I don’t remember much about the start of my senior year of high school. Even though it’s the year I have the most memories from, there’s a lot that’s blurred from the fact I started back into drugs at the beginning of the school year. Senior year was also the year I’d spend half my day at the Career Center every day. They had also switched up some of the people in my mechatronics class, helping me meet one of my best friends at the time, P. P and I were very similar people when it came to our interests, attitudes and social lives. He went to the same school as Blake and knew him well, so the three of us would typically ride together to CTC.
Minus my time at school, I was still keeping to my summertime routine of camping, work and hanging with the boys. But since school had started, we weren’t able to hang as much, which led to me having a lot more alone time. Young Life hadn’t started back up yet and J had since graduated college, but was only working 30 minutes away, so he and I still hung out regularly. I knew that I didn’t want to smoke weed based off past experiences, which I won’t write about here for the sake of some (Mom) that might read this. Granted, it would’ve probably been a better option than what I chose instead.
Out grocery shopping for some Red Bull one day, I took a stroll through the supplement aisle and saw a bottle of caffeine pills. Each pill was 200mg of caffeine so I bought the bottle figuring I’d take them when I needed to focus in class, which was often. It started as one a day, then two, then four. Four made me feel this kind of dirty high when I took them all at once so I kept doing that. I didn’t eat a lot either and usually had 1 meal a day because I didn’t feel hungry. The routine turned to 4 pills before school then 4 before going to CTC. And like clockwork it’d all hit me like a wave by the time Mr. Franks, my Mechatronics professor, started class. My vision would pulse with my heartbeat and all the colors I saw would desaturate. If you ask P today about it he could tell you what I looked like. I’d be spaced out and seem kinda drunk but I’d slam the math in class and build the electrical cabinets faster and better than anyone. I probably shouldn’t have been driving like that but I did anyway. It effected my sleep heavily so every night I’d drink about a 1/3 bottle of NyQuil after completely blowing my guts out on the toilet. Then do it all again the next day. It wasn’t really addictive though. It became more of a routine than an addiction and I stopped in the Spring of 2016 that next year.
My Christian life was separate from the life I lived by myself. I never told anyone about the stuff I did, wether that was the caffeine routine, porn, or the drinking I did when Mom and Dad were gone. I was more worried about tarnishing the reputation of Young Life than I was with my own. I wouldn’t even tell the boys about it, J either. The last note I’ll make about that time is that the effect of the caffeine wore off by the time class was out so I was usually good mentally by the time I was home. However, I did end up losing a lot of weight because of it, which was not good.
It’s weird for me to write all of this part because there are a lot of stories that run together. The fact I led 2 different lives, one with people and one alone, makes for some weird timelines. So from here I won’t mention any more of my alone life because it’s not important to this year. I’ve always loved meeting new people and growing new relationships, so the fact that P and Blake went to a different school was good news to me. I ended up getting to know a big portion of their friends at school, and three girls in particular ended up becoming some of my best friends. First was D, the mom of the group, our culinary Queen and Comedy hub. Great at making me laugh and even better at making foods I’d never heard of, D was one to be reckoned with. Next was A, our sweet Asian child who might first come off as the gentle and soft-spoken one of the group, but don’t be fooled, when the moon was right she would be the craziest (and most fun) to be around. Last was Jade, our president if there was such position in the friend group. She always seemed to know someone wherever we were and was easily the most popular. She wouldn’t tell you though, because whoever she met, she treated them with kindness. Jade was the spontaneous one too and was always down for whatever. It was a group of different social backgrounds and made for a circle of people nobody really expected to see. It was Blake, P, D, A, Jade and Myself; and though I was still hanging with the boys W and L, those six are who I spent a majority of my time with senior year.
Later in 2015 I wrecked the truck on the way back from CTC. I wasn’t on pills at the time and hadn’t been that whole week. I got hit trying to make a U-turn while, ironically, turning around to help another friend who’d just been rear ended. Truck wasn’t totaled but the guy that hit me ripped both his passenger doors off when he hit me, sliding about a football field length sideways before sliding down a ditch and up a hill. The passenger in his car was ok too, but it took me a few days to calm down because I thought whenever it happened that I’d seriously injured or killed someone. I think this is where my fear of hurting people really came out and maybe even started. I couldn’t care less if I was hurt in that situation, even if it wasn’t my fault, I just couldn’t live with the thought that I could physically or emotionally hurt someone else. When that happened, Mom got me to quit my job so I wouldn’t be driving as much. Mom and Dad were also home a lot more during this semester and I had my friends over pretty frequently. But we have yet to get into the drama of the year…
Earlier in the semester, L had been hanging out with a girl from Blake and P’s school trying get her to go on a date. Her name was B, real pretty girl that was friends with my entire circle. She friendzoned Seth on multiple occasions but nothing was gonna stop my boy, I cheered him on. B had actually tried to set me up with her friend M but I never really pursued anything. However, through that and a few other social things, B and I became closer. So L and B started hanging out with all of us more, we all even took a trip to Brevard one weekend. B and I had been flirty with each other before but there were obvious feelings. The SAT was coming up and B, L and I had made a little study group, though we only met twice. The second time, L had to leave early and left B and I at my house to study. We talked a bit about them and she told me she’d friendzoned him again, though I already knew because L had told me. When she was leaving I walked to her car with her, and against my better judgement, kissed her.
That same night I had two separate phone conversations, one with L and one with B. The conversation with L was him telling me more about how B didn’t want to go out with him and that he didn’t know what to do at that point. I remember specifically telling him to stop trying to impress her by acting different from how he normally did around me and other friends, encouraging him to just be honest with her. Shortly after, I had a conversation with B where she told me she didn’t have feelings for L and instead had feelings for me. I remember almost exactly how the conversation went because I kept screenshots for insurance purposes, which came in handy later on. She told me things like, “I’ve liked you since the beginning,” and “I just want to be with you and around you!” but also things like, “we should keep this a secret right now,” which I agreed with but is also why I took screenshots in the first place. Over a few weeks B and I hung out more, most of the time it was just as friends in groups but we had plenty of one-on-one time together too. It was nothing too crazy, a white lie here or there to get away from Mom and Dad to sneak away for those little high school makeout sessions, wether it was in the car or over a movie. I must confess though that I did end up developing feelings for B. She was always a good listener and a genuinely fun person to be around. I’d entered a mental and emotional state of attachment with her. Not only that, but the other half of me was fighting with the fact I’d been betraying one of my best friends the whole time. A few weeks after this started, B and I talked about stopping or telling people based on how much stress it was bringing us. We both agreed on stopping but it wasn’t long before that took a toll on my mental state. Partly from the sudden halt in that physical relationship that I’d become emotionally reliant on but out of guilt for what I was doing to L and how it indirectly effected our friendship. I expressed all of this to B one night in the practice field parking lot at my school.
I was planning and ready to confess to L and apologize but the following night I started getting texts from him, he was furious. B had told him instead. I was ready to talk and apologize because he was rightfully angry. But then he starts telling me the skewed things B had told him. Saying that I’d tried to persuade her to friendzone him and that I was the better choice for her and that it was me who had gotten her to do all those things and that she never liked me. Thankfully I still had the screenshots from our past text conversations, and it didn’t take much to prove she was lying. At the same time, B removed me from our group text of Blake, P, L, D, A and Jade to try and tell them the same things. But thankfully Jade kept putting me back in so I could send the screenshots. A had also figured out what was going on between us weeks before and had kept it secret (she a real one fr). So it didn’t take long before both L and B both left/were removed from the group as they started dating the following week.
Note: I’ve been talking to L recently and he told me about how he and B recently broke up. We’ve since talked and forgiven one another, though I was the one in the wrong.
For some reason, that whole situation was a big personality changer for me. I’d pretty much lost one of my best friends due to a stupid decision that was clearly my mistake and could’ve easily been stopped by me. The emotional toll that relationship and dishonesty took on me was pretty big. It was my first real encounter with depression and would be a nuisance until I got to college almost a year later.
Nothing changed between Jade, D, A, Blake, P and I. They and their families felt more like family than my own sometimes, a point I’ll talk about later. We did almost everything together and were always welcoming of anyone who wanted to come around. This was no clique or group with specific rules, we all loved each other and in turn loved everyone else. We spent our last semester as that same family. But in a time of my life where I felt more loved than ever, I still felt an emptiness that I tried to fill physically. I kept two consistent friends with benefits relationships as secret while keeping my social status and still being heavily involved in Church and Young Life. And one instance even hooking up with one the day after I’d spoken at our Young Life banquet.
I was loved more than I’d ever known, made friends with people I’d never expected and had gotten and done almost everything I wanted. But I still had this vacant feeling in my heart with no clue what to do about it. I felt shame when it came to Church and Young Life and rarely admitted any of my feelings. Nor did I talk about anything I’d done or anything that’d happened in my past to the leaders. There was a spiritual hole that I was afraid to confront, I feared it irreparable and didn’t know what to do. In the abundance of so much, I was empty.