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godzillamendoza · 5 years

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My story of abuse and trying to overcome it

I talked about her before. Said some fake name. Avoided details. I’m ready now to tell the whole story. Maybe sharing it will help me get better. Because I can’t keep living like this. This is the story of how I was abused. And how I’ve tried to recover from it.

It’s 2015. I am 16 years old going on 17. I go to a small private school. Everyone’s either there because their parents keep them sheltered or they were kicked out of somewhere else for being a shitty student. She was the latter. I was the former.

She was really into sex for her age. Guys lined up around the block to ask her for a go. She had been at our school for less than 4 months and had already dated 2 other guys for a bit. I should have seen that as the first warning sign. I sat behind her in history class. I think she noticed one day that I just didn't pay attention to her the same way the other guys would. I just trained myself not to stare. To be polite and keep my feelings to myself after having so many girls treat me badly in middle school. I think she saw me as a challenge because I wasn’t an easy target.

So she started talking to me more. She got my phone number from one of my friends instead of just asking me for it. That should have been the next warning. I talked to her and developed a little crush, but I still had my reservations. She was so abrasive and crude. She cussed like a sailor, smoked behind the school at lunch, and showed up to class buzzed at times. She was set on partying and causing chaos. I was quiet and shy. Back then I had barely said the word "fuck" 3 times in my life.

Eventually she asked out another guy, and he said no. So she texted me about it. By that time I was in her friend zone and I was comfortable there. I assured her that this guy didn't know what he was missing and she'd find someone better. She asked me if I was someone better. She asked me to go out with her. I shut her down and said she was just in the rebound after a rejection and not thinking clearly. We stayed friends after that though.

So she asked again while we were talking one night. And I still said no. I told her I didn't want it to affect our friendship. I think half of it was my fear of her lifestyle and the other half was just not being used to those kinds of interactions. I wasn't ready to be in a relationship yet. Aside from some one-off dates with 2 girls prior that didn't go far, I had never had a girlfriend before.

One day she and a friend of hers called me on Skype while I was play Gmod with my friend Jackson. At first it was just 4 friends hanging out, but she kept steering the conversation, and her friend helped. Both girls kept saying I would be a great match for her, and that we'd be really cute as a couple. She kept insisting and the peer pressure of 2 other people being there made me say yes. She changed our relationship status on Facebook immediately to dating. My family and friends saw it. They were excited for me. A friend of hers named Lexie absolutely hated it and had an angry meltdown in the comments on that post. At first I thought she was being protective of her friend and thinking I wasn't good enough since I wasn't really part of their clique. Those girls dated soccer players or popular kids. I was the quiet guy that no one knew.

The next day was awkward at school. I didn't know how to be a boyfriend so I just acted how I always did. Nervous and always trying to make a joke. I figured if I could make her laugh I was at least doing something right. Her friends gave us nasty looks at lunch and in math class. Lexie was very disapproving and angry, and I thought it was at me for the longest time. I talked with Lexie again recently. She confided in me some very personal things and revealed she was angry about my relationship because she knew her friend was "going to eat you alive, Xavier." She was right. I forgive her for being angry now, because I understand it wasn’t at me.

At the end of that first day I tried to walk home but she grabbed my arm and asked if I was forgetting something. I had my first kiss. Her friends stood around us watching. Judging. Waiting for me to walk away do they could laugh and giggle like teen girls do. I felt terrible because I wanted my first kiss to be more romantic and intimate. Not this awkward, rushed, public thing.

We dated for around 5 months at first. We only got to hang out outside of school twice. The first was a somewhat pleasant date for Valentine's day. It was embarrassing how my mom had to drive us around because I hadn't gotten my drivers permit yet. But otherwise it was okay. We took pictures in a photo booth and hugged and kissed and played games. At the end when I dropped her off, I met her mom. Her mom intentionally spilled hot soup on one of her previous boyfriends, but she liked me. She thought I was charming and smart. She said dating someone like me would be good for her daughter. I really was different from all the guys she had been around. That's my last happy memory with her.

After that, our interactions would sour. She would tell me to stop sitting with my friends at lunch and just stay with her group, who all hated me and didn't talk when I was around. She'd force me to talk with her on Skype for hours while she did boring things like browse tumblr or text her friends. She would guilt trip me if I tried to leave to do anything else.

After 2 weeks, Lexie asked us in the hallway a very forward question. "Have you had sex with her yet?" Lexie seemed baffled when I said no. The girl seemed angry and disappointed. That was a turning point.

She would start being more provocative, more flirtatious. Sending me photos of her in her underwear, slipping her nipple out of her shirt while we talked on Skype. Asking me to send her shirtless pictures. I played along as well as I could but I never took the bait. I never fully gave in and it frustrated her. She started getting more aggressive in asking me and saying sexual things. I could tell she hated how little I reciprocated, but I just wasn't built for it. I didn't know how to do that and I wasn't ready.

I found out she sent pictures of me undressing to her friends. She showed me their reactions like I was supposed to be excited that they complimented my body, but that was a major breach of privacy and trust. One of the girls said "face ain't that great, but the abs are *thumbs up emoji*" or something and it really hit my self esteem. I stopped undressing for her a d taking those pictures. I just cut off from all of that part of our relationship. She hated it.

One day it snowed. Snowed harder than it has in a long time. The sky was just a white void. The ground was covered in fog and blizzard. It looked like Antarctica in our back yards for a day. But the school didn't cancel class.

After school ended, a student veered off the parking lot and hit a post. It caused a lot of chaos as the staff tried to help him and other students put on their parkas and gauked. She took it as an opportunity. She took me to a part of the school where no one went. An isolated little antechamber between the halls and the outside. My grandpa used to drive me home from school because my parents had to work. He called me and said he was outside waiting. She told me to tell him to wait. I made up a lie that I was finishing an assignment. I hung up and she started to kiss me. She got on top of me. I didn't like what was happening. I was frozen and timid. She grabbed my hands and made me touch her because I was too afraid to. I could taste the cigarettes in her mouth. Her braces scratched my lips. I just stopped being in that moment and looked outside at the snow falling. Her hands were cold and I felt this awful shivering in my bones while she touched me in ways I wasn’t comfortable with. It kept escalating and my phone kept ringing over and over. Eventually I found my courage and pushed her off me and told her I needed to leave. She was disappointed and angry that things didn't go any farther. That she didn't get what she wanted again. I felt so violated and sick and disgusting. I went outside in the snow. I couldn't even feel how cold it was. I got to my grandpa's car and he yelled at me for making him wait 40 minutes. I just apologized and asked to go home. He passed away earlier this year in 2020, and he never knew why I was so quiet on that ride home from school. I never told him why I was so afraid and sad on the ride TO school every day after that.

She was angry then. She said hurtful things all the time. Told me sex stories about her previous boyfriends to maybe make me jealous or change my mind. Some days she'd corner me with her friends and they'd make jokes and pressure me to do things with her while they watched. One of her friends tried to pull my shirt off. She called me a faggot. The girl just laughed with them. She didn't see how much it was bothering me. Feeling pressured and watched and all those hands grabbing me and touching me. She just thought it was funny like the rest of them.

She started talking about going to hang out with another guy she met on snap chat. Some guy named Patrick. I said I was worried something would happen between them and she made me feel guilty. Said I was being controlling. I backed off and acted complacent. I was well trained by that point. She didn't hurt me when I just gave her what she wanted. The day after she saw him, she was unusually mean. Calling me names and acting sick of me. I asked her what I did to deserve it and. She broke and told me she felt guilty because something did happen with her and Patrick. For once I decided to stand up for myself. I demanded to have his number. I texted him and asked what had happened. He gave me details while she just stood there, staring at me and looking guilty. He said they had been intimate. That he could give her what I couldn't. He said she complained about me all the time and he would have her by the end of the week. She said he was lying and she loved me, but I knew better. I felt the first panic attack of my life. I started shaking uncontrollably. I couldn't breathe. I was trying not to tear my hair out and cry. I was so panicked that after I was done calling her I just laid on the floor of my room and hyperventilated.

She did the last nice thing she ever did to me. She was so worried about my mental health that she told me to call my mom and tell her I was having anxiety attacks and needed some help. I think she did this out of guilt for me and someone else she had hurt. She told me a story about another guy she had dated. This guy took a bunch of pills one night and killed himself in the bathroom of his home. His mom called her the next day to tell her what happened. To this day I don't know if that story was true, or just a fearful prophetic vision she wanted to avoid me fulfilling. I completely ignored the cheating and just latched onto that lone act of kindness since they had been so rare. I tried to talk myself down and pretend I forgave her and loved her.

After that it was weeks of uneasy normalcy. She stopped asking for sex and nudes. She talked to me a little less. One day I overheard her tell a story to one of her friends about how she lost her virginity at a party when she was 14... To a 25 year old. She told the story with pride like it was a fun romp, and not something disgusting and wrong. I understand now why she struggled with the concept of consent. She was a victim too, but didn't even know it. Or maybe just didn't care anymore.

The second time we hung out outside of school was a fashion show she was a part of at school for some art class. Her and her friend (the one who tried to pull my shirt off) drove me to school. They bragged to each other about guys they had slept with and which ones had the biggest dicks. She knew I could hear them. I think she wanted to spite me with it. Or worse, she just didn't care about me being able to hear it. The show was stressful. Behind the stage I saw her put on her dress while acting cold. Wanting nothing to do with me. After the show we all went to the store. I bought her flowers to help her mood change, but she acted annoyed. She said she didn't have anywhere to put them. They dropped me off at home. Even though she was the one being cruel and spiteful, I was still the one who apologized to her. Like always. I thought about killing myself that night.

Instead I started working on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-ypqagJNXY&feature=youtu.be

I showed it to her after it was done some time later. She said it was too nerdy and didn't watch past the first 30 seconds.

Days after the fashion show, she told me she just didn't feel like she was in a good place to be in a relationship. That she needed time to be single again, but she still loved me. I started sitting further away from her in class. I finally got to be around my friends again. I think I was more quiet at school than I was even before her.

She started posting pictures of herself and some girl holding hands on Facebook. I asked her why she lied about not being ready for a relationship. She just wanted to finally officially date this girl she had been cheating on me with for a few weeks (since apparently Patrick couldn't quite "measure up") I told her I didn't want to see her again. She begged me not to go and said she had gotten so used to me being in her life. I was her longest relationship by that point. As usual, I conceded and just forgave her. She and this other girl broke up maybe a week later. We then spent these awkward few weeks doing finals and avoiding eye contact. She told me one day she was transferring schools. Maybe because she was too guilty to stay and see me every day. Knowing what she did to me. Maybe she realized how fucked her reputation was at that school because none of her old friends talked to her anymore. Maybe she just wanted to get out and find a new hunting ground since guys here knew she was bad news. Maybe she wanted to transfer to help her chances of graduating because she had bad grades in every class except the one with a teacher who wanted to fuck her (And might have, I don't know. He was like 25, seemed really annoyed seeing me with her, ate lunch alone with her some days, and gave her A+ grades on assignments she didn't turn in) The last day of school came around and I knew it would probably be the last time I saw her in person. She was wearing one of my old jackets she had taken. A Batman hoodie that was too big for me, so it looked like a trench coat on her skinny body. I heard the bell ring and we both stood up. And I stared at her. I couldn't think of anything to say. So I just hugged her. And then I walked away. I never saw that hoodie again.

For a few months I was alone again. Burying the trauma and heartache. I was so disgusted by my own body I stopped looking at myself in the mirror. Stopped looking down while taking a shower. Some days I would just lay on the floor in the bathroom feeling this empty hole in my chest grow bigger. I never lied to myself and pretended it was all because I missed her. I felt relieved to be away from her. But I felt worthless and unloved.

Comic Con came again that summer. I was having fun. I was happy. I was finally starting to get back to normal. Then she messaged me... Told me she was there too. Asked me to come meet her. I was in a Deadpool costume having fun with my friend Jackson, who I made a Rorschach cosplay for since Watchmen was his favorite comic. I didn't want her to ruin it. So I gave her bad directions so she couldn't find me. I was eager to get to the hotel and change out of the costume so it would be harder for her to spot me.

Later we went to the hotel and she texted me, saying she was sorry for how things went and that that she missed me. She asked if we could try again. The thing about abusive relationships, is that even when you don't want to, even when it hurts you, you give the other person what they want. It's like being hypnotized. You just can't see them sad. Even if deep down you hate them. Even if you wish they'd die, you just say yes to them. It doesn’t make sense until you live through it yourself. Remember that next time you judge someone for giving in to someone who hurts them repeatedly. They can’t help it.

When we were dating the first time, she never went inside my house. She always had an excuse for why she had to skip dinner and meeting my family. I cleaned my whole house top to bottom 4 times because she promised to visit me 4 times. It took me a whole day each time. The 5th time I didn't do anything. I left my room a mess because I knew any minute I'd get that text saying "sorry I can't make it..." I knew that would happen again. A few days after comic con, I asked her if we could meet up. I was tired of being in a long distance relationship with someone who lived 20 minutes away. I told her to come to my cousin's graduation party.she swore she could make it. Then she didn't. And i told her I was tired of being let down. I wanted to just stay friends. She said she missed the party because a fight with her mom and she refused to just be friends with "someone she was still in love with" She told me she was in love with me. After everything that had happened. Everything she had done.

Time goes by. She texts me out of the blue again. She's now started dating another guy, and they're having problems. He wants to have sex in the first few weeks and she's stonewalling him. She says she's reevaluating why her relationships keep falling. Why they only last 3 weeks maximum. And she remembers we dated on and off for close to 7 months. Something was different about me. She says it was because I was the only one who never pressured her or asked. I keep my distance and wish her well. By that point I was too busy working on Spider-Man retrospective part 3. Sometimes it’s hard playing Web of Shadows now because I associate certain parts of the game with pausing to text her and what she was saying at the time.

More time passes. More failed relationships. She keeps failing to hook anyone. She talks to me again. Says she missed me. She's in a new relationship with a new guy ALSO named Xavier. I don’t even know how to interpret that. She keeps acting like she can't stand him and I was “the one that got away.” She very much wants to rekindle things with me once again. She asks me to meet up for my birthday that was coming soon on July 4th. In the same stupid subservient trance, I say yes. I know she won't be there.

The night we were supposed to meet, she says she got too busy and we'll try again some other time. Then on Facebook she posts a picture of her and the other Xavier kissing with fireworks in the background. I connect the dots that she only talked to me when she was mad at him. I was the new Patrick.

I write her a text. A long, angry, paragraph of hate for her behavior towards me. Her friends text me the next day asking "what did you say to her? She's been crying all day. You're such an asshole." Her boyfriend texts me. He asks what's going on, so i tell him "I know you're trying to defend her honor but she made plans to cheat on you with me. She's not good for you. She'll just hurt you." He tells me to go fuck myself. Makes a joke about me being a ginger. Clearly what i said bothered him. They break up shortly after.

In that long message to her, I never once brought up the sexual abuse. I still hadn't even accepted it happened. I just ignored it and yelled at her for everything else. A few bad relationships happen over the next 2 years. One with a girl I didn’t have feelings for, but I felt safe with because she was too afraid to even mention sex. The other with another girl that was just as verbally abusive and emotionally distant as the first one. These are just more weights on me.

Then i met Anna. This was when my life changed. I fell in love with Anna almost immediately after we started talking. I had dated other girls after the first one, but I was never this... at peace. I never felt like they understood me or cared for me like Anna did. She was different. She had also been abused by her exes, but in different ways. One day while dating Anna, I start breaking down crying. I tell her everything that happened to me. I cry for maybe 5 straight hours. Anna cried with me. Both over what happened to me and her own traumas. She promises she'll never force me or hurt me. But now Anna realizes why we had been dating for weeks and I never brought up sex. Why I just completely avoided it. After that night we started getting more intimate. She wanted me to feel safe so she eased me through it. It started to feel fun to send pictures or flirt. She taught me how to do everything step by step. She was amazing. In the time since writing this initial post I’ve visited Anna in the Philippines. Being with her physically was freeing and felt different from everything I experienced before. I always felt safe with her and never afraid when we were intimate in person. I know she’s the girl for me, and we plan to get married later this year.

I wrote the first girl one last message. Saying goodbye. I talked about the sexual abuse. How it made me feel. How it ruined me. How it gave me nightmares. I told her I wanted to make peace and move on And let go of the hate. She laughed at me and insulted Anna. And that was the last time I ever talked to her.

I still have nightmares about her. Trying my hardest to forgive her. My natural defense mechanism of just being her pet. I keep dreaming of meeting her and trying my hardest to be nice, even though I'm so afraid I'm shaking. A year after we stopped dating I had a dream about marrying her and being terrified. I have dreams have her touching me again and I wake up. Some days the first thing I say when I open my eyes is a panicked "don't touch me." I developed a twitch in my neck from her. When people touch me unexpectedly, or when I'm stressed, or when the weather gets cold and the snow reminds me of that day. Just recently I woke up covered in sweat and hyperventilating just because I heard a voice in my sleep saying “we need to talk about__________” and saying her name. That’s all it takes sometimes apparently. Just hearing her name.

I still have a hard time with physical contact. I push people off if the hug me for too long. I feel my skin crawl when I think of her. I get these panic attacks where I feel her cold hands again. It feels like they're inside me. Feeling my skin from inside. Squeezing my ribs and lungs. It feels like there are ants on on my body and I want to claw out of my skin. Just tear it all off.

I hate how I owe all my current life to her. She made me so depressed and sad that I spent nights awake writing my novel. I wrote whenever I was sad, and she made me finish all 250 pages of it. When I ran out of book to write, I made that YouTube video. I was considering suicide every day and i made part 1 of the Spider-Man Games Retrospective to distract myself from thoughts of self harm. I think it makes sense in retrospect. There's jokes about self harm in there. An overly shocking joke about how awful it is to think Spider-Man wasn't there to stop someone from being raped because he was too busy catching balloons. I guess at the time I was angry no one tried to save me. Feeling like all the role models in my life were just out catching balloons.

If she hadn't made me that fucking depressed, I never would have made these videos. I wouldn't have the success of the channel. I wouldn't have met the scores of friends I have now. I wouldn't have Anna.

Everything good I have in life now is because of the awful thing she did. And it all feels a little tainted by that fact sometimes.

I've never really written it all out like this in this amount of detail before. It feels good to just lay it all out. But at the same time it makes me feel sick. I do think things have gotten better. With the help of a loving and amazing fiancee, and more friends than I think I deserve-- it’s gotten better. The nightmares are less frequent. I can handle being with someone now, and I want to be with Anna for the rest of my life. For whoever you are, if you know what it’s like to deal with this, and you’re afraid that people will judge you... I promise you that you’re valid and people will care and accept you. It does get better. Being open and trusting about what happened makes it easier, because you no longer have to deal with it alone.

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godzillamendoza · 5 years

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godzillamendoza · 6 years

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Valentine’s Day

Well, here’s to another crummy year of being single on this holiday and feeling like a total loser for it. I’ve managed to have 2 relationships in the past 2 years, but neither of them during the Winter and Spring months oddly enough. I can only seem to meet and date people during Summer and Fall. Maybe I’m just less depressed and lame to be around for the second half of the year and January-May I suck at talking to people. Who knows. Either way this is the third year in a row I haven’t had a date on this day and it doesn’t get any less shitty. I guess it’s time for another public brain dump, because writing these and talking to you guys always seems to help me think when I’m really conflicted internally.

I know a lot of single folks fall back on the defense that “it’s a stupid made up holiday designed to spread lies about perfect relationships and sell heart shaped products” and all that. I just can’t quite get on that bandwagon though, it feels like a defense mechanism people use to say they’re okay with feeling lonely today. It’s easy to just shut it all out, dismiss it as stupid, and pretend you aren’t bothered by your inability to participate. It reminds me of people saying video games are stupid because they aren’t very good at them (ahem David). I don’t exactly buy into the quitter’s mentality. I’m not too high and mighty for this consumerist holiday about selling products.

Although it has me wondering when I’ll be able to meet someone again. I’m kind of at a loss with that question. There are girls in my college that I find interesting or attractive, but none of them are in classes with me. I pass them in the halls or see them in school events, but don’t have many opportunities to just talk to them. I feel like walking up and engaging in conversation at random in the hallway is forced, sort of predatory and creepy, and has no guarantee that I’ll walk away from the scenario with a phone number or means of talking to them more on their time. So I can’t exactly start it that way. I think 60% of my inability to talk to them is worry that I’ll be annoying and get turned down instantly, and the other 40% is fear that I’ll come off as a jerk or a creep.

As for the girls that I have classes with, they’re in relationships already or twice my age. So... no. Meeting girls online is hard. I’ve tried it already and dating someone long distance just isn’t for me because of the amount of stress of never knowing where they are or what they could be doing or what they’re thinking. Plus, I once again don’t want to even begin a conversation with a girl I find attractive on twitter or something because it seems creepy. There are girls in my fanbase who are probably really like-minded and cool, but talking to them feels manipulative and predatory. I don’t want to seem like that Sam Pepper scumbag or use fame and clout to get attention from women who wouldn’t like me otherwise.

I’ve considered talking to girls I knew in high school on facebook again, but all of them are hours and hours away in far off colleges with their own problems. They probably don’t even want to think about dealing with me and that distance issue. And once again, starting the conversation is a trial in itself. I guess I find myself often going back to these steretypes of overconfident guys pathetically asking women gross questions online or the kind of guy who walks up to a girl with a lame pick up line and makes them instantly uncomfortable. I don’t ever want to be like that and thus starting a conversation with a complete stranger or someone I haven’t seen in a year is just impossible for me.

Lately I’ve thought about trying a dating site. Maybe just writing a profile about how much of a fucking mess I am and hoping the person it matches me up with isn’t a serial killer. Then I think about how many bad stories I’ve heard about that, how dangerous it can be, and how illogical my hopes are. What are the odds that a girl my age living a reasonable driving distance away who shares my interests is that desperate for someone to talk to that she’d use a dating site? If she’s as cool as I’m imagining, she could probably just go to the mall and meet someone there. Dating sites are for like, people that have kids and have gone through a divorce or two and want to get back into the dating game after falling severely out of practice. Either that or serial killers. Maybe there’s an overlap in that demographic, I don’t know. What I’m left with is that I don’t know how to meet anyone now. I can’t make the first move if I do meet someone. And there’s nowhere I CAN meet people without having to go outside of my comfort zone and act unlike myself. So I’m stuck. Another year on Valentine’s day sitting around working all day and thinking about this. Then I’ll probably inevitably meet someone on accident and stumble into a relationship by the end of July that might end before next February and the cycle will repeat.

I don’t know what the point of this one was today, I didn’t really come to some kind of greater understanding or figure out the answer to a problem. I just talked in circles and depressed myself a lot. Is this even worth posting online? Am I going to seem like the biggest loser in the universe if I share this with other people? Eh, probably. But hey, it’s good to ruin your own ego from time to time. Keeps you in check so you don’t end up like Cole or something. Happy Valentine’s day to those of you who have someone to by heart shaped products for, and happy Valentine’s day to those of you who don’t. Maybe you all have some missing ingredient that I’m missing to be content on this day. Either way, more power to ya. Talk in a few months I guess whenever I’m feeling all sappy again.

-Xavier

#valentines2018

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godzillamendoza · 6 years

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Oh my god, I love this!

A fan comic of a fan comic written by @godzillamendoza

P.S. Excuse the bad fan comic art

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godzillamendoza · 6 years

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Leaving Behind 2017 - Relationships are haaaarrrrdddd

So much to some people’s surprise I’m sure, I’ve been with a couple girls this past year. Like real ones, not those ones that holographically project themselves over prostitutes that you can install in your ceiling. (does anyone get that joke? No one saw that movie but me, right?) Ah jeez.

Gotta learn to quit automatically deflecting with humor when something stressful comes up. Gahh! This is a healing/learning experience.

Okay, so context is important. I know all of this is stuff from before 2017, but it leads into how this year went so its important to cover: in 2015 I had my first girlfriend, whom I shall not refer to by name. She and I dated on and off for about 5 months and it was the first real relationship I had been in. We started dating after I told her no 2 times. The third time she asked me to be her boyfriend, her friend was there and they sort of pressured me into it so I just went with it. Then I had my first kiss with a crowd of her friends standing around me, watching to make sure I followed through on the day after. The majority of our conversations were through text or skype, even though we went to the same school. She was just too busy to ever hang out with me outside of school. She was often jealous of me talking to other girls, she mocked me constantly and called all my hobbies “nerd shit” and rolled her eyes at me when I said I didn’t want to smoke weed with her. Then she told me she’d be hanging out with a guy named Patrick at her house after she met him over snapchat. I was obviously a little worried about it and she told me I was being controlling and needed to back off, so I did. Then a week later I tracked down Patrick and confronted him, asking why she was suddenly so cold and distant. He bragged to me about how good of a time they had together and how she complained about me constantly. He said the sentence “she’ll be mine by the end of the week.” Being cheated on by your first girlfriend in addition to some emotional abuse and being kept at a distance constantly... well all of it is like a perfect storm of PROBLEMS that you’ll have to deal with later. We broke up after I told her that I knew what they did, though it was like 2 weeks later because I was naive and forgiving at first. She’s dated around 5-7 people since that venture ended 2 years ago, so clearly she learned a lot from it. She also offered to go out with my again while she was dating another guy, which caused me to... well let’s just say I wrote a very long, very mean spirited message that I don’t regret.

Naturally, after all that, my self esteem was subterranean. I had a lot of image problems due to her comments on my appearance. I had severe trust issues with... well pretty much everyone. I had problems liking myself and I just needed outlets to focus on while I was lost. So I started making more videos on comic book stuff. While I was dating this girl I made a short video essay/editorial thing on my thoughts for casting Spider-Man in the Marvel cinematic universe. She was quick to dismiss it, but I felt like it was the first thing on YT that I was truly proud of and I wanted to make more. After we broke up I did that video about Spider-Man videogames you might have seen once or twice. It currently has over 400 THOUSAND views. I owe it to this girl I suppose, she made me so miserable that I accidentally became a z-list internet celebrity to take my mind off being miserable. It didn’t exactly fix my emotional issues, but it was a coping method that was better than becoming a meth addict or something.

--so on to 2017. This was the year where I started dating again. Obviously I would still have a lot of baggage after that first girl and everything that happened with her. I met a rather mousy girl in high school who I’ll refer to as... uh... how about Sandra? That’s extremely far off from her real name. Sandra. Well anyway, I met Sandra in high school and we kinda became friends. I wasn’t all that attracted to her physically. I’m still not. She’s not ugly, nor is it a shallowness thing, she’s just not really my type. I’m not the guy to just “take whatever I can get.” So it was a difficult decision when she told me how utterly heartbroken she was when she had no date to prom. I figured it would give me a good excuse to go to the prom and I would be making someone else happy, so I took her. And from that point forward she became rather infatuated with me and I made the hideous mistake of “just going with it” so I didn’t hurt her feelings. I tried my damnedest to find things to like about her as a girlfriend, but we were really a pretty bad fit. Plus, we had this sort of non-commital and strange relationship where we didn’t consider ourselves a couple, but still ended up holding hands or hanging out outside of school a lot. Sandra had never dated anyone before and I was a trainwreck because of the girl from 2015, so it was this stilted and halfhearted attempt at romance.

She wrote me a letter once, confessing her feelings about me and the way she thought of me at night. She was too nervous to give it to me in person, and had a mutual friend deliver the note. It was full of grammatical and spelling errors, and her handwriting lacked something to be desired. I was both honored... and slightly put off by it. She was 18 years old, with her own car and a paying job, but her methods of going after this relationship reminded me of the silly things I did in 5th grade. I guess that’s when I realized that I couldn’t keep leading her on and that it wasn’t really meant to be. I was looking for something a little more serious and age appropriate, but she still couldn’t handle something like that and I didn’t really feel for her how she felt for me. So I... just couldn’t figure out what to tell her. I ended up using graduation as a means to distance myself. We were moving off to different colleges with different goals and ambitions. I felt guilt for a long time for just brushing her off without saying anything beyond “I’m not really at a good place for a relationship right now, mentally.” Which was the truth, but I felt like I could have said more. We’ll put a pin in the story of Sandra for the time being, because it has a more clear resolution later.

Shortly before graduation, I received a piece of fan art on twitter that was truly special. It was probably one of the most accurate and detailed pictures of me anyone had ever drawn. Whoever did it clearly spent a lot of time staring at my old mug to make it happen and I was really impressed with it. I showed it to my classmates to not-so-humbly brag about my following online (come on, I had to be excited about something SOMETIMES, its not like I did it more than that one time). Then to my surprise I saw that there was a particularly pretty girl in the profile picture of the person that sent me this piece of fan art. I think my female audience is kind of small, so I was really happy to see one of them sending fan art and kind words. Plus I thought she was cute.

I sent her a DM on twitter saying that I thought it was really cool and probably one of my favorite pieces of fan art ever, she responded and we just kind of started talking from there. The more I learned about her, the more I liked her. We had a SCARY amount of things in common. Like, favorite comics, movies, books. We shared a similar sense of humor, we had the same extremely jaded reaction to fictional violence and laughed while looking at covers of “Crossed” together. We even took the same type of antidepressant medication. I fell for her really quickly, probably in the first 15 minutes of what would be a 9 hour conversation. Of course our mutual insomnia kept us from caring about sleep and we just kept talking and sharing stories and pictures of cosplay. I felt like I had never felt before. For the sake of protecting her identity, let’s say her name is uh... Lila. Sure, some of you internet detectives might be able to find out her real name, but I ask you... please don’t harass her or ask her about any of this. Respect her privacy, respect her decisions, and respect her in general.

So, Lila and I made an amazing match it seemed. She made me feel... like I had been found after being lost again. Part of me resigned to this notion that I’d never meet a girl who I had things in common with. Maybe I’d live my life with my interests and dreams being silly to the women I spent my time with, or worse, boring. Lila treated me like the things that I did and talked about were interesting. She thought I was cool. It helped undo a lot of self loathing just talking to her for that first 3 days. I was walking with a spring in my step at school for the final few days, I was singing in my choir class instead of just lip syncing, I was acting like I didn’t care what anyone thought of me, because at least she thought I was interesting, and that was all I needed. In a way, just meeting her was what I needed to get over a lot of pain, and I’ll always be thankful for her giving that to me. We didn’t have to be in a relationship, I just needed the validation of knowing girls like her existed. She stayed up until 4 Am with me on school nights, talking with me through text or skype helping me stay awake to finish studying for my geography test. We spent hours just talking about our lives and what we thought of the world. We shared our experiences battling depression. Eventually she told me that I made her happy when nothing else could and I said the same. In almost a week it felt like we knew each other for a life-time. So at 3 AM one night I asked her to be my girlfriend and she said yes. The problem with that was... she lived in a different country.

I never really considered that part until after it was too late. Long distance relationships have always seemed like a huge gamble to me, but I was willing to risk it for Lila. And for about a month, it was working REALLY well. We would watch movies together on skype, share ideas for cosplays, and just chat until the sun came up every night. She even helped me bake apology cupcakes for my mom at 5 AM after I carved a spider logo into the kitchen table on accident. I was feeling freaked out because I felt genuinely happy for the first time in two years and I was just waiting for some anvil to fall on me and everything to be ruined. But the distance and our age became a problem. We were both at the very end of high school, just about to go to college and unsure of where life would go. She mentioned that she was thinking about traveling abroad to go to college. I had a conversation about it with my mom and BOY did she take it far immediately. “Ask her to go to your college! She could move in with us! We have the room now! You could drive her to school every day and eventually get your own place and get married and have kids and blah blah blah blah...”

My mother was just excited. She’s also been going through relationship problems too in the last year, and was just living vicariously through me. My mom wanted something to be stable and long lasting and fun, but she didn’t realize that it was too early to ask Lila for these things... and I... like a complete idiot... asked Lila if she wanted to go to college with me and live in America with me. I pretty much asked her to move in with me after knowing her for 6 weeks. She still had a lot to learn about me, and vice versa. We were worlds apart and it would have been a huge step if she only lived down the street, let alone in a different country. I shouldn’t have asked, and I ESPECIALLY, shouldn’t have asked more than once. I still feel like an idiot for it to this day and it was nearly 6 months ago. Then things started getting worse, mostly due to my previous relationships bleeding into my actions.

The girl I dated in 2015 cheated on me because I was so hesitant to be physically intimate with her. That creates a lot of doubt and shame, so I started asking Lila how she felt about that sort of thing if we were to meet in person one day. She became uncomfortable with the subject and I very awkwardly tried to steer the conversation away from it. Then a message meant for someone else accidentally got sent to her without context that SEVERELY damaged the situation. When being asked about the price of something by a friend, I sent back a number, which went to Lila and without context “... about 8.50″ looks VERY... weird? Maybe even kinda threatening if you misconstrue it the right way? I looked like the biggest creep/moron! So I tanked that 4 AM conversation pretty hard, and then listened to some very, very poor advice from a friend who said “just try to be casual with her about that stuff.” Because of my internal fears of her being bored with me if things didn’t get hot and heavy now and then, I started awkwardly making more casual references and jokes regarding sex over the following two days. It made her uncomfortable, and she kept quiet about it, so I kept doing it until I just couldn’t anymore. I had to tell her that I didn’t like it either and that I was doing it because I was worried she’d end up getting tired of a relationship where it wasn’t a factor. I held her to the same standards as the girl from 2015, and it was unfair. She wouldn’t cheat on me if I didn’t bring up intimacy constantly, and I was stupid for thinking she might. I won’t make excuses, but I will say why I did that. And I know I learned from it and won’t do that ever again. That made things a little more tense and over time, we started having other issues as well.

Lila made an off handed reference to some passage of her diary she wrote about me in the last few days we talked. The thing she said concerned me, as it didn’t sound positive at all. I pressed her on it because I was worried it was just several pages of her listing off the things she hated about me. Eventually she broke and read it off, and it was just several pages of her listing off the things she hated about me. She disliked my dress sense and hated my clothes, she thought the way I ate food was stupid looking(???) she felt weird about dating me for my RACE, because apparently she didn’t talk to many white guys except me. She spent hours of her personal time writing about superficial things about me that she didn’t like, and thus my self image problem had returned and I didn’t wear button up shirts for 4 months. I asked her if there was anything she DID like about me, and after a long time of struggling to find something to say, she said she liked my sense of humor and that I was nice to her. Which are... kinda general reasons to like someone? Like, non-specific and sort of forced. Then over the next few weeks she started insulting me a lot more. She developed a habit of casually calling me a... derogatory term for homosexual... (not sure what twitter’s policy is on cussing and slurs, currently so I don’t want to say it) and saying hurtful things randomly. I figured it was time to accept that the honeymoon phase was over and that she didn’t like me nearly as much as she initially thought. She didn’t like me nearly as much as I liked her. Then the final straw happened.

Being in a relationship with someone so far away can be stressful, because your ability to speak to them is entirely dependent on the use of the internet and all its various outlets. If she were to just decide one day she didn’t like using Facebook messenger anymore and delete it, I wouldn’t be able to speak with Lila through it unless I used something else. So when she casually deleted messenger one day, I just... couldn’t hear from her anymore. She never told me she was going to do it, so all of my messages to her on the first day went to no one. I decided to give her some space and assumed she just didn’t feel like talking. By day 5 I was a nervous wreck and assumed she died and had no idea where she was or what happened to her. I was losing sleep over it, my friend was checking police reports in her area, I messaged her on twitter asking if she was okay. I got no response and felt so scared. Eventually, my friend Damian messaged her on twitter myself and she responded in a few short hours, just saying she forgot to tell me about it and resumed talking to me on twitter like nothing happened. All that worry and anxiety turned to anger really quickly, because she was either trying to break up with me in an indirect way by ignoring me, or she was just being inconsiderate and actually forgot to tell me our main means of communication was going away for no specific reason. I didn’t resent her, but I was upset.

This caused me to think long and hard about the relationship and how it was doing after those short few months. We both made mistakes. I got way ahead of myself and was asking about very serious steps way too early, I let my distrust of people guide my decision to act like someone I wasn’t to keep her interest because of past experiences, and she undermined a lot of my self confidence and said some very toxic things. I wasn’t quite ready for a long distance relationship and I was still hung up on bad things from my past. She hadn’t dated anyone before and wasn’t really ready to commit, nor did she have much interest in it. We agreed that going back to being friends was better, before we started to hate each other. And of course, we talked less and less in the following weeks until not at all. We haven’t spoken in a few months now, and looking back I’m not proud of my actions or hers. I think in another life, another time, after we both did a lot of growing up, we might have made a really great team. As I said before, I’m still very thankful to have met her. I think just meeting her gave me a lot of hope and confidence that even she couldn’t really ever take away. I know now that I have a chance at meeting someone who doesn’t look at me like an alien. I know now that I can’t be distrustful and hold everyone to the same standard as people. I know now that if I were to try dating again, there are a lot of bad choices that I’d avoid (definitely wouldn’t be so damn clingy, ew). And I know now that the girl from 2015 isn’t the only girl on Earth who will be interested in me, I just have to look for another one. As for “Sandra,” I texted her midway through this last semester telling her that I felt guilty about the way things quietly drifted off, and we met up a few weeks before thanksgiving break. That night we tried one more time, going to a restaurant with no open seats and a 2 hour waiting time. She said she wasn’t hungry and we went back to her place where she had no food so I remained starving for that night. Her parents weren’t home, and we... spent the rest of the night looking at vacation photos on her phone. It was clear that the magic just wasn’t there, and I told her before I left that I appreciated her giving me the opportunity to tell her that it just wasn’t meant to be. She had no interest in the things I liked, and while I could see that she tried to like those things too, her heart wasn’t in it. So we ended things amicably like we should have months before. I was proud with how I handled it, and I felt as if though I was finally an adult when it came to my relationships.

I don’t need another person to like me in order to validate my existence. I don’t need to have everyone in the world think I’m awesome. I don’t need to rely on someone constantly to maintain my self confidence and my image. I don’t need to date someone to avoid feeling lonely, because you can be just as lonely in a relationship as you are out of one. I don’t need to say and do things untrue to myself to keep someone interested in me, because if they lost interest when I act like myself, they aren’t worth my time. I don’t need to date someone to feel complete. I don’t need to date someone just because I don’t want to hurt their feelings by turning them down. If you’re feeling alone lately and having a hard time getting into a relationship, just remember you don’t need any of that. There’s always someone out there for you, and your interests don’t make you completely alone, even if it feels like there’s no one else in the world that shares them. Being into “nerd shit” doesn’t guarantee that you can’t find someone to love and care about, and even if someone loves the same stuff as you, it might not work out anyway and that’s perfectly fine. Just remember that the only person you need to believe in you is you and no one else can fix you but you. Try to find someone after you have all that stuff sorted out or you’ll just end up getting hurt again.

In all reality, I don’t need a girlfriend at all, but I’d still like one because the company is nice. There’s a girl out there for me, and I’m going to avoid the mistakes I’ve made in the past, and I’m going to leave behind the baggage and tragedies that lie behind me. Who knows, maybe going into 2018, I’ll get to meet her. Let’s hope so.

#relationships #story

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