Happy FEST day, kids!

I am coming to you LIVE from the DePaul student center! I am a crew member and I am currently on duty right now. It is currently 7:46PM, and Brian, my boss, just let us know over the radio that if we pegged 7:42 for the first arrest of the night, we are the winner. He also just announced he’ll be staying by the east entrance, so I should have a good amount of time to type this out on the computer that’s labelled, “SC [Student Center] Use ONLY. No Web Browsing or Homework!” Oh well, what Joe doesn’t know won’t hurt him. I’m going to be done with school on the 9th, anyway. I don’t care if he fires me at this point. I’m out of here.

Okay, so, back to the story from last night. So like I had said, Buck* had just become a part of the CCM community in the second half of spring quarter freshman year, so she was relatively new. I think it was Sophomore year that she began to hang out late at night with a group of people from in there, like Ben and Andrew and Piere* (Ere/Air* for short) and some others, I’m not 100% sure who at this point in time. If I could change another thing, I wouldn’t change that she had spent time with them, but that I would have joined them. I think she might have invited me once, but I never went with them, probably because they mostly just went to Devil Dawgs which I couldn’t go to considering I was newly vegan. I think she did want me there, because at that point, as I said, she and I were each other’s best friend. I feel, though, that not being included in this part of her life made it simpler for her to divorce herself from me completely later on. Sophomore year was still pretty good otherwise, though.

One night, the Devil Dawgs gang was hanging out extra late, so Buck* asked everyone in the group if someone could put her up for the night. They all ignored her as though they hadn’t seen her message. How kind. I had to work that night, but I told her if she could wait until I got off then I could put her up at my place. I sent a group message to my roommates and two of them said they’d be fine with it. The third (the second random roommate, if you remember the story from before) never responded. Well, Buck* needed a place to stay, so I figured it would be best to just ask for forgiveness later if it upset her. So once I got off at 1AM Buck* and I walked to McCabe and I signed her in and we went upstairs and I put her up on the couch before going to my own bed. Before I fell asleep, the third roommate comes barreling in, her two friends in tow. All of them obnoxiously drunk. They were very loud and I had to move Buck* to my room due to their unannounced visit. I had to have her sleep on top of the covers of my other roommate’s bed. What got me is that she hadn’t even tried to let us know that they were all coming even though we had put that in our roommate rules. So essentially my having roommates made it much more difficult to host people because I couldn’t trust that everyone would stick to the rules we all agreed on. However, remember how I told you yesterday that Drisella* had her own room in Clifton-Fullerton again?

Well. Buck* actually ended up getting a job as a regular crew member, so she needed a place to stay. Since I had introduced her to Drisella*, they made plans that Buck* could stay with Drisella* on the regular, because Drisella* had no roommates to worry about notifying. By nature of this regular time spent together, the pair of them became very close to each other, and I realized only too late that they had become closer to each other than to me, though I suppose this may be partially my fault because Winter quarter that year was by far my worst academically because of a mix of orgo (word of advice: unless you are 110% sure and dead-set on becoming a medical doctor or a chemist, do NOT take organic chemistry! This is coming from someone who thought gen chem was easy- orgo exists to kill your spirit.) and my entry into the world of netflix, which I binged to my heart’s content. I spent most of my time in my dorm room watching The Secret Life of the American Teenager and Once Upon a Time, the latter of which became and continues to be my new obsession.

It was also around this time that we really met Hele*. I distinctly remember we had met her before, but I don’t truly remember her before the day I think Justice* brought her to the epiphany party. Justice* walked ahead with Drisella* and Buck*, and I followed with Hele*. I remember this moment distinctly. I said, “So how have you been?” and she looked me right in the face and sheepishly said, “Do you even remember my name?” and I was very taken aback by this. I think it is something of an unspoken rule that you do not ask this to people who sort of know you, especially if they’re being friendly, because we’ve all been there where you forget someone’s name, and we all do the same thing: we wait until someone else says their name, and then we make a point to remember after that so we don’t have another near miss, and if we’re the one whose name was forgotten we politely ignore it until they learn your name. In my case, I even let a girl who lived down the street from me call me Erica for years, though this was in part because I thought it was funny (sorry Jenna, haha). But no. It’s not even like Hele* had some very traditional foreign name to be proud of- she has the name of an old white lady, Helen*. She called me out anyway. I was embarrassed. I thought it was Melissa or something, but it turned out I had it mixed up with some other average looking white girl. Nonetheless, she spoke with me at the party as well as Buck* and Drisella*. She began to hang around CCM a lot more despite the fact she’s very much against Catholicism, which I would come to learn the following year. We all got to know her just a little bit better during that time, and she even came on Women’s Retreat, which was now a camping retreat like the men’s.

However, the closer she became to Buck* and Drisella*, the more she came to annoy them. See, Helen* was the type who liked to kiss and tell, and she wanted to have relationships with other girls who relished in gossip, too. Buck*, Drisella*, and I aren’t really like that, at least not on the same level she wanted to be on, because it was a bit more of a wannabe thing for her, though she seemed to have a “fake it ’til you make it” mindset. At that time, Buck*, Drisella*, and I weren’t really into that. I, for one, am demi-asexual, and I subscribe to a certain Catholic way of being which dictates that love should be grown organically from a friendship, not forced out of infatuation, so any relationship I may come to have will be slow to come and will be a slow-burn because I will really need any man (or woman or person of other gender outside of or in between that binary- I do currently identify as heteromantic but I have never explored this so who knows? Just God) who wants to be romantically involved with me to know my entire heart, and know all of me and know that all of me is what he wants, so that if we do get married I will feel safe allowing him to become one flesh with me and that he would also want to truly be one flesh with me, as God intended for us when he created humankind as we are. Buck* is a bit less intense about it than me, as she is still kinda boy-crazy and does kind of care more about boys who she is infatuated with (any boy who isn’t physically unattractive and is nice to her) than the friends who have been there for her by her side the entire time they’ve known her (I’m a little salty), but she still is pretty Catholic and believes in doing things the Catholic way, which is waiting until marriage to have sex. Drisella*… I think she has a very contorted understanding of relationships should work. I understand that she herself has a mental disability, but her understanding is odd at best and concerningly contorted at worst. She definitely sees potential SOs as objects, and I think even the boyfriend she has now she doesn’t completely see as a person; he’s very quiet. I can’t imagine dating someone who I would not feel comfortable disclosing my sexuality to, yet here she is, having a sexual relationship with a boy who she doesn’t trust enough to disclose her non-heterosexuality to (I’m not going to disclose her sexual identity and forcibly out her, but it stands to be said that she has one which she is afraid to come out about TO HER PARTNER). How romantic. I do not think that a relationship in which you are not fully trusting of the other person should exist. That is just a disaster waiting to happen. But she still does seem to believe in committed relationships. That much cannot be said for Helen*.

Helen* seems to want her life to be like an American high school drama series. Like a soap opera. She wanted to sleep around and kiss and tell and fight and cry and be über passionate (dramatic, in a theater sense) about all of it. As many of us know, that is the sensationalized view of life portrayed by the media, and she was eating it up wherever she could find crumbs of it. So when she caught wind that Drisella* was kindling what might potentially be a romance with another friend of ours, Helen* lunged at this information and practically begged Drisella* to give her all of the juicy details of it, from what Drisella* has told me. This, however, caused some panic for Drisella*, who was not completely sure how she felt yet. She didn’t want it to be a huge deal like Helen* was making it out to be (though I’ve since come to suspect it is also partially because he didn’t fit her image of her knight in shining armor), so she decided against dating him at all. In addition to this, apparently Helen* would constantly ask Buck* where she was hanging out, which Buck* hated. I can understand both sides on this one. On one hand, yeah, I can understand that it would be uncomfortable to have someone wanting to know where you are all of the time. On the other hand, I’ve been there, and Buck* herself has put me into a position of feeling a need to know where she and all of my other friends are because I am being left out. I understand fighting to not be left behind and forgotten, or even worse, being left behind intentionally. I get it. Buck* doesn’t seem to, and neither does Drisella, so near the end of the year I innocuously asked Buck* where she was over facebook messenger and was met with mean backlash by Drisella*, who was manning Buck’s* phone because she was the passenger in the car. She told me that I was bothering them and that Buck* was angry with me for asking. This upset me greatly and I cried, because ouch, all I did was ask where she was and suddenly I am a terrible burden who deserves Drisella’s verbal abuse?

I didn’t. And I don’t. And I feel very stupid for not being able to stop her from putting me in a position of being abused by someone again. As much as she thinks she does, she has no right.

It is the end of the night now. I might work on this a bit tomorrow while I’m working at 826. Come visit, if you’re so inclined. All proceeds go back into the non-profit tutoring program to keep it free, so you’ll be doing a good deed by buying the taco-printed socks you’ve always wanted, you saucy millennial. Until then, keep it real kids. You don’t have to sugarcoat the truth, but it doesn’t have to be cold and hard, either. Be kind. Use “I” statements. Love one another.

A demain,

Cara

Hello blog I forgot about for a very long time,

Lots to mind dump. I still don’t have a therapist although I likely could very much use one. However, I feel that honestly the biggest contributor to my current depression is my struggle to find people in my community who I can depend on, who care. This is where many of my grievances lie, so this will likely be a long blog post unless I get too tired to finish, but I have my doubts that that will happen. So sit back, relax, grab some popcorn and probably some hot tea because this is about to get juicy. My biggest question, though, should you feel inclined to help me out, is whether or not a therapist would even be able to help me find good friendships with people who are willing to be close to me. Also, just in case someone DOES happen upon this, I will be changing names of my DePaul colleages in a manner which I think is relevant and makes sense to me. I’ll put an asterisk next to their names, but they should be relatively easy to tell).

Essentially, there has been a pattern throughout my life in which I become friends with a person, become close-ish to them (close to me, idk about them now, as Drisella* has planted that seed of doubt with her gaslighting), but then right when I begin thinking we’re going to have a strong, lasting bond of friendship, they fade away, sometimes even literally ghosting me. This happened with Brooke, this happened with Rachel, this happened with Amanda, this has probably happened with some others who don’t stick out as much, and now this is being done to me by Buck*. And it is super fucking frustrating. I’ve gotten it into my head that I am cursed, because I have tried many different things but I always get the same outcome: they ghost me and wait for me to fuck up, then use my fuck-up as an excuse to bail, and bail in the meanest way they can. Perhaps I just have a tendency to make friends exclusively with mentally/emotionally abusive people, but if that’s true it is bullshit; it’s not even remotely fair. I come from a past of abuse, and I know that I will not be able to completely heal from that until I get some therapy, but like how cruel is it that if because of that I just keep cycling through friendships with people who will just chew me up and spit me out while everybody else gets to have healthy, close, positive relationships without even trying? Why? This question keeps following me through life like a sinister shadow, haunting me , overtaking me on dark, lonely nights when I am left alone with my thoughts, which is far too often. I dream of one day having a group of people who truly care for me and want the best for me, and who would be willing to be there for me, and who want me around, who think of me as part of their group, who cherish me as a friend, who like spending time with me, who think of me when they want to spend time with someone, who will include me, and who I would do all of these things for in a heartbeat. And perhaps the people who hurt me are somehow cruelly preying on this. It does tend to go south only after I introduce them to my other friends. So I lie awake terrorized by thoughts and haunted by questions, wondering if they’ve all been plotting against me and if they secretly hate me. The former is obviously absurd. I wonder ceaselessly about the latter.

Thus, the grievances. First, with myself. I won’t go into my haunted, twisted, contorted psyche, but I know that I have done things wrong and I am far from perfect. I know that, although undiagnosed, I am afflicted with mental illness which could be distorting my view of these matters to a certain extent. I might even be guilty of some of the things I will be accusing others of, making myself a bit of a hypocrite. But these things I am willing, albeit ashamedly, to admit. I’m not sure I could say as much for some of the people I will be discussing below. But I have the humility to admit that I have done things I shouldn’t have and haven’t done things I should, and should it come up then I will discuss it.

So I suppose there are many different places to start off from, and I am now getting the feeling I will NOT finish this story in one sitting, but I’ll get through as much as I can. Drisella* and I were both lonely and desperately seeking friendship, and we became friends with each other. I joined up with a bunch of organizations, she joined up with none, and I could probably count the friends she had freshman year on one hand, whereas I can’t even remember meeting everyone I did freshman year, which was made very apparent to me when her current “boyfriend” Dean* pointed out that he had also been on the Freshman Connection Retreat freshman year.  Drisella* and I hung out a lot freshman year, which she now says was not as often as I remember (though I think that is another way of her trying to gaslight me). Additionally, I had an eating disorder which she either blatantly ignored or was too self-absorbed to notice, whereas Erin noticed it very quickly after I moved in at the beginning of winter quarter that year, despite us not being remotely close. I say Erin’s name straight up because I feel she deserves a mention. She and I were not close and I always felt like a stranger in that room and I was worried she secretly hated me (though I don’t think that’s true), but I think that Erin is a good person who is caring and compassionate, although I tell people that I was incredibly intimidated by and afraid of her despite the fact she is half my current size (I say this because I was afraid of her. She had an intimidating demeanor. I’m still afraid of her but I do believe she is a great person). Anyway. Drisella* somehow didn’t notice this, or if she did she didn’t care to mention it (care at all). I joined many different organizations and tried to connect with many different people on some level, but I was so concerned with my eating and my image that I think I missed out on some great friendship opportunities, especially the one I could specifically have had with Joseph*. If I could go back, I would have done it differently. I would have invited Joseph* to come hang out in the Belden study room while I still lived there; he lived just over in Munroe. I was a clueless, scared, lost little freshman, and I wish I would have known that pursuing those popular types would never lead anywhere. I wonder how they could always tell I wasn’t going to be one of the cool kids.

I made some friends that year who I got sort of close with but none as close as Drisella*. She and I had classes together every quarter, so we would sit next to each other up in front. This did not make things much easier for her, though, and she ended up flunking enough courses that she has to be here an extra year, though she says it is because she changed her major. Sure, that’s part of it, but I know the whole truth, Drisella*. I also know she lies about things, most notably sleeping through one of our finals winter quarter of that year. I tried getting ahold of her when the final was starting, but she didn’t pick up. I couldn’t do anything more for her. She contacted me later and let me know that she slept right through the exam, but later on she told me it was because she had a migraine. This obviously confused me because she had told me she slept through it initially. I asked her about it, and she added that the migraine had happened in the wee hours of the morning, and that because of it she had slept through her final once she got back to sleep. What gets me is that I’m not a snitch, so I don’t know why she was bothering to lie about it. I still won’t because I’m not enough of a sociopath to ruin her college career even though she’s being horrible to me. Why? Because I’m not horrible, despite what she’d have you think now. But let’s move on.

It was nearly the end of our freshman year when I met Buck*. Buck* was a commuter student who was even lonelier than me. The moment I began talking to her in the CCM office before the Women’s retreat that year (before it was a camping retreat), we virtually did not stop until we both had to go home the next day. Within weeks she and I had become two peas in a pod. It was great. And while I’m at it I’d like to throw a callout at housing services for by far being the absolute shittiest branch of the school. Fuck you guys, you are a huge part of my problems. Here’s what went down with housing: First of all, bitches, y’all had been sitting on that permanent room since winter break, yet you couldn’t have let me, Sam, and Angelica know until we had already settled in? I moved my desk and everything. Then literally the Wednesday after we moved back in I was hanging out in Drisella’s* room and I get an email that says, “You got a new room! Congratulations! Move out by Sunday. We will provide you no assistance and we will not open the elevator for you so you and your mother whose knees are shot get to carry everything up the stairs :)”. Wow! How efficient! On top of that, and I blame myself partly for this, but you forced Buck* to pay you for an entire quarter’s rent in McCabe despite the fact that she had never lived there because she forgot to cancel the 4-weeks housing she had requested. What a dick move. But the worst you did was screwing me over with the housing signups for housing sophomore year. Drisella* was originally going to room with two other girls, but because there were no 3-person rooms in centennial they decided to give her the boot and just room with each other, whereas when the same happened to me Ethel and I decided to go with a 4-person room and get a random 4th roommate. Now, here’s the thing about the room signups: you CAN change it, but you have to be absurdly specific about what you’re asking for. They gave us flyers that said you can do “room reassignments.” You MUST SPECIFICALLY ask for a ROOM REASSIGNMENT or the SMUG, SNOOTY bitch woman who works in housing services will do all that she can to prevent you from getting the room reassigned. Drisella* asked if she could be in our room given the circumstances. I remembered that room reassignment was a thing and I told her of course she could be in our room. If things had gone THE WAY THEY WERE SUPPOSED FUCKING TO, I think my life might have turned out differently, but no. So Drisella* and I go back to the signups and I ask if she can switch to our room. But I did not specifically say the words “room reassignment,” so we were forced to wait forever just to get up to the lady who told us we were asking for something very difficult and impossible and which would cost us all $1000 each because we’d all have to cancel our housing and sign up for different rooms. She told us to come back during the lunch break. Lunch break comes, they won’t let us in because they’re having lunch. Drisella* has to go to class so she fills out a proxy form so I can make decisions on her behalf. So I wait in the line again and when I get up to smug bitch-lady she won’t let me use the proxy form because Drisella didn’t circle her building preferences, which she hadn’t felt the need to do considering she was going to be moving into a room we already had in McCabe! So I had to go pull her out of class, and when we got back I actually said the words “room reassignment” to the dude who was in charge of the line, so he let us streamline and skip the waiting and go over to smug bitch lady, who smirks and says “Awe, too late, I already made sure to give the extra bed to someone else!” That woman was so rude. The WORST, though, is that halfway through the summer our rando roomie cancelled her room so it was effing pointless anyway! Housing services sucks and is inefficient and unhelpful, and also there were a LOT of spiders in that room in McCabe. Their rules were stifling, they’re all bad at their jobs, they’re shady, and I know the school is gutting a lot of employees this summer so I’m hoping that for the sake of future students who will have to live on campus that at the very least smug bitch lady will be replaced with someone who is actually willing to be a decent human being.

Anyway, my thing is that if Drisella* and I had successfully moved her into my room for the following school year, I think things right now would be a lot different. Instead, here is how things went down: Drisella* got her own room in the freshman dorm again, I help her pack up, we all go home for the summer. It was a very nice summer. I was newly vegan, having used it as a tool to break off of my eating disorder, and I was living the healthiest lifestyle I ever had. I drove myself to Evangelical Training Camp (ETC) and had an absolute blast with the group of people I was there with. I felt so in tune with and close to them during that time. We returned to school, and after a few days I started feeling the best that I can remember feeling in my entire life. I was on top of my school work, I was on a spiritual high, I had good friends and a good community, everything was looking up. Buck* and I still were two peas in a pod, and I tried my darnedest to convince Drisella* to join me in CCM, which she was adamantly avoiding doing. Joseph* and I had just begun co-leading a small group with another boy, Rafael*. During that time, I felt so at peace. It was the best time in my life thus far. I tried to go even further and rid myself of my worst habits (they’ve since become worse, not due to my efforts to break them off). I began working at the student center, so I actually had an income. Drisella* finally gave in and walked past the threshold of CCM, which has arguably been the best decision she’s made in her entire college career. I introduced her to Buck*, and I wanted us to be the three musketeers. The three of us became our own little squad, with me being in the center of it. It was wonderful. But it was doomed.

Joseph* confided in me that he was going to take a romantic risk and promised that he would tell me if it went well. I was a young fool and thought he was going to ask me out. Well, that’s not what happened, and he asked someone else, which is completely fine, except he never told me like he had promised to and I had to find out from someone else that he had begun dating someone. He also hurt the feelings of our friend Jessica* in the process, because he is also not the brightest and he said to her, “well, I didn’t think you and I were that close that I should have told you about it.” She had had a bit of a crush on him, so with that statement he kind of crushed her, and soon she made the decision to leave our community and her job in the office, which left me frustrated because I had applied and interviewed for the same job and they had chosen her over me, and look where that got them! I’m still a bit salty about that; they should have just hired me in the first place, and that also would have made things different in my life, but I digress.  Rafael*, too, began dating someone, a leader of a different small group. Again, fine, except they began flaking out on leading small group to instead be alone with each other and wouldn’t even answer my texts asking what the plan was for our small group meetings. They straight up lied once, too, and said they “forgot” that we were having small group. We do it every week. You didn’t forget. I somehow was able to hold out and carry the small group through the rest of the quarter, but because all of my other co-leaders had either flaked out or couldn’t do it anymore (such as Joseph’s case), our small group was done for the year and did not return winter quarter. I was angry at all of them for doing me so dirty like this.

There’s more to tell, but it’s 3 AM and I am tired so I will leave it like that. Maybe I’ll get back to it in the morning, but I’m leaving it off here. I’ll try to remember the big CCMer group that Buck* was a part of and how close she and Drisella* became without me. But I will let you know it is all downhill from here. It has gotten worse and thus far has not gotten better. There are some happy moments, but altogether life is worse, which is evidenced by my current state of depression. I’ll try to dish more dirt tomorrow. Peace out, kids, and don’t be sluts.

Love, Cara