...and I don't know how to feel, though I'm generally not very thrilled about it.

(Heads up, this is extremely long and very personal, it’s basically just a rant about my thoughts on becoming an adult, my first crush, and my fears of losing my friends after high school alongside a kinda sad personal anecdote. While it won’t be a super appealing read due to the length and personal nature of it, I’d really appreciate it if you took some time out of your day to hear a confused, scared guy out and give as good of advice as you can)

(This is me from 11:30 speaking (the piece was originally written over a time period from ~1:30 to ~5:00), I think some of the fears I voiced were a little ridiculous and hyperbolic, things aren’t nearly as bleak as I thought and I still have a ton of my life ahead of me. So don’t focus too hard on the parts about losing friends or spiraling into poverty, I think I was just kinda scared and overwhelmed. I’m definitely still worried about those things and would still appreciate some advice on how to deal with them, but they aren’t nearly as serious of issues as I made them out to be, at least not for me right now. The stuff about that girl is still open for advice, too.)

I've never been able to relate to the people who say they "can't wait to graduate." While to them it represents a whole new world of freedom and possibilities, to me leaving high school is just a monumental upheaval of routine (something my ADHD brain relies on heavily). Becoming an "adult" now endows upon me so many new responsibilities and just...things to worry about, while many of my previous friends and the securities I have within my parents' house like free and consistent food, shelter, Internet, privacy, gas...pretty much anything one needs to live in today's society just vanishes away, all while I gain a marginally higher ability to exercise personal freedom, provided I can pay for it. While others see a sandbox of endless potential, I see a nihilistic minefield where a single bad decision or event could irreversibly send me spiraling into destitute purgatory where I can never live my life the way I want to again, essentially ruining it and wasting mine and everyone else's time and energy.

I get that part of the point of growing up is that you need to learn to act independently, but that's like, a really scary concept. I've always been atrocious at decision making, something I will also credit my ADHD to, so suddenly entering a new stage of life where you constantly have to make really important decisions does not feel like the promised utopia of freedom that adulthood supposedly is. Shit, I don't even know if I want to commit to the area of study that I plan on going to fucking SCAD (a really prestigious (and expensive) art school in the giant metropolitan hellscape that is Atlanta (I am tremendously afraid of big cities, courtesy of living in a bumblefuck nowhere town with only 6000+ people for 90% of my life)) for, being game design. There are just so many things that I could see going wrong, so many apparent downsides to leaving and growing up, so many horror stories I see online about student loans, textbooks, corrupt business practices, healthcare, mental health, employment, relationships, wasted time in college, the value (or lack thereof) of art school, crippling college debt, addiction, bad college professors, taxes, bad roommates, freak accidents, the wealth gap, poverty, getting older, losing my closest friends, never finding or securing love, and...well frankly, it's fucking terrifying. It seems like one bad decision, one short straw drawn, and I become one of the countless, nameless, lower-class failures, a nobody with not a single scrap of notable impact on the world at large. With my current level of ambition, motivation, and conviction (which isn't a ton), that reality seems all the more likely.

But...who knows? Maybe it won't be all that bad, maybe I'm just hyper-focusing on isolated cases and hearsay, maybe my chronic pessimism is just being a bit too...well, pessimistic. I could be totally wrong, and adult life will turn out to be way more fun than how it is right now. I mean, I can have sex, which is pretty rad, I suppose. So that's a start. Maybe college life will be super fun, a neat change of pace. Maybe a lot of those issues I mentioned won't be as troublesome as I feared. Maybe I'll make new friends, better friends. Maybe I'll find a cool girl, or hook up with the one I've currently got my sights set on (the one in the pic on the very left who I actually gave the courtesy of properly censoring her face as opposed to some thematically appropriate meme that would only make sense if you knew us personally (this was to protect their identity, of course. While I did post this image uncensored on Facebook, that’s a much smaller audience of family and friends, not the anonymous masses of the web)). Maybe my time at SCAD will help me find my frustratingly elusive true passion, whether it be game design, writing, drawing, or something else I have yet to discover my love for, like, I dunno...fuckin’ stonemasonry or horticulture or something.

And it's not like my old life is just going to disappear entirely. I'm only moving about an hour away, though granted it will be to Atlanta, a city notorious for its traffic. I can still call my friends over Discord or meet up with them at their place. I still, you know, live at my parents’ house until SCAD starts up in fucking September, so there’s plenty of time left, provided I don’t just sit on my ass and do nothing like last summer (which was a positively miserable stretch of my life that likely had some very negative effects on my mental state and social skills). I’ve got all summer to hang out with my friends and maybe even get things started with that girl I mentioned earlier. 

After prom, she proposed that we go see a movie sometime after graduation, and while she has yet to respond to my inquiries asking to make it a one-on-one thing instead of a group event with other friends like Captain Coomer to my left (who isn’t necessarily a coomer, he just looks a lot like that image loooooool) or even whether or not she’s even still interested in doing it, the mere prospect that she kinda sorta asked me on a date after having developed the mad hots for her is still promising and really exciting. She’ll be going to college near where I live currently, so if things develop further, it wouldn’t be too awful hard to visit her.

Man, just the thought of that and her, in general, is making me feel much better about this whole thing, or it at least lightened my mood immensely. I was originally going to wait until Wednesday to press her on whether she was still interested in the movie thing, as I wanted to give her time to find and read the message herself, but writing and thinking about her has emboldened me, so imma do that later today. While I realistically don’t have a super good chance with her, I’m going to try to suppress my pessimism this time, because the mere idea of being together with her is so enticing and exciting that, well, it boosted my mood from biting cynicism and nihilism to heart-racing happiness, so I want to chase the possibility, however slim it may be, of getting with her. 

Shit, I’ve been working on this for so long and gotten distracted so many times I barely remember what I was talking about other than gushing how tightly this girl has me wrapped around her finger. Because…sheesh, I...heh, I really like her. I’ve never felt this way before, and it’s such an exciting feeling. Here’s to hoping things go well with her, because god, I so dearly wish it does. 

I’d actually say I really enjoyed school, I’ve met some absolutely fantastic people throughout the years, classmates and teachers alike. If not for them I probably wouldn’t be nearly as...good as I am now. Never seeing most of my classmates and pretty much all of my teachers again is really saddening. They’ve had such a profound impact on who I am as a person, and to essentially ditch them forever with no way to say goodbye is heartbreaking. Schoolwork could obviously be a bitch sometimes, especially math (I want to fucking smash Isaac Newton in his big stupid Brian May-ass face for disgracing humanity with the blight that is calculus), but the friends, jokes, stories, and teachers handily make up for it. I will treasure my time in school immensely, and some of the friends I made along the way will always be some of the most deeply beloved people in my life, even if I’ve since largely parted ways with some of them. I think that’s why the prospect of leaving school stings so much. 

Hoo boy, this is gonna be tough to write.

I had a friend in elementary school who was my single closest companion, my unmitigated best friend for pretty much all of it. After 5th grade, we both changed to the same different system, still in the same middle school, forcing me to abandon my other best friend. After that, we just kinda...went our separate ways. There wasn’t any bad blood between us, he got more into the jocular football side of things while I stayed with my nerdy little subculture and made my current set of friends. By 9th grade, if not earlier, we had totally separated. My dearest pal, one of my few good friends at elementary school, my brother from another mother, the guy I straight up fucking directly asked to be my friend in kindergarten, is barely even my friend anymore. I know it’s natural for stuff like that to happen, but...still. He meant so much to me during those earlier years, and for that to just...wither away...I feel like I betrayed him, and I think he feels the same way. And yet...I don’t think it can ever go back to the way it was. We’ve changed so drastically, made our own new friends, found our own new interests, had so many of our own new experiences all separate from each other that we just...don’t have that bond anymore.

I went through the trouble of bringing myself to actual tears for this tangent because...I’m scared that this will happen to the people in this photo, to the people who aren’t, to the Coomer (my best friend), to...to her. I’m scared that these people, who I love so dearly, will fall away from me into the void of nostalgia just like the guy from elementary school, only becoming the odd awkward Facebook follow where we tepidly acknowledge each other’s existence but don’t really talk to each other. I’m scared that I, being the passive, non-instigating coward that I am, will just let that happen. I know I’ll probably make new, potentially better friends at SCAD and beyond and the cycle will repeat itself again, but now that the friends in question are ones I made during my most mature years, ones I’ve developed a love for beyond friendship in some cases, ones that helped through the hardest and most traumatic leg of my schooling career, even though they aren’t as…”primal” of friends as the one I lost in the transition into middle school...the thought of losing them is so much worse. I didn’t expect to lose touch with the guy from elementary school, that just...happened. But I’ve had this doomsday scenario laid out for me since day one. It scares me, and I don’t know what to do about it. 

I might just have to accept that there will come a day when I never see my friends again. For some, it was years ago, others a few days or weeks ago, others still on Friday (when I graduated), and even more in the time to come. I can obviously prolong, maybe even potentially prevent that from happening by routinely checking in on them, but...I don’t know, it’ll never be the same, like with the guy from elementary school. I probably won’t be as bothered by it by the time it happens, I’ll most likely have already made new friends and moved on, like how I did in middle school. But the idea of it still hurts right now, at the moment. 

But, there’s no way of knowing how the future will go. Maybe I won’t be like my parents, especially my dad, who nowadays sits largely alone, no longer really having any consistent friends because of his similarly passive, unconfrontational demeanor. Maybe I’ll find someone, whether it be that girl or someone else, who whips me into shape and causes me to be more proactive with maintaining the relationships I’ve spent something like six years building. Or, who knows, maybe I’ll just leave these guys behind just like I did the guy from elementary school, and they’ll just be a happy little blip in the (hopefully) wide and colorful canvas of my life, just as he was. Or maybe I’m just overreacting to the incredible rush and stress that was graduation and should probably go to bed considering it’s 3:20 a.m. as of writing (it’s 11:30 now, and yeah, I think I was kinda worrying a bit too much). As I said, there’s a whole summer ahead of me, not to mention, well, the future and its ever-present uncertainty. 

Regardless, if you made it this far, I cannot thank you enough for letting me dump these incredibly complex feelings on you. I know I covered all kinds of emotions, whether it be the existential horror of adult life, to finding the good in such a momentous shift in my life, to reveling in the excitement of my first true crush and the potential for it to progress further, to the rejoicing of what school has given me, to a tear-jerking (for me writing this, I don’t know about you) mourning of the friend I lost and the existential dread of that happening again, to me trying to reassure myself and dampen said harsh feelings. This is 18 years of culminated emotion, emotions I don’t really feel safe expressing on something like Facebook (which, I assure you, I do NOT use nearly as much as I make it sound, it’s just really pertinent to this piece of writing) due to the weird inexplicable fear I have of my family or old friend learning these things about me, knowing how bad I feel for leaving him behind or the fact that I just...have a crush on a girl. Is it weird that I’d rather dump my life story and deepest feelings on total strangers instead of the people I love and trust the most? I would say “probably,” but, I mean, isn’t that basically what therapy is? That’s probably what I need, to be honest, but you know how it is, finding a good therapist, getting the money, explaining to people what you’re doing/why you need to go, and that weird subconscious fear/hesitation I’m pretty sure everyone has when considering getting therapy. 

But while I work the kinks out of that, I can at least try to rely on the anonymous internet (even though I just posted a picture of my ugly mug) for a comfortable place to vent, even though I’m not guaranteed (and more than likely won’t get) a response, even though I probably shouldn’t. I know you didn’t read this, or if you did that you don’t care, but the fact that I aired all of this has really helped. If you did, let me know, I worked really hard on writing this and I want to know that people read it. If you have ANY advice, whether it be for life post-high school, college stuff, keeping up with friends, or hooking up with that girl, please please please please PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE GIVE IT TO ME. I’m...confused, lost, and scared, too scared to ask for this help from the people whose roles within my life are to do this very thing (I’m not like afraid of my parents or anything, we have an amazing relationship. It’s just...I just can’t ask for this kind of help from them. I don’t know why, I just...can’t. Or at least I don’t feel like I can), and would like some guidance from anyone who can give it. Or who knows, maybe I just wasted several hours writing a big rant about my life to an audience that is either uninterested, judgemental, or nonexistent. But at least these thoughts got out somehow.

I guess the best thing I can do now is something I always hear people say: stop dwelling on the past, stop worrying so much about the future, and just live life in the present. I'm planning on messaging that girl later today about the movie, the last time I did it was at 1 fucking 42 in the morning the night we graduated, so she probably didn't see it. I've been really cautious in my attempts to get close with her because I'm afraid that if I mess things up or come on too strong that it'll potentially heavily damage our friendship, but you know what they say, these kinds of things necessitate taking risks. So I'll have to see how that goes, and maybe report back on what happens.

Fuck, I really just wrote out all this personal shit, didn't I? Might as well post it and not squander all the time spent working on it.

Edit: So much for the girl :(