KWSN

***DISCLAIMER***
This is maybe the worst piece of writing I've done in years. It's a total mess, because I essentially just threw whatever came to mind down and its just too much for me to go over and fix right now. It gets the point across though. I'm really not as bad a writer, in general, as this is going to make me seem, so try not to form any opinions. Thanks
***END DISCLAIMER***

I've been thinking more than my fair share lately. It really seems to be the only thing I have substantial time to do. I spend almost four hours a day, four days a week, on LIRR trains with little to do but stare out the window and wonder what exactly contributed to me being where I am. The prevailing feeling in my life for over a month now has been alienation (though exhaustion is a fairly close second). The people who I so recently considered my friends are dispersed throughout this country and are redefining who their own friends are as we speak.

College has, for me, been simultaneously exactly what I expected it would be and a major disappointment. Being a commuter, especially from such a great distance, placed very obvious limitations on my ability to forge new friendships at school. Rushing in each morning (barely awake at that) and rushing out to get the first train I can doesn't leave much time for me to linger and meet new people. Anyone who I don't have a class with I simply walk past. And even those people somehow fall short of the expectations I held for the people I would meet. My classes consist of mostly the same 20 people in each one, as I'm part of a "learning community;" that is, 20 people who take the exact same courses with the same professors in order to more easily keep up with the course material. It's advantageous in an academic sense, but socially, it's a huge hindrance. I have the misfortune of being competent at math, and the learning communities were chosen based on math placement test scores. This puts me among a lot of people whose ideas of a great time are spending whole weekends playing CounterStrike or watching Anime or going to teen night at the YMCA.

I can't say my social life was any more interesting when I was in high school, but I came to college looking to change that. I went to some parties, I got drunk a handful of times, and my life really wasn't all that boring. But I was just praying there would be some sort of escalation there. It's just not available at my school. I spend a lot of time between classes sitting in the school library idly browsing Facebook, and I see pictures of the parties that all my friends have been attending. These are friends that have gone away to school and are dorming, and the parties look like EXACTLY what I was hoping for myself. This was probably unreasonable to dream of, knowing full well that there aren't even any dorms to speak of at my school. But something still told me that somehow, opportunities to make friends and make up for all the time I lost in high school would present themselves. They haven't.

So, there being nothing to do at my school, I try to get home as quickly as I can every day. I walk the kilometer or so it takes to get back to Penn Station as soon as my classes end, board the train, and wait. Two boroughs and two and a half counties later, I get home and usually drive straight to the only thing that really keeps me motivated anymore, my girlfriend. We've been together for several months upwards of a year now, and I can honestly say it's been the greatest thing I've ever experienced and that I wouldn't trade it for the world. But when we're hanging out, we don't really go anywhere or do much. We just sort of hang around. Both of us agree that there has to be something else out there. She's going to community college right now and will be transferring within a year... she could be where she wants to be already, but waited too long to apply thanks to a paralyzing fear of the future. Me, on the other hand, I applied early. I was certain that this was what I wanted to do. This caused me to reevaluate my own concept of certainty.

It wasn't always like this. During high school we always had friends we could see, and things were always going on. Really exciting things happened maybe less than we desired, but all in all, life wasn't too boring and certainly not that bad. Now, though, we can go weeks at a time without even spending more than an hour with ANYONE else, other than her mom. Any of our friends that are still nearby are too busy with school and work to do anything most of the time, and the rest of our friends are away at school. It's made me think a lot about my friends and how I interacted with them while I was hare. I've reminisced endlessly about how my friendships have changed and my definition of a friend has differed as I've developed. And I realized that for a long time, I really didn't have any friends I could go out and see. My friends, for a while, existed mostly on the internet.

Which brings me back to the TFP.

Anyone who recognizes my name and remembers anything about me will likely have been perplexed by what I've written so far. Until now, in TFP terms, I was a married 24 year old with one child (22 the last time I had really made any significant contribution here). I still lived on Long Island, but in a different town. I still had the same taste in music, movies, and other things. The persona I'd crafted for myself had many elements that were very much me in their essence. But the life that person was living wasn't mine. I never worked for UPS or sold air conditioners. I most certainly hadn't gotten anyone pregnant (though that has become startlingly close to a reality more recently... whole different story there). I wasn't married for sure, and back then I didn't even have a girlfriend. But all of these fabrications stuck in my own head, and I was more content for a while living out the life of this imaginary person than my own.

From a psychological perspective, it doesn't surprise me much that I reverted to such a state. My interpersonal interactions from age 12 had been so confusing and frightening, especially to the undeveloped human being that I was, that it made sense for me to hide immersed in an identity that wasn't actually mine. Up until about age 10, I had harbored this inexplicable infatuation for a girl who I had been classmates with for several years in elementary school. She struck me as immensely attractive, witty, and overall pleasant to be around. As early as in third grade, I gave her fake powdered roses on Valentine's day. She disregarded the gesture almost completely... probably standard practice for someone so young. I persisted, however, and somehow I refused to let it die until I reached 6th grade. She never, in that amount of time, spoke more than a few sentences to me. It left me feeling constantly emotionally hollow, and thereafter, I found myself reaching far beyond my own limits to fill that hole. Things only began to get really complicated in junior high.

At age 12, I met a girl who would quickly become my best friend. She was the daughter of two parents who had had their first kids at age 18, and as a result, her two brothers were 7 and 11 years older than her, respectively. She told me all the time of the torture she endured from them growing up, but she also displayed some considerable advantages from having these much older siblings. She had an astonishing taste in music, art, fashion, and the like for someone her age. This was the first thing we were able to connect on. My father's passion in life has been music from a very young age, and he was always exposing me to music as I grew up, new and old alike. He bought me my first CD in kindergarten (Green Day, when it was kind of cool to like them), and took me to my first concert when I was 7 (No Doubt... okay, they were never really cool. But shut up). So this girl and I connected almost immediately.

She had her own boyfriend who she had been together with since elementary school. What had started as a simple, playful relationship between very young kids had become complicated by hormones, and they could be seen making out constantly and profusely in the school cafeteria at almost all times. I hadn't really found any initial attraction to her, but as I watched them more and more and our friendship grew deeper and deeper, pangs of jealousy would grow more and more frequent and intense. This went on for about two years, until I was 14. I, hormone crazed little kid that I was, was already a member on TFP at this point, I believe (my chronology is somewhat distorted). Another friend of mine pointed me here, for the porn of course. I relished it. But I had no reason to pretend I was someone else until what happened next.

When we were in 8th grade, my friend and that boyfriend of hers broke up. She was devastated after that for a while. To this day, she still mentions how barely anything had hurt her quite as much as the end of that relationship. I became her shoulder to cry on for a while, a duty divided between me and a few of her other friends, who I had also become very well acquainted with. As this progressed, my feelings for her developed more and more, but I didn't want to betray our friendship by reaching past my own boundaries. Instead, we just further cemented our status as best friends. My second best friend became a friend of hers, a girl who I had been taking acting class with outside of school. We lived very close to one another, so I would walk home with her after school. I very rarely went inside her house, though. I didn't know at the time how horrible her family situation was. That will come into play later.

Over the ensuing summer, before 9th grade, I kept mostly to myself. By this time, I was beginning to develop my false identity online and found it somewhat more appealing than my real-life encounters. My confusion and subsequent hormone-driven sexual frustration gave way to reclusion, and I spent the majority of the summer indoors, becoming more and more involved with life on the internet. On the final day before school started, in September, my best friend invited me over to her house. We ended up making out for about 2 hours while watching her Smiths and Cure DVDs. Afterwards, I convinced myself it was the best day of my life. But I never asked her about us being together.

During school, we began to drift further and further apart. We remained very good friends, but I kept silently pushing for a relationship with her while being too afraid to actually say something outwardly. She started becoming extremely friendly with one of my male friends instead.

***NOTE: I just realized that an upcoming part of the story is going to be very confusing with the presentation that I've relied on for now, so let's give some of the characters names. My best friend/girl I was interested in is B. My second best friend, her friend, is K. An as-yet-unintroduced character, who is both B's and K's best female friend, is M.***

Anyway, she ended up dating this friend of mine. I was heartbroken but too weak to actually tell her this. I would find out one day, much later, that the only reason she wouldn't date me was because she was looking for something playful and insubstantial, and that any relationship with me would be serious and intense. She meant this in a good way, as I seemed to be the perfect match for her. Still, at the time, I was devastated, and painfully lonely.

B and her best female friend M got into a major rift around this time. I barely knew M, but M was best friends with both B and K, who were only casual friends with each other. B felt K was corrupting M, who had started to try drinking and smoking at K's behest. M was a shy, quiet, soft-spoken, very innocent girl at the time, and B felt she was being changed too much by her friendship with K. B began to resent, even loathe K. I somehow remained very good friends with both of them through all of this, but there had to be a breaking point somewhere, and even though I knew it, I avoided thinking about it.

I walked home one day with K, as I usually did, and this time we actually went inside her house. I met her mother at this point, and found out that she was mostly deaf, bipolar, and extremely abusive to K. She yelled at K for "being a fat whale," (K was almost certainly under 100 lbs at the time) and went on a further tirade which forced K into tears and caused her to storm out of the house. I followed her and, trying to be a good friend, offered her words of encouragement. When she stopped crying, she gave me a hug that lasted for about 3 minutes. I felt very satisfied having helped, when she finally spoke. "What are we?" she said. I remember my heart skipping a beat at that point. I knew exactly what she meant, but didn't want to answer the question. I had felt no attraction to her at all for the time that we'd known each other, and I didn't want to be any more to her than a good friend. But she asked me again, thinking that I hadn't heard her. I had to say something, and settled on "What do YOU think we are?"

She said, "I think we're more than friends."

I had absolutely no words to say and my mind was racing about as fast as it ever had. She took her face up from my shoulder at this point and looked me straight in the eyes. As much as it didn't feel right, I realized that it was an opportunity to fill the void that had been eating away at me with the relationship I'd been so desperately craving. I also thought about how her relationships with B and M had suffered, and now, seeing her family, I realized that this might be the only thing she had left. I took a deep breath, swallowed hard and said, "I think you're right."

We kissed after that, and I walked home happy, knowing that I had my first official girlfriend. At the time, it was extremely satisfying. I failed to realize, at the time being, exactly what the implications of all this were.

As soon as B heard about this, she promptly cut off all contact with me. I almost decided on more than one occasion to just break the whole thing off and try to go back to my precarious friendship with both B and K, but I realized that it was impossible now. I became somewhat more comfortable in my relationship with K, but as time went on, she grew more and more depressed. Her family situation was an absolute wreck and she often came to me crying for sanctuary from it. It felt very fulfilling to help her, but I could sense her abject depression and knew deep down that nothing good was coming of this. In December of that year, it came to a head. She sent me a brief message online saying "I'm getting rid of myself. I thought you should know."

I panicked. I had no idea how to react to hearing this. I sprinted to her house and tried to talk some degree of sense into her about it, but her depression had fully gotten the best of her. She barely spoke a word to me about the situation. She was morose and impenetrable. She didn't plan on hurting herself yet, though, that was one piece that I had gathered for sure. The next day in school, visibly shaking and almost in tears, I went to the guidance counselor (as was supposedly standard procedure for these sorts of things) and told him what had transpired.

The next day, she was taken out of school and placed in the psychiatric ward at the local hospital. I visited her that week and she told me sternly never to speak to her again. She remained there for the ensuing six months.

Within another month, I decided to tell B the entire story of what had happened. She sympathized with me and forgave me, and we became friends again. Things seemed to be returning to a stable place, but B had begun to feud with another friend, C, who was close to M and was supposedly corrupting her. One day, with M present, C used another girl's screen name to speak to B. Under the guise of someone else, she asked B questions about C and gathered her negative opinion. C then revealed that it was her the whole time and said something to the effect of "Well, everyone hates you too, even M." B felt betrayed and completely crushed. I knew nothing of this until I read her away message that day: "It seems that no one wants me alive... I guess I'll make their dreams come true."

In a panic, I called B's house, but got no answer. I was just short of running the mile to her house when a message popped up in her window. It said something along the order of "I just swallowed an entire bottle of pills. I'm scared. Help me."

I summoned all the sanity I had left and told her that the first thing to do was call an ambulance so that they could pump her stomach. She didn't have a phone close by, so I called for her. I stayed online talking to her until she told me the ambulance was there, and she thanked me. I just sat there in a daze for about an hour, desensitized to the point where I couldn't even bring myself to cry.

The first place I went was the TFP. I wanted nothing more than to hide from the circumstances of real life, and TFP was the place to do it. After that day, I immersed myself more in the site than I ever had previously, and I kept adding minutiae to my own "personal description" until it became something relatively believable. It remained this way for quite some time. B came back to school the next week physically unscathed, but I couldn't find it within myself to speak to her, or just about anyone, for quite a while. In school, there were people I could always wave or say hello to, but outside of school, I was a ghost, and remained that way until junior year of high school. In the interim, TFP was my safe haven.

So, now that I actually am 18, I find myself back here, but no longer looking for an escape. I can't say for sure what I actually AM looking for in the long run, if anything at all, but I can say what drew me here initially. Something that has stayed with me is the memory of the sense of community I found here in the face of sheer alienation in. This is the only place I know of where people will actually listen to my story and offer valuable opinions in response to it. So, maybe I'll be sticking around for a while. I don't plan on living here like I once did, but I'd like to make myself a welcome guest from time to time... that is, if I am indeed welcome. But if the past is any indication, I don't think I need to worry much about that. Even though this is all pretty hard to talk about for me, and even though I'm horribly self-conscious about my writing (and I think I did a pretty horrendous job here), I still feel comfortable submitting this thread. And that's the best thing about this place... no matter how long I've been gone, no matter how long I plan on staying, no matter who I am now or who I was before, it still feels a little bit like home.

It's nice to be back.

-Tom

__________________
Your arms are broken!

Martian

I'll be blunt and say that I'm very bothered by this. Not by your story, which frankly seems like so much teenage melodrama to me, but more by the fact that you cheerfully admit to having intentionally deceived all of us for an extended period of time. This isn't as simple as moving your birthdate back a year or four; you created an entire person, a person who some folks here may have gotten very attached to, who does not exist. You played us. With me, at least, you no longer have any credibility whatsoever.

But welcome back, I guess.

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I wake up in the morning more tired than before I slept
I get through cryin' and I'm sadder than before I wept
I get through thinkin' now, and the thoughts have left my head
I get through speakin' and I can't remember, not a word that I said

- Ben Harper, Show Me A Little Shame

KWSN

This is why it's taken me the majority of this year to find it in myself to make this post. I was afraid of rubbing some people the wrong way by admitting the lie I'd been perpetuating. I made sure to ask someone in a position of authority before posting this. I was ready for just about any opinion to arise, and I do appreciate yours. I'm sorry that it bothered you, and I sincerely apologize to anyone else it may have bothered.

As for the "teenage melodrama" thing, yeah, that's pretty much what it is/was. Some people forget, though, that when they're significantly removed from their own teenage years, their problems back then seem like a joke. This was in my fairly recent past and even I still look back sometimes and think about how ridiculous this whole period in my life was, but it shaped who I am today. And dealing with legitimate threats of suicide among the people I was closest to, melodrama or not, was scary and scarred me pretty bad back then.

But thank you for speaking up. I value honesty (which may sound ironic regarding the nature of this post) more than anything in replies.

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Your arms are broken!

Bill O'Rights

Back?

It seems to me that this is the first time that you have really been here.

Welcome.

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"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony

"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

Ustwo

You pretended to be a 24 year old who was married with one child and sold air conditioners?

And here I thought pretending to be a dentist was mundane.

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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

Crack

I met a coworkers 8 year old son that said when he grew up, he wanted to be a dentist. It was almost the worst thing I have ever heard in my life. I asked him, do you want to be a Policeman, or a Firefighter, or some kind of Superhero? He said no, they don't drive BMWs.

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Crack, you and I are long overdue for a vicious bout of mansex.

~Halx

Giant Hamburger

Hail KWSN!

You appear the same to me, as always, from my periodic and nonsensical orbit around Planet TFP: a doe-eyed embryo in a glass egg glistening in blue amniotic fluid. Perhaps some day I will make a part of you an ichorous festoon on my garland of human fetishes but until that time, carry on.

Your presence I find pleasurable,
-GH

WarMoney

And to think I gave you a kidney. Pffft.

Manic_Skafe

Not only has this thread reminded me of who I was in high school, but which parts of that person I wish I still were. I'm better off without the melodrama, the gossip, and most of those wonderfully stupid moments - but to feel that pure exhilaration from meeting new people and doing new things with an open mind and open heart..

And while I'd like to hope that most of us are exactly who portray ourselves to be, I won't pretend to be offended either.

Thanks for sharing and welcome back.

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"Porn is a zoo of exotic animals that becomes boring upon ownership." -Nersesian

Lasereth

If no one else is gonna say it I will take the honor:

This is some really good shit. I like this thread and I like what you did with your online persona. This is truly interesting material and to make it better it's actually real. TFP needs more threads like this that come from your feelings and emotions directly.

Sounds like you had a really emotionally impacting childhood. You write and think very mature for your age. I don't even have a twinge of regret, doubt, or anger towards your manipulative acts towards TFP because it resulted in the understanding of yourself better.

BTW I'm sorry to hear about college. Commuting to college tends to have that not-fun factor, especially if you can't live in a dorm. I can't offer much advice but only comment that every single person who didn't live in a dorm at college said college was boring and not fun. Those who did live in a dorm without a commute said it was the best time of their life.