Josiah and I moved into a new place for my Junior year. It was a quaint two bedroom duplex just a few miles from campus. Going from living with four other guys in The Retreat, that summer with nine in The Brew, and then down to us two took a little bit of getting used to. It was definitely much quieter and a hell of a lot cleaner, but held a little sense of loneliness to me.
Within the first few weeks back from Carolina Point I felt like I had told the story from that summer a hundred times, and each time it was just as draining. Every time I told it I figured people were seeing me as a sob story as if I was just trying to play a victim card. At the time I didn’t care because every time I talked about it, I was more talking to myself than I was to whoever asked about it. I kept trying to find the problems, where I could’ve gone wrong or how I could’ve done better, but no matter how much I talked through it, nothing changed. I know my friends got tired of hearing the story when others asked, I didn’t care. A part of me also felt that if I just worked my ass off in everything, that it’d somehow magically go away, so that’s what I did.
One of the first things I did however was sit down and talk with my Young Life team, I made them aware of what had gone on over the summer and how I thought my attitude would change, asking for help through that time. School and Young Life were the ways to get out of my head a little, so I threw myself into both. Most days consisted of me going to class from mornings to the afternoon then immediately getting ready for Young Life club or Campaigners on Mondays and Tuesdays. My free time during the day was usually spent at the Media office where I worked at school. I quit working there a few months later though because there was a lack of work being given to me. I had a goal to outperform everyone I had a chance to compete against. In class I worked to have the best photo and video projects. In Young Life I wanted to meet more high schoolers and bring more than any of my teammates. Socially, I wanted to be wanted and invited more than anyone else. I’d consistently force myself to try and be nice and make friends, in a lot of cases it was obvious. And I think my lack of genuine care was evident to most, and that’s what ended up pushing me away from a lot of them. When the work ran slow or was all finished I would play video games. It seemed like the only thing in my life that had a clear and attainable objective, and I craved that.
Pretty quickly, video games became my safe haven. I didn’t have to search for approval from anyone when the Playstation was on. The achievements were done on my own time and seemed to be endless. I felt safe playing video games. About this same time I started talking to a girl I’d met over the summer. One day shed called asking about what happened. When I told her about it, she had a response which was much different than the others, there was some sense of assurance that she had towards me. Something in her voice and in the way she talked stood out, so we just kept talking. An hour here and there throughout the day, I didn’t feel a need to impress her and there was no immediate fear in talking to her, we just talked and I loved it. Whenever we talked, it was the highlight of my day, more than anything, it brought me peace because I knew someone was listening. She lived in Kentucky and went to UK so this made me hesitant to express feelings since it was long distance. But after a few weeks I ended up telling her how I felt. The night I did it was kinda funny, it was a night after YL club and I’d told my team I was going to do it. They’d all hyped me up and were texting in our group asking for updates. She and I were on the phone for my drive back from club just having our regular random conversation, I wasn’t sure how I was going to bring it up. I’d gotten home and sat in my car talking to her for a while, our conversation came to a halt and that awkward silence set in while I battled with wether or not to tell her. She even said something like, “do you have anything else to tell me?” or something like that, I don’t remember exactly, I was nervous. But whatever it was, I said no, and we hung up. I went inside and started getting ready for bed and texted my team to tell them I chickened out. But the girls on my team weren’t having it and told me to call her and tell her. So I did. I called her and she answered with a confused, “Hello?” wondering why I was calling back. I felt like I was back in middle school talking to my crush when I said, “ok bear with me…” where I told her that I’d loved talking to her over the past few weeks and that I had feelings for her and would love to get to know her better. I don’t remember her exact response, but it was along the lines of, “I’ve loved talking too, I like you too.” If you asked her though she’d tell it much better than I. But either way, we both laughed about it and said goodnight. I went to the living room with some victory air punches to tell Josiah, he was excited for me.
Things had finally seemed to be turning around after the summer, school was going easy and Young Life was growing consistently. That fall break, I made the trip to Kentucky to visit her too. I stayed with some of her guy friends and it was the first time since the summer that she and I had seen each other. We kissed that first night and laid in her room talking til 1 am. It was the first time I’d felt safe in a relationship, especially after the friends with benefits relationship I had with another girl back in Columbia that past year. I didn’t feel the guilt or need to hide anything like I had done before, there were butterflies for this girl and I was more than ready to work towards a relationship with her. That whole weekend I got to meet her friends and began to build those new friendships, but more importantly, the relationship between the two of us. That weekend, she and I solidified our relationship and started dating, I left Kentucky with confidence in being able to build a relationship with her. I had feelings for her and had hopes of growing the head-over-heels feelings that I’d hoped for since high school.
I believed in working towards everything, the idea that with the right amount of work, effort and repetition, anything could be done. This went for my friendships too. Though I was emotionally unavailable for most, I figured with time and acts of service, I’d be able to maintain and grow my relationships. But more often than not, my friendships felt like a chore and in turn, I ended up losing much of the desire I had to be around the people I loved. Over time I spent more and more time alone.
A few months passed with those ideas, Black Ops 4 had dropped and now a majority of my free time was spent on the camo grind (yeah I cringe a little that I said that). By this point in November, I was spending little to no time with my friends, including Josiah. I turned down repeated opportunities to hang out with friends and ignored numerous invites. I felt safer by myself and more secure when I was in control. This continued into December as my YL team dynamic quickly deteriorated along with my attitude towards them. We fought and bickered consistently, and I knowingly hurt feelings with no remorse. I just wanted to feel like I was right. My anger and frustration slowly bled into my friendships and into my relationship. And when Christmas Eve rolled around the girl and I had broken up. I lost my temper with my family while I was home and was careless in my speech to them. Christmas 2018 was an emotional breakout that had been bottled for over a year.
Mom, Dad and my sister left for a wedding in Colorado the day after Christmas and I was left home alone out of my own choice. I knew I needed people around so I asked Josiah, Goose and my YL teammate Nathan to come up and stay in Brevard for a few days. My thinking of accomplishing whatever I wanted through time and effort now had me attempting to confront my emotions with the same mindset. Which of course didn’t work.
The guys came to Brevard to be my temporary therapists, I loved the three of them more than most at this time and they knew I was hurting. But nonetheless we wanted to make those few days as fun as we could. It’d been raining in Brevard for a week or so and wasn’t stopping anytime soon so there was little to do outside. But when the rain would stop we’d go out to adventure a little. We ended up all having a great time and I was able to process some feelings I’d been holding in for a while. When the guys left, I still felt stick with that bottle of feelings. Unready to open that bottle, I took my little sorry ass to New Years at Wingy Gap.
I’d saved up a few hundred bucks to go to Kentucky for New Years and ended up using that money to go to Windy Gap when a few friends hit me up to go. I was still feeling uneasy about Young Life at that point but it was still a safe haven for me and was a place I’d have friends. I only knew a few people that were there and even fewer that I was comfortable talking to. I fully intended to spend those few days decompressing, but was kindly met with a different plan. Two friends that I’d met at video training were there, Reanna and Aliza. We’d chatted a few times over that summer and semester since we’d all gotten along at training. We linked up and all just stuck together that weekend, a few of their friends tagged along and the group of us quickly became friends. I spent that week opening up not only about the feelings from my relationship but also began to process what I’d been bottling up over that past year. It was the first few drops in my bottle that I’d yet to fully open but was more than enough for me at the time. That week was also the first time I’d broken down and talked to God for what seemed like years. I felt the only way I could be a good servant and good Christian was to work hard and achieve some kind of spiritual affirmation through it, I figured since I was emotionally unavailable, the next best thing was my own efforts. This proved quickly to be unreliable and was spiritually draining to a fault, so New Years was the first step in coming to terms with my ignorance. And amid all that confusion, I started to forgive.
I knew for months that there was nothing I could do on my own to fix myself or to get what I wanted emotionally. And when I got back to Columbia it took some serious time and work to try and even get that ball rolling. Towards a healthier life that is. There were a lot of issues that needed addressing and I didn’t know where to start. Slowly but surely I went down my mental list of what I thought were wrongdoings, attempting to make them right. It started with the apology to my Young Life team for me being so negligent to them the previous year, along with a confession and desire to become a family and not just a team. A blessing that would take time, but eventually came. Next was my attempt at mending friendships and my fear of social interaction. My entire demeanor around the people I loved had dramatically changed from the guy they knew sophomore year. I was a different person and I knew that, I knew I couldn’t just turn around to retrace my steps to become the guy I used to be. No, I knew I had to move forward. My life began and continued that semester much like the last one had. Though I was focusing heavily on my attitude, I still chose to spend much of my time alone, especially when Apex legends came out.
One of my friends in Columbia, Dan, hit me up with he saw I was into Apex, asking me to come join he and some of his friends in a squad. It was 6 or 7 guys in a group message that were all on Playstation, none of which were involved in Young Life, but still Christian guys from Columbia. Daniel, Josh, Branson, Taylor and Casey were the consistent ones. And pretty quickly I became close with them. Though I’d only really met Dan, the rest quickly became close to me. The time that I had been spending alone on video games had now become a daily hangout where I could decompress and talk to guys without fear of judgement. Partly from the fact I’d never met most of them but mainly because none of them were in Young Life, so I felt no judgment when I wanted to vent about my problems. They were always supportive, as we all were for one another. We weren’t afraid to tell things how they were and each day I looked forward to joining the party for some late night games. I had established an honest community that I put hope into, though I was still alone when the headset came off. I knew that was an issue, I just didn’t know how to fix it.