But this list is a special list. This list is a list of things I need to bring with me to college.
I'm sure some of you are thinking "Already? It's only the beginning of May!" I'm sure I'd be thinking that, too, if the person were anyone other than me. But only if I didn't know the reason. The reason I already wrote this list is that I'm leaving soon. Twenty-three days from now, actually.
See, I got a job this summer, working at my college. My big brother goes there, and he hooked me up at the theater he works at. I'll be working forty hours a week, and living with his awesome, geektastic girlfriend, Jordan. This is going to be a huge change for me; I know that it will be Fun and A Good Experience, but it could also be Frightening and Lonely, and it will definitely be New and Different. I have many complicated feels about this, and it will probably be a good thing for me to get them down and sort them out.
The first think I'd like to address is my house and homelife. In this aspect, things can only get better. Yes, I'll be providing for myself, living with someone who I have only met three or four times, and will have to manage everything on my own, but I honestly can only see this as an improvement. I currently live with my parents and two younger sisters; my oldest brother has moved out, and lives in Chicago, and I will be joining my other big brother in Wisconsin this summer. I love my family, don't get me wrong, but my baby sister (she's almost nine now, but she'll always be the baby) has an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and it can make life hell sometimes. She can be this sweet little girl, who loves to hug you and hang out with you and looks up to me and our other sister so much and wants to be just as cool as we are, but suddenly, with no visible cause, she can become unreasonable, throwing fits over the smallest thing; she won't respect our personal space, she has no filter between her brain and her mouth, and never thinks how hurtful the things she says can be, she doesn't get that sometimes, big girls are irritable and in so much pain they literally cannot move and just don't have the patience or the will to deal with anything stressful.
I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea. Like I said, I love her, with all my heart, and I will do anything to help her. I'm so grateful to the people at her school, to the staff, who know exactly how to handle her, and to the other students, who love her imagination and think she's the coolest and are almost always so nice to her and make her feel like the most popular girl in school and, really, I think she might be. I'm so happy that she can have that, because I know the hell that kids with mental disabilities can go through in school. I flew completely off the handle one day in Gym class because the teacher was being an ass to someone like my sister, and nobody said so much as a negative word about the kid in my hearing for the rest of the year. I hope that my baby sister doesn't ever have anything like that happen to her, but if she does, I hope that there is someone like me to stand up for her.
Now that I (hopefully) have convinced you of my love of my sister, I think it's safe to say that she is one of the things that make me cry the most often. The unreasonableness, the temper tantrums, the just not getting the fact that Neenie and I just need to be left alone sometimes, are so hard to reconcile with the sweet girl she can be. It's desperately difficult to deal with, and there are times when I have to babysit her, and once she's in bed, I just sit down and cry, and I'm damn certain that it will be so much easier when I don't have to deal with that sort of thing on a daily basis. But then I love her so much, it hurts to think that.
Also included in my homelife are my parents. I remember saying, when I was little, how my parents were probably the best parents in the world. I think back and remember that, and then remember how much they managed to screw up. Maybe Neenie and Grace have it best, because my parents had three kids to practice on before them, or maybe what they do is more noticeable. Or maybe my parents were so afraid of doing the wrong thing that they did it anyway.
When Neenie was in fourth grade, her teacher was a bitch of the highest degree. This was the final year in our elementary school before the students started switching classes; English, spelling, math, science, social studies, all were taught by the same teacher, so Neenie had to spend the whole day with the same woman. My sister would come home sobbing, because the teacher made fun of her, almost every single day. My parents went to see the principal, and I think I'm going to love that woman for my whole life because of what she did. She couldn't fire the teacher, because the pastor had the final say in those matters (don't get me started on him), but she told Neenie that she could come down to the office whenever she needed to, because the teacher was being mean, because another student was being mean, or just because Neenie was feeling down. So my parents did something about that. They don't seem too bad, do they?
Well, look at the other side of the story.
When Neenie was in fourth grade, I was in seventh. Now, I didn't have a teacher going after me, but I had most of my classmates on my back. Neenie has always exuded an aura of confidence (however much we both know she lacks it) that has made her a favorite among her classmates. I never had that. I was smart, geeky, and socially awkward from the ground up. I had been homeschooled until sixth grade, and I didn't have any idea how to interact with my peers until about eighth grade. I'm still kind of clueless. They teased me mercilessly because of this, and I came home crying almost as often as Neenie. My parents never did anything.
When I started to self-injure, I think it was kind of obvious. I'd show up in the morning in my pajamas--a tank top and pajama pants--with cuts criss-crossing my shoulders, but my mom took the cock-and-bull story about falling into bushes that I fed her for the longest time. She only ever did anything about it when my dad saw them, too.
My big brother thinks that she was afraid of making a mistake. Perhaps she was thinking that I was just clumsy and kept taking the same fall over and over, or maybe she was in denial. All that I know is that it made me feel even more alone.
But they did eventually get me help, and I got better. I'm still better. You could almost say that I'm flourishing. Almost.
They got better, too. They helped me get through things, they did what they could to help me get better, and they were very, very gentle with me. For about five months.
Once those five months were up, though, I started seeming like I was okay again, the support and the gentleness and the care that they had been showing me faded slowly away, until they got to the point where they act like nothing is different from before. They have started, again, some of the behaviors that put me in the hospital in the first place. They yell at me for doing things wrong when I think I'm doing them right but I'm not because my parents have changed the rules again and forgot to tell me. They don't take what I do seriously. They tell me that I need to take time for myself, but get angry with me when I do. They make hurting, cutting remarks that undermine my self-esteem and confidence.
I have to deal with this sort of shit in my own home. And my friends wonder why I think so poorly of myself.
I never get out. I'm trapped in a house that isn't a home, with people who don't seem concerned about my welfare, and I'm dying to just leave. These are the reasons that I got the job at the theater in the first place, and why I'm so happy to be going. But there are reasons that I want to stay, too.
I'm a part of a wonderful youth group. I left St. Damian, the parish of my childhood, and the school where I spent three years learning, to go to a church twenty minutes from where I live, where my only connection is that it was the place my dad and his siblings went to school. Why did I do this, you ask? Because my three years at the school sucked. Because the pastor was a homophobe, and I couldn't sit through another damn sermon about how gays were bad and wrong and going to Hell because they didn't conform to the Bible. Because the place where I ended up had a group of loving, supporting people who let me be myself and stood by me through hell and high water. Because the sixty-something-year-old youth minister told one boy to get off another boy's lap because "that's so gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that."
They are wonderful human beings, the epitome of what the Catholic Church really should be, who take the real meaning of the word "catholic" to heart, and make it truly universal. I'm going to miss being a part of this group, all the friends I leave behind, the love and support they have given me, and the two hours of being open and honest and just having fun every week, and I know that they are going to miss me.
My social life has taken an upturn recently. Specifically, I actually got asked to prom by a friend of mine, and that's something that I never thought would happen. But this kid; he's a friend of mine, and I've sort of half-liked him ever since we met. He's cute and geeky, and he's one of the few guys I've met who are actually really nice (the total is, like, seven or something, and two of them are my blood brothers and another is like my little brother). I mean, I have quite a few guy friends, but most of them can be complete assholes sometimes.
But anyway, so there's this boy who has asked me to prom. Unfortunately for the both of us, I had to say no. No, I'm not doing anything the night of or whatever. I just really hate dances; I hate dancing and crowds and noise and really bad music, and that's pretty much the summary of a school dance. So we're currently treading those awkward waters frequented by two socially awkward people between a slight miscommunication (he thinks I was out-and-out rejecting him) and clearing it up, but hopefully this will work.
Except that I'm leaving soon, so God only knows where this will actually end up going.
Then there are my other friends. My best guy friend (and my "little brother") and I came up with this hilarious plan to build ourselves a little hut thing behind my house this summer, and it would have been so much fun to build it and paint it and hang out in it all summer before I left for college and he started classes (at a local community college) in the fall. Because I'm going away to work, that plan completely fell through.
This is just a little sample of what's going on. My friends and I had a bunch of plans (road trip, hanging out, swimming, and all sorts of other stuff) that won't happen now because I'm really only going to have ten days of summer break between my last day of school and when I leave to start work.
But the hardest part of leaving is definitely the fact that I don't get to take my little sister and my best friend with me.
These are two different people, but they can both share the same two roles. Neenie, my freshman (they make great pets), has been considered my best friend since sophomore year. I don't know how it happened, other than gradually, but suddenly we were super close and loving each other and still a little teasing but in a nice way now and sharing interests and all sorts of things, sort of like what happened with me and my big brother, Chris, but fortunately before my senior year. Emma Lee, my lovely co-host on our recently-conceived podcast (shameless!plug is shameless), has been my best friend since the first day we met in 2008. We are similar enough for it to be awesome and kind of freaky, but different enough that we fill in the gaps in the other's character. When a lot of people think about soulmates, they picture the perfect couple. Emma and I aren't in a romantic relationship--we never will be and the thought is pretty weird. We are soulmates, though, completing each other, best friends for forever and a day, and we know we'll make it through hard times because we have done before.
I'm going to miss these two desperately. Even though I don't get to see Emma every day like I do Neenie, it's still going to be hard being so much farther away from her. Nothing will change in our relationships because we are four hours apart, I know that, but it still hurts to leave.
So, when the day comes to go, I'm going to leave with mingled joy and sadness, because sometimes good-bye is a second chance, but the hardest part of this is leaving you.
