The other day something funny happened to me. I went to Boston to visit my best friend (I currently live in London) and I got so horribly drunk one night that I blacked out and burst into hysterical tears for about an hour straight. I mean, I was inconsolable. Water-works doesn’t even begin to describe it. In fact, I’d wager that you could have dumped me in a farmer’s crop and he wouldn’t have had to worry about rain for the entire season.
When I woke the next day with a stinking hangover, my friend (who I can thankfully call so after this particular episode) began to regale the previous evening’s events. She told me me, that a few too many beers and equally too many whiskey shots (I never do shots, and I NEVER drink whiskey – just an indicator of my mindset of the evening) later I proceeded to burst into tears rambling on about how I hated my life and how I hated her. I continued with garbled convictions such as “you constantly berate me, you’re so mean to me, you’re horrible to me and your brothers.” This is all news to me. But it has to come from somewhere, right? I mean, this is my best friend in the entire world who has NEVER put me down, constantly supported me and all of my movements in life, even if she didn’t agree with me. This is the woman who has maintained my strongest friendship despite the fact that we’ve spent 10 of the 13 years of our friendship living on different continents. Why, then, all this hidden anger and ridiculousness?
Let’s put it down to this – I realised, the next day, that I have never, ever actually made a decision for myself on my own. Ever. Things have always sort of, “fallen into my lap” so to speak. I’ve always been that one friend in the group who has the best of luck, but also the worst of luck. There’s no happy medium with this one. Let’s take, for instance, my current job. I’m a film journalist for a pretty proficient trade paper and many of my peers would kill to work at such a place. It’s important, it’s a good atmosphere, reasonable money and I basically get paid to write and talk about movies. Brilliant. But this only came about because I fluked work experience there and then there happened to be an opening at the time and I was the most convenient option. No real elbow grease there then.
Then let’s take my family’s living situation. My parents are currently divorced after many years of arguing, living in separate houses and berating each other via me (I’m the oldest of five children and therefore see it as my responsibility to keep the family together). I distinctly remember when I was 18 when they separated. We were all living in London after having been there for two years. We had gone bankrupt and my father took my two brothers back to the US to live and start over. My mother went up to her native town in Lincolnshire to live with my two sisters and grandmother. I, having not gotten into the college of my choice, was dumped at a friend of my mother’s house with the equivalent of about $10 in my hand with the words, “Good luck”. Shocking for me to come to terms with. Mom and Dad fought and only spoke through me. “Tell your mother I said…” and “You’d better tell your father I said this…”. I felt I was singularly the only thread that was holding this web together.
But without getting all emotional and morose here (believe me, this is the lightest of my bad runs – wait until I tell you the one about the boyfriend who turned out to be an engaged, coke-selling pimp. I thought he was in real estate. Hmm…) let’s go back to my Boston waterfalls. It was then, when the one person who has never caused me grief said to me, “What the hell is wrong with you? I didn’t know you were so unhappy” that something clicked. There, in her very spacious apartment, roughly three times the size of my box in London (which costs me roughly three times the amount she pays) I had an epiphany. I had literally never made a decision for myself in my life. When I say never, I mean never. At restaurants, I harp back and forth for 20 minutes until I give three choices to whomever I’m dining with and I make them pick one for me. Or there’s the first boyfriend, whose advances I resisted for months until a friend pleaded with me to “give it a try” because he liked me so much. I felt bad, so I thought, what the hey. Or there’s the university that I went to that I very luckily got into via clearing at the last minute (literally eight days before class started I was accepted into my choice degree on lower than average grades because my English was such a record-breaking, high A). How do you say no to that? Or there’s the time my mother kicked me out of the house that my family had “bought” for me and the rest of the kids to live in. She came over, rustled her peacock feathers and I was out.
You’re probably thinking “this isn’t funny, it’s tragic”. In some respects, your assumptions are right. It IS tragic. I’m 26 years old and thought I had a reasonable grasp of my life and the world around me and you know what? It turns out that I actually don’t know a damn thing about myself. Ah, phew. There. It feels good to say it and just put it out there. I don’t know anything about me. I live my life through the eyes of other people and how they see me, or how I’d want them to see me, not how I want to see me.
So you know what, with that admission comes acceptance. Here I am, arms bare, scared out of my mind but liberated. I don’t know me. So, I think it’s time to find out. I’m quitting my job tomorrow, packing up my things and leaving this little rainy island that I was kidnapped to in the first place (ah, another story of the beautiful dominance parents have over their little ones – I thought we were coming over here on vacation until a friend back in the US, where I grew up, called me and said my house was packed up in boxes and there were moving trucks outside. Unsurprisingly, I never went back until I was in college). Yep, I’m leaving. I’m making my first big decision for me. And it’s going to piss a lot of people off and it’s going to make some people think that I’m an idiot for doing so but I don’t care. I’m moving. I’m picking up my bags and shipping off to Boston. I don’t even have a job lined up. But I do have a friend who will support my every decision and take care of me despite the fact that I berated her in a drunken episode only a few days ago. And that’s pretty much all I need right now, right? I think so.
