It was my nineteenth birthday and my year of being eighteen was done. I was working that day, I think? Or at least I was hanging out in the place that I worked to study and be among people and be in a space that I liked. It was a college learning center with whiteboard tables you could write on with erasable markers, natural light from the windows, origami everywhere. Of course I was there all the time. It was nice there.
A coworker I thought was vaugely cute back then found out it was my birthday and he laughed and slumped back in his seat and said something to the effect of “you have to be at work on your birthday? gross. dude, you don’t even have any friends.”
Which was a false and completely unnecessary thing to say, especially because (a) I did have at least one friend, which is logically refutation via counterexample and (b) I thought the people I worked with were extremely cool and I wanted to be friends with them. Even though about half of them were leaving and I was fairly sure I was never going to see them again. I just didn’t know how. There is an unforgettable kind of admiration towards the (much older, cooler, and more sophisticated) students who are exactly one grade above you in your first year of community college. This may read like satire, but it isn’t. Their graduation – not just the vaugely cute one, the entire lot of them – felt like losing this first real sense of community I had discovered. Even if I was still experiencing that feeling of being stuck on the other side of a wall of glass, even then.
Everything feels intense and vivid in that way, when you are eighteen.
And I was such an oddball of an eighteen year old human. Quiet. Shy. Irrevocably homeschooled. Still living at home when everyone else was off on their own for the first time. Took most things way too seriously and everything else much too personally because I was literally eighteen and when you are eighteen or nineteen or twenty-one you still think you are the main character and everything is all about you. And honestly I didn’t have many friends. Had just ended a dying relationship with a highschool sweetheart I didn’t love anymore and I had been wandering in the woods on campus and crying my eyes out over that loss for days. Had just cut my hair short for the first time since I was fifteen and couldn’t stop trying to figure out how to style it in the bathroom mirror with an embarrassing amount of sticky waxy hair paste. As a displacement activity, this was better than the extremely obvious obsessive compulsive skin picking rituals which took years for me to heal.
It was That Time of the semester – exams, etc.. I don’t think I even had glasses yet. Still had a flip phone.
A few of the guys in my Calc II class asked me if they could have a copy of my meticulously crafted 8 1/2″ x 11″ formula sheet for the final calculus exam. I had spent my entire semester devoting hours to helping them with the homework, standing at the whiteboard covered wall with my back to the room, learning the subject better even as I was trying to help them. On that day I finally told them no.
Before I left that day my boss at the time smiled at me and told me he was proud of me. I couldn’t tell if he said that because I had just said to the boys “no you may not copy my work for the exam” or if I was good at the work that I was doing, but it was nice of him to say. I have kept that memory on purpose.
The first time I met this person who told me he was proud of me I was immediately struck by a feeling like oh my god. You’re like me. We’re not much alike, as you seem lovely and I am terrible, but we have something in common. I have never once met anyone in the world who was like me. I cannot explain how exactly but it’s there. I didn’t even understand what the thing we had in common was, at the time. I just knew it was there and it was important.
In retrospect I think it was false to think I’d never met anyone else who was “like me” in this way. I just think most of us who grew up homeschooled or in the culture of an extremely conservative white middle class school district learned to hide so we could blend in. But over time I’ve been lucky enough to find other people who are like me and experience this sense of commonality with them. We are not exactly alike, we are not in any way the same person, just – we have something in common that is neither good nor bad just different from everyone else and it’s something we can both relate to and understand without ever needing to talk about it.
(For those of you who aren’t one of us – the best I can do at translating what specifically it is we have in common is that it’s something similar to “ah yes – you’re a writer, too.” And this is all I will say here.)
To this day, finding these people and befriending them and nurturing those friendships as best I can – even when I don’t always know how – is probably one of the best things about being alive.
When you are eighteen you don’t have a clue who you are yet. You’re not done cooking. But it’s the beginning of a chapter of experiencing your life in a new way. We grow up fast. We are constantly changing and learning how to live. And even years later on we are still constantly growing and changing and we aren’t sure what’s going to happen next in this life. At first glance it doesn’t seem like an advantage to have friends who remember what you were like when you were young and terrible. It’s this “mortifying ordeal of being known” thing. But perhaps it’s a kind of gift to have been known for a long time.
I remember being eighteen. The memory is excruciating.
As of yesterday I am slightly closer now to my twenty-sixth birthday than I am to my twenty fifth. But as a character in a book that I like said once – “that’s a universe away from eighteen.”