In hindsight, all he did was try to not directly hurt me and keep a friend who he always said knew him better than he knew himself.

How can I possibly blame him for that motivation at that age?

Older and hopefully a tad wiser, I now see that maybe I expected too much of a seventeen year old. But I also see why it would be equally unfair to demand more of my younger self. I was a baby, too, and my capacity for empathy and patience got me in trouble often. Unfortunately, it led to some pretty manipulative behavior on my part, too.

In this era, I found myself nearly becoming a female incel. Do you know how embarrassing that is? If you don't, look it up. It's... tragic. And, hey, I do not completely deserve that title. I do not hate the opposite sex, and as far as I know I belong to no online communities dedicated to that hate. But I had all of the self-pity. The self-loathing. The "woe is me" perspective. The entitlement to his affection after the “hard work” I had put into being a doormat.

I was bitter.

It has been a challenge to make nice with the person I was during this time. She was mean. She was patronizing and condescending. She did exactly what she knew would get praise and fed her ego with it. She did everything she could to make him need her and want her, because if he needed and wanted her, he had to love her - right? She made her schedule open to him without question or reservation so everyone knew how heavy her cross was to bear. She relished her martyrdom. She made everyone pity her and her unrequited love, and she loved every second of the attention she wasn't getting from the right person. All the while, she thought herself a saint.

And she made sure everyone around her agreed.

She was a silent sufferer in front of him, though. She was quite proud of that fact. Very, very proud. She said nothing about what she wanted and how she wanted it as her ultimate sacrifice to keep him happy and comfortable, but she forgot one thing.

She had, has, and always will have something to say (clearly), and her not saying anything knocked her head over heels off her rocker.

Every day that she kept her mouth shut, she soured. She dragged this story of her own creation out as long as possible to hold onto her final shred of hope that maybe, just maybe, she would win. She had reduced her dearest friendship into a vicious game she could not bear to lose, and losing would hurt worse than all of this effort, she knew wholeheartedly. She had to win. Her silence and patience had to pay off. She would persevere. She would prove her intuition wrong. She would prove her insecurities wrong. She would prove that she, and all of this, had been worth it all along.

It had to have been worth it.

But more and more, she began to resent all the calls and the compliments and the emerging realization that they would never amount to anything other than an excellent playlist. That resentment kept her furious. Fuming. It kept her absolutely irate. The fury, which she largely felt at herself, took a year or two to dissolve into grief. For a friendship, for lost time, and for her pride. It left her a complete mess.

I would like to think she had a character arc.

She, and the messes she made, make no sense to me now, but I would not be who I am today without them. She needed to lose her own game to understand why she played it in the first place. She needed to learn what love was and what it wasn’t, and she had to figure out how to love herself.

She did, eventually.

One day, years ago, I changed the title of our playlist from "It's Complicated" to "Oh Well". It’s still just as angsty as it was before, but now with a more peaceful, well-rounded title. Because that is how I think about this story now: oh well.

I accept it. All of it. I am so embarrassed by it, but it is mine. Oh. Well.

People say change is inevitable, but I disagree. Change is very conscious, and it is a hell of a lot of work. I have known my fair share of characters who have never put in that work the entire time I have known them. I believe this is Newton’s First Law: an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

This wasn’t supposed to be a physics lesson, but here we are.

The unbalanced force that finally kicks your butt into changing is usually only found within. Maybe it’s shame. Maybe it’s confusion. Maybe it’s empathy. Who knows? It’s different for everybody. The good news is that objects in motion stay in motion, so once you start changing, it’s hard to stop.

Thank God.

As much as I hate my prior actions, I am proud to tell you all that I am not that person anymore. I am much kinder to myself and, by extension, to others. I use my words. I am secure enough in myself that it is hard to recognize who I once was sometimes. Then again, sometimes it is all too easy. But, with all of the work I have put into myself with the help of a therapist called Marty, I cannot imagine ever putting myself in that situation again.

When I pass a rock and a hard place, I calmly keep on walking instead of running at breakneck speed into it.

I've been told that the man I owe an apology to literally never thinks about what happened, and that is honestly good for him. I’ve been told he got over it all nearly immediately. I’ve heard that I rarely cross his mind. I’ve been assured that, for him, this has been easy.

As for me, not so much.

I have mourned all the ways I could have written our story differently many, many times. The different paths I could have taken. The different plot points I could have abandoned. It's taken me years to learn that I need to forgive myself for not only what I did to him, but what I did to me. I hurt myself unconsciously for many, many years, and that is a pill I have found quite difficult to swallow.

So I guess this apology is for the both of us, sort of.

As much as I have learned from this, I did think that, as time passed, I would realize that what I felt was not actually love. It had to have been a need for validation, attention, etc. And I know twenty-five is still basically childhood in the grand scheme of time, but nothing has managed to prove to me that the core of what I felt was anything other than love. At this point, I think it was real. I handled it beyond poorly, but I think it was the real thing. It has morphed into different forms over the years, mainly into fondness, but it is still there.

The fact that it is still there is exactly why, after all these years, I am still so sorry.

For him in particular, this may be an uncomfortable read. I used to despise the idea of making him uncomfortable, but now I don’t mind it so much. He can handle it. Discomfort can do wonders for the soul, sometimes. And, at the end of the day, I think it would do everyone a world of good to hear, without an ounce of expectation, that they have been loved. Even if that love was imperfect, even if it was felt by a villain, and even if it is written at the end of her author’s note…

I think it would be nice to hear.

.

.

.

I do have to at least wonder how this will be received. Maybe it will cause a smile, or maybe a cringe. Maybe it will cause a perplexed and lengthy phone call to a mutual friend. Maybe it will end up in the famous group chat. Who's to say?

Regardless of where this ends up, I feel as if I can now finally lay my villain origin story to rest.

So, here it lies, in all its odious glory.

RIP