When your chips are down When your highs are low

 Do you ever... like... think of people you haven't thought of in years and are like.... woof.

This is a photo of me circa 2008.

I wish that someone would have told 2006-22008 Me that the things that I thought were devastating and never-ending would ultimately be fine. Actually, it would be more than fine. The version of the world you knew at the time would end, and a whole new version of your life would start.

And the people who were trying to make you feel worthless would be insignificant in the long run.

2005 to about 2010 was such a strange era. Like the worst hangover of high school hell you have ever had. It was all the pettiness of a high school eye of the drama tornado, but magnified because everyone involved was an adult.

Was I a perfect person during this era? No. Did I respond perfectly to everything that was going on? No. Did I do so much as half of the nefarious things they said I did? Also, no. 

And, like, let me be transparent for a second, there were times when, yes, I was awful, I am sure. I was responding to awful things that were happening, and responded with  more awfulness. 

Turning the camera and the mirror back on myself.

One of these people wrote a terrible song about me, and I remember both laughing at it and actually being surprisingly shook by it. Part of this happened over the fact that I wasn't interested in dating someone who didn't have a bank account and whose parents had been involved in a murder. I was honest about why I didn't want to date them. Maybe I shouldn't have been SO honest. But also, I had spent the last 19-20 years of my life trying to escape my biological father's  reach over my life, and his criminal history. I had worked hard to get away from that. I didn't want it in my life. This person ended up being just fine and marrying someone else and having a family with this person, but to continue to paint me as a villain and some kind of bigot decades later when they found someone in their life much better suited to them is beyond me.

Looking back on the song ("song"), I can laugh at it now. I mean, I did think it was pretty terrible at the time when it was written, but distance has really made it all the more embarrassing. And by "embarrassing," I mean second-hand embarrassment.

One thing I can say for certain with distance, especially when learning more and more about the Not Like Other Girls of the early to mid-2000's, is how much so many of these people involved played into that, probably not even realizing it. It's also strange to sometimes see them in passing or in suggestions on social media, because (and there are two very specific people in particular I am thinking of when I write this) is that they seem frozen in time. It's like they're 36, about to 37 year olds stuck in this bizarre time warp of Hot Topic mall goth teenager circa 2004-2006, specifically. Let's... NOT do the Time Warp again! They never grew up, they never did anything with their lives. Not Like Other Girls who are Unique and Special with Special and More Unique Interests only SHE has ever thought of, dreamt up, or even conceptualized! It's like those musicians who think they are ARTISTES and that their lyrics are so DEEP and PROFOUND (as compared to MAIN STREAM lyrics), but you come to find out that the ARTISTE lyrics are just as fake-deep, banal, reductive and cliché, if not more so. 

I also realize now that a lot of their negativity directed towards me (and I hate even saying it like this) was most likely jealousy. They were jealous of the friendships I had with people whom they were no longer friends with, because I put effort into said friendships. (The irony to all that is I am not longer in contact with the person they had been friends with--no shade! There's no beef here, we just stopped talking, which is fine, not everyone needs to stay in your life, and you can go along your merry Candide. When I not longer served my purpose, I was phased out of that person's life the same way, it just happens.) They were jealous of my talents, my ability to make friends, my fashion, my whatever.  I was also an easy target because I took everything so dearly to heart and blamed myself for everything.

Even though a lot of what they were trying to blame me for was not my fault, I still felt bad that they felt this way.

I notice that NLOG types tend to be really, really nasty towards people who are truly Not Like... other people, people who are different in ways that are organic to them. Honestly, a shout out to people like my friend Joanne who was also someone who skipped on the Not Like Other Girls phase, and has always and will always been 1000% authentically and organically herself and doesn't care if anyone else likes it.

Let me be clear: I handled messy situations imperfectly, in ways that were very 2006. But I am also not stuck in the vortex of Hot Topic mall goth teenager circa 2004-2006. I, for lack of a better expression, grew up. They didn't.

I will go back to not thinking about them again, after ruminating on them for this brief amount of time. They are irrelevant to my life now, and were not even the friends I had thought they were when they had been my "friends."