The Aftermath

I always got along with everyone but never fit in with anyone. In high school, I was the floater. I’d drift from friend to friend and from one circle to another and it was nice having such a diverse group of people around me but I still felt like I was lacking something. Unfortunately, I so desperately wanted to connect with a clique. Mind you, I never wanted to be anyone’s exclusively but there’s a certain kind of comfort knowing that you belong somewhere. I never belonged to a certain group. I had no specific place to call my own. Consequently, I felt pretty empty most of the time. I never had a best friend in high school, no single person I could always count on or call up and talk to about anything. I was awkward and quiet around some people and loud and silly around others. It always seemed like someone brought out a different something in me but no one ever let me be everything I was. I didn’t have anyone I could share my thoughts on love with one minute and tell a fart joke the next. I was torn between all of these different personalities and I was never able to pull them all together into one cohesive person. It didn’t help matters that I was completely fake in high school. Naturally, I wanted to be among the popular group, to feel that unity, to be loved and envied. And so I tried to do things that I thought would make me popular, such as dressing a certain way or listening to a certain kind of music. This desperate attempt at acceptance only led to more of an identity crisis. I lost myself somewhere in high school. And most unfortunate of all was the fact that no one shared my mind. No one in my grade was artistic like I was except for one guy but he was a major tool and I didn’t want any part of him. No one else equaled my passion for drawing, my love of animation. I had no one to share that part of myself with and I was very alone.

I endured two years of community college, which just felt like a Twilight Zoned version of high school with same drama, same pettiness, only more faces to add to the façade. I found some promise in my art classes. Because this was college, the kids that were in my class wanted to be there, for the most part. I met some interesting people and even made friends with a girl who dreamed of one day owning her own clothing boutique. She had the cutest speech impediment and she was pretty and she actually seemed interested in befriending me.

I thought, “Oh, if only SCAD were filled with these kind of people, I’ll absolutely love it there and I might even meet a girl like this who’d be interested in being more than just a friend.”

It was a dream of mine to go to that school, a rather blind dream now that I look back on it. I only looked at one other college while applying to SCAD. It’s just that I was told throughout middle and high school that SCAD was the place to go so I never bothered to look anywhere else. I took their word that I would get a great education there and make all of my artistic dreams come true. And as I got older, I hoped my dreams for a vibrant social life would also materialize. I had a lot of hopes and dreams for that school. I just knew things would be different, that not only would I be given a platform for my art to shine but I’d also meet like-minded people, people that were as passionate as I was, talented students that would enlighten and challenge me. I had wished so much that at last I wouldn’t ever be alone.

My first dream came true when I was accepted. I only later learned that at the time I applied, they pretty much accepted anyone. So any validation I got that I was a genuinely good artist was thrown out the window. I did receive a scholarship, though, so that fact only offered temporary satisfaction. I already had a healthy dose of low self-esteem before going to SCAD but it was only made worse when classes started. I was surrounded by phenomenal talent. It took me off guard and I had to realize I wasn’t in Alabama anymore. I had taken for granted that I was the best artist in high school. That’s not me bragging. It’s just fact but it’s not so much a fact to brag about because no one else was interested in art. I was the best one because I was the only one. But I was no longer the only one. I was one among many and I no longer stood out. Of course there were kids in class who were just phoning it in, just like any other school, but the difference between them was they sucked because they didn’t care while I sucked even though I tried. Although I felt lost in high school, felt like an unknown and unacknowledged outcast, I was at least known for my art. It was the only thing I had to cling on to and now I didn’t even have that anymore. I was hoping to find myself in college but I only felt more lost than ever. Any kind of identity I had, however small it may have been, was slowly stripped away from me.

And that dream I had about the school and being accepted also began to wilt. I realized the school was quite different than the picture it painted on the pretty brochures and fancy statistics. It wasn’t as high profile and glamorous as it portrayed itself. Many of the professors were failed animators. Many of them were bitter or didn’t know the first thing about teaching. They were hired to make the school look better, to boast names that all too briefly dipped their toes in the industry. The professors were impatient and unprofessional. The equipment, while state of the art, crashed frequently. After leaving a class, I never felt fully satisfied. There was always something missing, something lacking in their instructions, something about their careless nature that turned me off over and over again.

Slowly the veil dropped from around that place and I saw it for what it really was: a money sucking machine. They had my money and were slowly taking my soul and that’s all they cared about. They left me on the floor to flounder and I don’t think I ever fully recovered from the shock. What little talent I had began to shrivel, taking a backseat to my ever growing disappointment and neurosis. It seems perfectly normal now that no college is as great as it seems. I suppose it’s strange that I’m just now realizing how it all works, how I suppose I shouldn’t be so trusting of boastful advertising. Yet, back then I was so blinded by hope, so young and naïve that I never questioned the school’s authenticity. That was a lesson learned.

I was suffering academically, becoming consumed by my own insecurity, becoming overwhelmed and eventually shut out by the many talented students in the class, reducing my face to that of just another mediocre student that never stood out in any way. I shuffled along, never finding acknowledgment, never receiving recognition. I hardly missed a day of class, did all of my assignments on time and to the best of my ability (based on the fluidity of my mental capacities at the time) and was quickly forgotten in return. And things were no better socially.

I recalled all the friends I’d make, how I’d find a photographer friend that would take great pictures of me and make me feel handsome, boost my self-esteem and make me feel better about myself. I’d make friends with a musician and he/she would teach me how to play the guitar so I could express my thoughts through song. I’d hook up with a fashion major and she’d dress me and hold me and teach me about love. I’d meet people of different religions and ethnicities and soak all of their differences up like a sponge and become more cultured and more understanding of others. And most importantly, each one of these people would have a piece of me within themselves, that same fire and energy and passion for art and beauty and poetry and life. These would be the people who would understand and encourage. They would get me. I would finally find my lunch table group. I’d finally have someone to cover all aspects of life with. I’d finally belong.

It just didn’t happen like that. I in fact did make friends with a photographer but she never took pictures of me. I’d ask but she would never agree to it. I guess I’m not photogenic. I in fact did go on a date with a fashion major but after one date and a half dates and a boring viewing of Garden State in her dorm room, she found interest in another guy. Typical. I in fact did come in contact with a musician. He was my first roommate but he never taught me how to play the guitar. He only drove me crazy and forced me to question everything I ever believed in. He was mean spirited and jaded and he made it his personal agenda to bring me down into the abyss that he inhabited. He hurt me the most for so many reasons. He was older than me and had already attended the school for a year before I came along. I had so hoped he would show me around and take me under his wing. I looked up to him and respected him for being a musician (because to me there is no one more respectable in my mind than a musician) and I found his behavior intriguing at first because he was so different than me. I projected a big brother persona onto him, a persona he systematically destroyed every day. I quickly came to find out he had no interest in helping me out but he did enjoy hurting me whenever he could. He was never physically violent but put enough hate into my head to mess me up for a long time.

I never made any real friends during my three years in school. My first roommate was a total jerk and his friends were also unsavory. The people I’d talk to in class would be friendly during the course but after it was over I never heard from them again. The only constant in my life was the photographer but she was messed up, too. In fact, I think that’s why we got along so well and argued so often. We were both total nut bags but she also happened to be an unreliable nut bag. She couldn’t ever be there for me because she had her own life to mess up. My roommates were better my second and third year but it was just a case of four vastly different guys being placed together and making the best of it. While they were all nice, none of them came through as a good friend. We had nothing in common and all had different values and belief systems. And I tried, oh how I tried, to make it work with them but they had their own things going on.

Slowly but surely, everything that had made me happy to leave home and go to school was now making me want to leave school and jump off a cliff. Nothing was happening how I had hoped and all of my visions of a happy life were breaking up everywhere I turned. To make things more frustrating, I had no one to turn to during this time. And as my dream of making genuine friends and going to a genuinely great school slowly died, so did my passion, my energy and my motivation. I began to question my talents and realized I wasn’t as good as most of the students and I wasn’t grasping new concepts like the others were. Things didn’t come easily to me and I had to work twice as hard to produce work half as good. I realized I was no good at animation, barely any good at just drawing. I just wasn’t skilled enough. I was lacking talent and patience. There was something inside of me that just wasn’t working like it should. That something inside of me messed up any chance at friendships, any chance at talent, and any chance at happiness.

And now I’m back home and my mind spins at the thought of school. I’m torn right down the middle because in some ways I feel like nothing has changed since high school. I’m still the fat guy with no friends and a mountain of insecurity. I’m stuck in a home with parents who don’t understand and "friends" that don’t care. But in some ways I feel a lot has changed, mostly within myself. And it’s not good. I’m still the same kid from high school but there are some parts missing. I’m no longer hopeful about anything. I don’t have high expectations for anything or anyone because I know expectation leads to disappointment. I look at people differently, not as generally kind but as mostly selfish. And I include myself in that category. I used to be so compassionate, so helpful to others. I used to care about people. I used to believe in people. And now all I do is wait around for others to let me down because I know they eventually will. And maybe I’m just projecting again, like I did with my roommate. Except this time I’m projecting my own internal character, that of someone who is bitter and hollow inside.

It’s hard to articulate just how much I put my hopes into that school, how I was so completely convinced that things would be better and how utterly disappointed I was when everything came crashing down. I hate that I had such a bad experience and I hate myself for ever being so naïve. I was way too deeply invested in nothing more than a hope, a thin concept with no guarantees for fulfillment and yet I took that chance and was the unlucky recipient of a huge slap in the face by the hand of the universe. And I wonder if that slap jarred me into regret or reality. Am I just now seeing things the way they are or am I viewing the world through blood spattered glasses? I don’t know if anyone will understand. Most will probably think I’m simply overreacting and maybe I am. Maybe a part of my problem is how overworked I get over insignificant situations but the fact of the matter is that I was uprooted from the only home I had ever known with no friends or family to help me out and I had to endure pissy professors and Mephistopheles as a roommate. All the while my vision of a beautiful college experience was collapsing so yeah, maybe all of my emotions were heightened, stretched beyond withstanding and eventually snapped under the strain. And I suppose I can’t expect anyone else to understand when I barely understand how I felt the way I did.

I left school with nothing tangible to take home and now, here I sit, snipping all strings of attachments I had to the place and the people that I encountered along the way. Not much has changed in the five or so years since I had those first few beautiful thoughts of a better life. I’m still fat and fragile. And while in school, I didn’t blossom, only withered. I didn’t find friends, only frustration. I didn’t discover love, only lamentation. I didn’t produce talent, only tears. I didn’t experiencehappiness, only heartache. Everything I ever believed in was chipped away. I was placed in a machine that sucked out my heart and soul, whisked away my wallet and then threw me out, dropped me off here to recover, to try and reconcile the past three years, to pick up the shattered pieces and try to find some semblance of understanding or closure and I just don’t know how I can do that. I don’t know how I can be capable of closure when there are still so many unanswered questions, so much pain and frustration and so much to figure out. For whatever reason, these past three years that were supposed to be the best of my life were in face the worst. I’m just not sure how I can recover from that, from all the wasted time and missed opportunities. I just don’t know how I can heal.

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