On Being Popular

I have social anxiety. This means that interacting with people freaks me the hell out. 

This was not really a problem at my small high school of 350 kids with a graduating class of around 90. I had some friends. I moved between social groups. It was all good.

But when I became a Sophomore in college I became inexplicably popular, for me anyway.

I joined a pre-law fraternity that year where I met my best friend and my kids godmother. It was the first time I found an entire group of people who made sense to me. We had conversations about international relations and politics. Argued about religion and human nature. It was great.

But these people were tragic party organizers so my friend and I became the social chairs and started to organize all the parties. They became more fun and I started to really enjoy the social aspects of school.

However, these people REALLY liked me and my friend. One or two of these people would take us out and treat us to dinner. They would find us when we were jogging at night so they could join us. We had to plan coffee nights so that we could all hang out in the evenings.They would even call out to us on campus and run over to talk with us while we walked to class.

To say that we had no idea what to do with this attention is an understatement. 

I was completely lost. Why in the hell did these people want to spend so much time with me. I'd spent a lot of time with me and I was fairly certain I was a dork and not nearly this interesting. 

Here I'm going to insert the obvious fact that the way I was raised, my terrible childhood and resulting low self esteem all came into play here along with my social anxiety, which I didn't know I had. 

So people kept coming up to talk with me and freaking me the hell out so I did the most obvious thing to me and became even more introverted.

I started to wear my Walkman ALL THE TIME. I would walk to class with the music up staring down at the ground so that the odds that I would hear these people was reduced. THEY STILL FOUND ME. So I turned the music up louder and took unexpected routes. It was not a normal response. But I'm not normal, so there you go.

My friend and I had regular conversations about why in the hell we were suddenly so popular. We still don't understand.

As the year wore on people took us out to fancy dinners to try and sway our votes for the next year's election. What the heck!

I think college should have like Friendship 101 for people like me, where they explain that this is normal behavior and people are allowed to like me and want to be my friend. It would have helped.

Both my friend and I went away the next year to do semesters abroad so I never reconnected with those friends because it was back in the stone ages when Facebook was just a dream. I still only talk to the best friend I made, but it was a bizarre life lesson.

I think I learned that I could be popular, which is a good thing to know. The fact that there are other people like me in the world and a place where I made sense is still comforting.

When A Longterm Disease Isn't All Bad

I laugh and smile more than anything else. My daughter pointed out to me tonight that the reason she thinks I’m so happy is because compared to my childhood everything must seem like a great day.

I was sick for 9 years with a horrible disease that had me practically narcoleptic most days, foggy brained, gaining weight while I was on diets, nightly hot flashes in my 30s, basically not super functional. Yet, that is still not a bad bunch of years.

My daughter was saying that for most people they talk about how terrible their diseases were. How they destroyed their lives. For me, those days were still great when compared to my youth, so I took the whole thing with a grain of salt. I’m well now so I just look forward.

She had me almost falling out of my chair laughing at how ludicrous it is that this is how I view my life. If I’m not surrounded by horrible people then it’s a great day.

I can’t imagine living any other way. I’m just happy to be where I am and have my funny, kind and loving family. I don’t deal with people who are mean or unkind because I don’t have to, so it’s great. It’s all a matter of perspective.

Scottish Love

My favorite place on this earth is Edinburgh, Scotland.

The reason for this is that Scotland was a place of many firsts for me. I went to Edinburgh the first time with my friend who I visited during her semester abroad in the UK. It was my favorite part of the trip.

It was the first time I drank Dramboie, which is my favorite liquor. It's whiskey and honey and comes from the Isle of Skye, which makes it even more magical. It tastes like home to me.

It was the first time boys that didn't know me smiled at me on the street. This may seem weird, but I tended to walk around looking like I wanted to stab someone, so the fact that these cute boys smiled at me and flirted was a real win and showed that they weren't easily cowed.

It was the first time I realized how silly it was to drive to so many places in Los Angeles, when we could just walk. Of course, I didn't have a car when I visited and I walked the entire town. This really highlighted to me the over dependence on cars in Los Angeles.

It was also the first time I visited a place where the people were universally sweet to me. The shop keepers were kind, the B&B folks amenable, the strangers in the street smiled. After living with my crazy ass parents and growing up in LA, I had no idea that this type of magical place even existed. It gave me hope for the future.

It was the first time I saw guys in kilts and let me tell you, there is nothing better. If I ruled the world men would all wear kilts because they are the cutest, sexiest, handsomest piece of clothing a man can wear. I wanted to have my husband wear a kilt when we got married. I couldn't get him to agree, but he now owns two utilikilts so I'm a winner in the end.

I would love to live in Scotland, but I don't know if that's in my future. I will always honor the magical land that taught me so much about the good things in the world.

Abandoned at the Airport

So now you know that I was already traumatized from being left in the UK.

I got on the plane to head back home to LAX and I was drained of both energy and money. I did sit next to an older British woman who introduced me to the delight that is Dramboie in tea, so the flight was a win in my book.

I landed at LAX and walked out to baggage claim where I was expecting to find my family. You see, if you had normal parents, or even not my parents then they would be there. They would apologize for abandoning you in the UK, when they knew months before they would not be able to make it. Those types of things.

But because this is me and my family. No one was there. Nope. No one.

So I gathered all my bags including the ones that carried the gifts that I was told I must return home with, since you know they sent me to the UK and all.

Still no parents. This was before cell phones, so I used the airport house phone to see if a message had been left for me. Nope.

So I went to the street outside baggage claim to wait for them to arrive.

I waited 2 hours. That's right, two hours after getting off an international flight and getting abandoned without any money in the UK.

So I called the friend I had met in the UK to see if she could come get me. At this point it was the middle of the night so I woke her from a deep sleep. I don't think I was very clear because she mumbled at me and hung up. (To this day she still feels guilty, which shows what an amazing person she is. I mean who feels guilty that they didn't realize that my shitty parents had abandoned me at the airport.)

So I called my friend, Andrea, and she came running to my rescue. It took her a while to get to the airport since she lived in a distant part of LA, but she came as fast as she could.

As Andrea and her brother arrived 45 minutes later, my parents drove up.

This is probably 4 hours after my flight had landed.

The kicker is that they didn't even apologize. My mother said, "We were seeing Dancing with Wolves, it was longer than we expected, but we weren't going to walk out of a movie." (This is in quotes because I still remember this sentence. It is probably the sentence that most clearly sums up what a catastrophically bad parent this woman was.)

When you live with crazy, it becomes normal. Terrible parents are able to justify their terrible behavior in a way that makes the kid accept it. They don't have to like it or agree with it, but the child will accept it.

We drove off to the new house they were living in since they moved every year of my life except for the 5 years I was in high school through my first year in college.

They didn't ask me about the flight or my trip instead they talked about the movie they had just seen. I fell asleep in the car and when I woke up I was asked to give them the gifts I had brought.

This is the point in my life where I finally realized that these were crazy people who should be avoided at all cost. It took me a while to get away from them for good, but this was my start.

I met my now husband of many years soon after this incident and my daughter recently pointed out to me that all of my stories that are about good things in my life begin after I met him and this is because he is amazing, but also because I had finally had enough crazy and I was now old enough to take more control over my life.

Abandoned in the UK

So this is a really clear view into the mind of the crazy woman who raised me.

I spent the fall semester of my junior year in Washington DC, which was great. I took classes and worked for a non-profit organization and went to a lot of museums. I'm terrible with people so I naturally was cut off from my roommate by the end of the semester, but it was ok. My parents came to visit me for Thanksgiving and I was going to visit my best friend in London before my parents joined me for Christmas.

It was my dream! I was traveling, life was good. My mom showed up in DC wearing a new fur coat and there was no mention of money trouble.

I don't think I should need to remind you that Thanksgiving is at the end of November. This was about 2.5 weeks before I was supposed to leave for the UK. Clearly any glaring money trouble would have been discussed at this point...right?

Hahahaha! (maniacal laughter)

So I left for London to visit my best friend in the whole world all happy and content that my life was finally starting to look up.

(Insert maniacal laughter again)

I had a great time with my friend and the friends she had made while on her semester abroad. We were kind of broke, but it was all good because my parents were coming and they would take me to do the expensive stuff.

This may seem naive for me given the insanity of my mother, but I have always been an optimist and still am to this day. I think that things can always get better and this firm belief that I hold for no damn good reason is really the one thing that kept me going through my childhood. I had the faith that I would continue to age and eventually get away from these crazy people.

I went to the airport to see my dear friend off since I had a day before I would meet my family at the airport. She called her parents on the airport pay phone to let them know she was getting on the plane when all hell broke loose. She told me that I had to call my parents, something had come up.

So I called my parents from a pay phone in the Heathrow airport to find out that they weren't coming to London. That they had a flight back for my in 3 days and I was to take that. Oh right! There would not be any more money for me.

I landed on the floor of the airport in shock. I couldn't stand or speak for a while, I just sat there. I really could not believe that they would do this. My friend was panicked, because she had to get on the plane, so I waved her off and told her I'd be fine, pulled myself together and went forward. I was 19 and had just been abandoned without money in the UK.

Just writing this is leaving me with shivers running through my body. I haven't really talked this through in detail with any of my many therapists and I had forgotten how incredibly traumatic it was to be abandoned in another country.

I can't remember due to the shock, but knowing my friend, I will assume she gave me some money. I brushed myself off metaphorically, left the airport and went to figure out what I was going to do. My mom had me leave my luggage at the hotel they were planning to stay in and I was hoping that they had already paid for one room night. They hadn't, but that wasn't a big shock at this point.

So I took all of my luggage and stored as much of it as would fit it in a locker at a train station. I still had an active Eurorail pass so I looked at what the longest train ride would be so I would have a place to sleep that night and I took the train there. It took me overnight to Aberdeen, which was delightful. I had been up to Edinburgh with my friend the week before and my love affair with Scotland just grew from there when I got a look at Aberdeen. It was cold with snow drifting lightly in the air and I was happy to be there and it helped me forget my worries.

I tried to go visit a loch, but being alone made me too nervous to walk out on the lonely lane on my own.

I just took the train all over the place using it to sleep and keep me safe while I waited for my plane to leave. I had to stay a night in the youth hostel in London, which was truly terrifying to me. I can't read social cues so being in a big room with a lot of strangers is my own personal nightmare.

I got back home to find out that my mother had not been paying for my tuition or housing while I was in DC, so that would have been a clue. But one I didn't have until I got back.

I don't think I've processed this enough to find the humor in it, so I guess some of these stories will be a bit raw. My goal was really to find the humor in all of the stories I share, but I see that's not going to be the case. Oh well.

First Friendship

When I was 14 I started my sophomore year of high school in Woodland Hills at an all girls, private, catholic high school.

It was the first time I felt safe in my entire life. It was wonderful.

I had lost weight and grown two inches over the summer between my freshman and sophomore years and so I started the year with a lot of confidence and excitement. My mother was finally okay with my appearance, which was a huge relief for me.

On my very first day I was nervous, but excited, just like we all are. But at the end of the day I was given a huge gift of friendship.

I was walking out of my last class of the day, world history, and I was so excited with all that we would be learning, but a bit sad because no one had really talked to me all day. As I was walking down the walkway a girl called my name from behind me. She had just stepped out of the world history room and this cute, tall, brown haired girl was calling my name. I was surprised, stopped and turned to talk to her.

Her name is Andrea and she has been a friend to me for so many, many years. We lose touch for a bunch of years and then we talk again. It's nice and amazing to me.

No matter who else I was friends with in High School I was always also friends with Andrea. She is kind and generous and so easy to talk to. She introduced me to my soul mate and husband, so I will always be grateful to her for that along with the gift of her friendship.

So while my home life was a nightmare I always could count on Andrea and run to her house when needed. Her friendship has meant so much to me. She is also the person who took photos of my friendships through high school. Without her picture taking I would have many fewer physical reminders of those days. I've always been a terrible photo taker and an grateful for Andrea's prowess in this area.

So this is one of the good things that happened to me as a child. I made a good friend. I had never really  had one before and it was somewhat of a mystery to me as to how to navigate a true friendship. It was mostly Andrea being a good friend and keeping the lines of communication open or reaching out to me when I fell off the face of the earth.

From Andrea I learned that a big part of friendship is being there for someone  and reminding them when they forget.