A Chocolate Chip Among Non Chocolate Chips

I am currently in a strange place that I have a lot of freedom to do whatever I want. I can stay up late if I wanted, currently doing an all nighter. I can buy anything I want without being yelled at by my mama because my I eat too much candy. I can go anywhere without asking permission. Wow, awesome right? College is a place where you get to see what adulthood is like but you aren't exactly at official adulthood yet. Think of it as a purgatory of some sort: you can't return to the place you came from (high school), but you can't go to the other end just yet (official adult status). That's unless you dropout but let's pretend it's not an option. 

His mullet represents the awkwardness I experienced. 

In movies, you see that college is like the garden of Eden where parties are galore, sorority chicks are all up on you like a dog on a leg, and you can enjoy the adult version of 7 Minutes in Heaven all the time. I never believed in those stereotypical movies, mostly because I knew they were just fiction, exaggerations. Even though I didn't expect all of that, I at least thought that random people would come up to you and ask to be your friend. That's the total opposite of what I got. In my very first class of my freshman year, I timidly walked into class, expecting to become instant friends with the person I would sit beside but not embarrass the crap out of myself. Well, since embarrassment runs through my veins, I ended up in the wrong class and once I announced that realizations to the professor, he just looked at me in silence and a thousand pairs of eyes pierced me as I awkwardly sped walked out of there. Way to start off the semester.  But I soon saw that it was hard making new friends. Everybody was just like me: nervous, to afraid to even say hey to my neighbor, scared to move because the seat might squeak. That last one is definitely the worst. 

I always blamed myself for not making friends in my 1st month. I'm a big overthinker who thinks that in every conversation I'm in was a total disaster and it was might fault for it being that way. That's not a great way to live. I felt the ultimate lonely during this time and I thought I would spend the rest of my 4 years alone and thinking it was all because I was boring or annoying. It didn't help that I didn't know how to make friends or where to start small talk or anything social. I always considered myself socially stupid, a total moron when it came to basic social skills. I like to blame puberty which I'm still suffering the effects of to this day. 

Inside joke!!!

I started to realize that I have been the odd one out in just about every aspect of my life since middle school. In my family I was born in period where I had two other relatives my age but I never lived anywhere near them to hang out. For years I lived in a house that was way too crowded and filled with people I couldn't relate to: an impatient old man, an older woman who seemed to always piss people off, a woman who I barely saw who slept most of the day and worked all night, three teenage guys who were all experiencing that angry beast that comes to see them every month, and a whiny, cranky little kid I had to share a room with. I couldn't relate to any of them or talk to them about normal teenage boy stuff. Luckily, across the street was a kid roughly my age that I could hang out with to get out of the madhouse. Even with him I felt like we were two opposites whose personalities would seemingly clashed but it worked out better than you would think.

At school I was a very likable person. Teachers would always use me as an example for other students to strive to be (a thing that I always hated) and I had different sorts of friends from every high school social hierarchy. That sounds like high school for me was awesome but I consider it very unlikable years. I never belonged to any group, I aimlessly walked to different groups of people who shared the same interest as each other and hung out after school. It sucked for me because I lived so far from my friends that they either never knew how to get to my house or never wanted to drive that far to get me. I liked being able to not put into a certain group but ironically I wished I was. I just could never connect with anybody. 

I looked back at my years of high school after graduation and I realized that I had a lot more friends than what I originally thought I had but they were more of what I called "filler friends". Filler friends are people who "fill up" the empty spaces of former friends you always talked to when you transition into a new class. Filler friends are convenient since you can talk to them in class and not be so bored but when class ends, you guys never actually talk. I would say 98% of those friends I made were filler friends and it just made my high school experience even worse when I think about it. I constantly felt alone at certain times. I remember being that person who would always do anything for a friend and put so much effort to make them feel better or help in anyway. But everytime I needed help, I never got that determination or effect in return. Countless times I wanted to talk about stuff and I felt rejected whenever the person just seemingly ignores the crap out of it. This happened over and over again to the point that I just gave up and kept all that stuff I wanted to talk about to myself. I mean, it was no point in giving when nobody wanted to receive. From then on I never let people know how I really felt. I was known as the loud, funny, outgoingish guy but there were plenty of days when I didn't want to be that person but I just acted like nothing was wrong with. To this day I still kind of hesitate to express myself to people because I still think that noone will be there to hear it.

When I left for college, I decided to try to become a different person, someone who wouldn't be afraid of what people thought of him, someone who took more risks to get more out of life. The last time I had to make a whole new batch of friends was when I moved in fifth grade. Of course I met new people along the way up to college but I always had my same old friends around, so completely starting over with making friends with people you never knew existed was punching a MMA fighter in the face for no apparent reason, scarier than a mofo. It took me a really long time to get a group of friends that liked me for who I am and I still hang with today. I still over criticize myself at times, hold back my emotions and cover them up like I was completely fine, still feel that I the most boring person in the universe. I can't keep living like that. I have to realize that I'm an awesome person who anybody would be lucky to be friends with. I see that maybe in my life, I'm not meant to have a huge group friends, maybe I will always have a small, close knit group I would consider family for life. I see that you should friend everybody you see either because not everybody are as friendly as they seem. I still don't understand why my life turned out the way it did. Was that some kind of test that I needed to go through to be prepared for a bigger, happier life afterwards? Will I invent a time machine and fix all the crappy parts but find out that doing so created a crappier future where I feel 1000x worse than I did then so I decided to still with the life I have now? If so, that proves that there are time travelers somewhere on Earth who is changing history right now and we might never know. This makes me want to watch the Back to the Future movies again.