I’m Special

by Ryan O’Connell

  “You know I wasn’t happy then, Ryan,” Clare told me recently. “I was drinking too much and dating assholes. You’re romanticizing a very dark time.”

  Maybe I was. But I wasn’t expecting my friendships to change this fast. Growing up, I thought my twenties were going to be like the television show Friends. After college, my best buddies and I would get a beautiful apartment in Manhattan, despite the fact that none of us had decent jobs, and we’d spend our days having friendship orgies. When we couldn’t scrounge up enough money for rent, we’d pay for it using the sheer power of our bonds. “You guys,” the landlord would address us wearily, “you need to stop sending me checks that just have ‘LOVE!’ scribbled across them. I can’t cash these!” On the rare occasion that my roommates and I would leave our cozy apartment, it’d be to lie on coffee shop couches and commiserate about the sad state of our love lives for nineteen hours. Everything in the world would disappoint us—except for each other!

  Well, maybe it wouldn’t be that much of a culty lovefest, but I at least thought I’d have someone to dance with in my room after a long day at work. Instead, I found myself with a lot of paper-thin friendships. Whenever I’d have a connection with someone and attempt to make plans, we’d get lost in a black hole of texting. They’d be like, “Hey, I really enjoy your company but I’m too weird to set up an actual friend date so I will just continue to text with you 24/7 and make vague references to hanging out IRL even though we both know that will never come to fruition!”

  Then there are the people I used to be close with but then something happened—no one’s sure what—and now we’ve become people who just check in with each other occasionally. Lame attempts to hang out are made, but it rarely ever happens. A friend will text me, “It’s offensive how long we’ve gone without seeing each other. This is not okay!” and I’ll be like, “OMG, I know. Hang time ASAP, plz!” But we both know it means nothing.

  Your best friend, the one who manages to stick with you during the apocalypse that is your twenties, is the person who saves you from all of this misery. The bond you have is so authentic and loving that it almost feels criminal to have it in the modern age. When you’re together, you spend hours having brain orgasms. You can bring this friend anywhere—to a dive bar or an intimidating club—and they always make you feel safe. You never have to worry about them. There’s none of the usual friendship maintenance. You could go months without seeing each other and pick up right where you left off.

  Unfortunately, a best friend is not guaranteed. You think it is. You grow up waiting for the moment someone comes along and becomes the Daria to your Jane, but it doesn’t always happen. I’ve met people—normal, delightful people—who bristle when you ask about their friendships. They’ll say, “I’m friends with a lot of people, but I don’t know if I have, like, a best friend.” You know what they mean when they say that. A “best friend” is someone who, when asked which person sees the world the same way you do, will say your name without hesitation. There’s no anxiety about the feelings not being entirely mutual. You can write their name confidently in blood.

  I’ve been lucky enough to have a few special friendships, but the one that was most important to me is also the one I lost. I met Sarah in the Foothill Tech cafeteria when we were frightened freshman babies. We both looked at each other and were like, “Hi, nice to meet you. Want to get through this hell together?” She was a six-foot-tall water polo player with a metal rod in her back. I was a gay gimp with bad skin and rainbow hair. Separately, Sarah and I didn’t stand a chance at loving high school, but when we combined forces, everything was golden. We did everything together. We volunteered at the LGBT youth center and taught young gays that safe sex meant more than just doing it somewhere your parents couldn’t find you. We wrote plays about the absurd social politics of high school and performed them for our drama class. We even tried to be evolved like the French and shared a boyfriend for a few months. (No threesomes, obviously—just lots of slutty swapping with a bisexual hippie who had a big dick.) After high school ended, Sarah and I went away to different colleges, but we lived together every summer, interning and writing scripts. Our plan was to write a few sample specs before moving out to LA to pursue careers as television writers.

  Of course, life never works out the way you want it to. During our sophomore year of college, Sarah was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and spent the fall and most of the spring semester undergoing chemo. She recovered a few months later, right around the same time I was hit by a car in San Francisco. We intended to go to New York for the summer to take a screenwriting class, but we were both too depressed to do anything, so we decided to sublet an apartment in Los Angeles and spend the next few months processing our respective mindfucks-of-a-year. I was convinced it was going to play out like a sequel to Girl, Interrupted. (Girl, Still Interrupted? Somebody get my agent on the phone!) There’d be no sun-drenched barbecues, swim days, or steamy summer romances. Sarah and I would just lie in bed, sobbing into a bottle of Xanax.

  That’s what should’ve happened, anyway. I spent almost every day working on my hand in physical therapy and couldn’t move my fingers or make a fist. Meanwhile, Sarah was still experiencing terrible side effects from chemo. The two of us were a bona fide goof troop. But instead of resigning ourselves to a sad existence, we made an unspoken agreement to spend our summer having LOLs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We went out to parties, even though I was still in an arm cast and could barely hold my drink. We explored different parts of LA. We tried to get laid. It was like every other magical summer, except with a dash of emotional trauma.

  If our friendship could survive cancer and my accident and still be stronger than ever, you’d think we’d have it made. But sometime between that summer in LA and college graduation, something changed between us. Our lives, once nearly identical, started to take different shapes. Sarah got into a serious relationship. I moved to New York for school and found a whole new group of friends. Since the beginning of our friendship, our identities had been inextricably linked, but as we got older, we realized we didn’t need each other as much. I depended on Sarah to tell me who I was, but when I started getting more comfortable in my own skin, I began to define myself on my own.

  Sarah and I lived together one last time right before we graduated. We moved into another apartment in LA so we could write a spec script. The first one we wrote had gone swimmingly, but this experience was gut-wrenchingly bad. Our chemistry was off from day one, and we could never find proper footing with each other. Every day we would try to sit and write, but there was no creative synergy between us. It was like watching something I love get destroyed in slow motion. I wanted to scream, “Freeze! Stop turning my best friend into a complete stranger!” but there was nothing either of us could do. Time was going to murder us.

  Right before we moved out, I dropped a bomb on Sarah. “I’m not sure if I’m married to the idea of writing for TV,” I told her while packing up my suitcase. “I think I want to stay in New York and maybe explore the advertising world.”

  Sarah looked up and shot me an “Are you fucking kidding me?” look. She had ditched her boyfriend for the summer so she could be here and write this script, and now I was casually shitting all over our future.

  “Really? Advertising? Uh, that’s interesting. I’ve literally never heard you say anything about that before, but cool!”

  I didn’t actually have a desire to work in advertising, but I thought telling Sarah this would force us to have an honest conversation about why our friendship had deteriorated so much. Unfortunately, it didn’t facilitate any discussion. When we went back to school, our phone conversations became more infrequent and stilted. Eventually I met up with her in San Francisco, where she had been living after college (she, too, had given up on the dream of being writing partners in Los Angeles), and told her that we had grown apart. She cried, I cried after she left, and that was that. The most heartbreaking aspect of Sarah and me ending our friendship
was that there was no massive betrayal or devastating event that would justify something so special dying. We stopped being friends simply because we became two different people. I was shocked that such a thing could even happen. Sarah and I being friends seemed like the only guarantee in my life, but now I realize how naïve I was for thinking anything was a sure bet. For over two decades, my friends and I were on the same track, achieving important milestones together. Then we graduated from college and started living completely different lives overnight. Of course shit was going to get weird.

  After graduation, your friends typically take one of two paths: they either fall into a serious relationship or throw themselves into a career. If you’re one of those psychos who can somehow master a job and a relationship right after college, then congratulations and I hate you. For everyone else, what we have here is a division. In one camp, we have people who are devoting all their time to their first serious relationship. This kind of love is more intense than what they experienced in high school and college. They’re not just counting down the days with someone until school’s out for the summer. They’re choosing a person to build a life with.

  In the other camp, friends are putting a ring on their job and asking to marry it. Unless someone’s a prostitute or a porn star, I’m pretty sure their job can’t give them blow jobs, but what it lacks in sexiness it makes up for in mental stimulation. They’re discovering the things they’re good at and understanding their value as a worker. If only they had half the energy to dedicate to their personal life as they did with their professional, they’d have it made!

  Both paths give a person a sense of purpose and security, which is essential for someone who’s just left college and has no idea what the hell they’re doing. They have to channel all their energy into something, and it’s really only a matter of what scares them less: a relationship or a job. Funnily enough, both parties are convinced the other person has it better. The friend who’s in a solid relationship would kill to have an amazing job, whereas the young professional would like nothing more than to have someone to go home to.

  There are also people who have neither the job nor the relationship to fall back on. Being in a postgrad slump is an excuse you can only use for so long before people start to worry about you. “Did you hear about Jessica?” a concerned friend whispers at lunch. “She just got fired from her menial office job and she hasn’t left her apartment in a week. She’s not even dating anyone! It’s sad because, like, we graduated two years ago. It’s time to get your shit together, you know?” Yes, I know. You know. And your friend Jessica definitely knows. You need to shut up and exhibit some compassion. Transitioning to adulthood is hard enough. Having your friends judge your progress doesn’t make it any easier.

  For a year after college, I was that pitiful friend with no job or dating prospects. When I finally landed a full-time job, I called up all my buddies to inform them that I was a useful person again. “You don’t have to worry about me,” I’d scream into the receiver. “I’m still in the running to be America’s Next Top Adult!” It took me 2.5 seconds to turn into the kind of annoying person who only wanted to talk about their job. I couldn’t help myself. My work became my life, and I loved it. But you know the one thing that sucks about being a single career girl? Saturdays and Sundays. What once was a cherished time for respite and fun with my friends was now a dreaded reminder that I wasn’t in a relationship. When did weekends unofficially become regarded as couple time? It feels like it happened overnight. One weekend I was lying in bed hungover with my best friends, living, laughing, and loving, and the next I was receiving text messages like, “Sorry, can’t hang! At the flea market with the BF. Hang Tuesday night?” Ah, Tuesday night: the dreaded single-friend time slot. In the hierarchy of time, Saturday afternoons reign supreme and Tuesdays at 7:00 p.m. are a mere pity offering. When can I get back to the coveted weekend time slot? Who do you have to fuck around here to see your friends on a weekend afternoon?

  It’s not just relationships and jobs that prevent us from seeing our friends. It’s also because we’re complete flakes. People are always one text away from bailing on you with some bullshit excuse like, “Oh no! I just got super tired. Do you mind if we reschedule? I’ll call you if I get a second wind!” Or worse—they’ll lie and say they’re sick, because they found something better to do. “Don’t Instagram this!” they’ll hiss to the friend they blew you off for. “I told Julie I got food poisoning, so she can’t know that I’m here!” Blowing people off is turning into an epidemic, and it’s ruining our personal relationships. All we do is complain about how we miss our friends and feel so isolated, but when it comes time to see someone face-to-face, we freeze up. What the hell is going on here? What’s really preventing us from committing to a plan?

  I have thousands of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, so one could safely assume that I’d be drowning in playdates, but the opposite is true. It’s easy to tweet at a person, and it’s easy to “like” their statuses on Facebook, but it’s getting harder and harder to actually show up for someone and actively put effort into building a friendship. I find it hilarious that I’m “friends” with so many people on the Internet when I actually only hang out with five people. That’s how it works, though. The more fruitful your virtual life is, the more your real life gets neglected. Sometimes I think about the future of my social life and worry that things are going to get even darker. I see myself at my best friend’s wedding getting sad drunk at the singles table while people stare and thank God that the lives they have are fuller than mine. After everybody I love gets married, our friendships will be reduced to phone calls and lunches and “I miss you” and “Remember when?” Then babies will enter the picture and everything will be ruined. The only people who will have time to hang out with me are the elderly at a seafood buffet.

  When Clare and other close friends of mine fell down the rabbit hole of a long-term relationship, there was a part of me that felt like I was getting left behind. While I was busy working and sabotaging my love life, they were moving in with their significant others and progressing emotionally in ways that I couldn’t even fathom. I wanted to be a part of their life change and they wanted to be a part of mine, but it didn’t feel possible. They were in love. They understood things about the world that I didn’t, and it had created an undeniable inequity between us.

  Clare and I could have stopped being friends like Sarah and I did. The only reason we survived is because we decided to put the work in. After two years of festering resentments, we finally had it out with each other in front of a juice bar in the West Village. We screamed unthinkable things at each other; we took a rusty knife and dug deep into the wounds. Clare sobbed. I sobbed. People drank their juice and were like, “WTF?” By the time it was over, we were like, “Even though I hate you right now, the thought of not being friends makes me hate everything else more.” So we agreed to start from scratch and let go of any past anger. We had to. There are so many people in this world who make you feel like an alien. When you find someone who “gets it,” you don’t take it for granted. Great people don’t grow on trees.

  I’ve accepted that my friendships will change as we mature, and it’s unhealthy to fight it. Being someone’s friend once said more about yourself than you could ever say on your own, but then you grew up and stopped feeling like half a person. This doesn’t make friendships less valuable now. If anything, they take on more meaning. Now that you’ve gotten your sea legs and started to become the person you’re going to be, you’re not looking for validation or to fill a void. You want to be around people because you like them. Shocking, isn’t it? Just chalk it up to another life lesson you only learn through extensive trial and error. It’s embarrassing that it’s taken me this long to figure out how to navigate something as seemingly easy as friendships, but I can’t say that I’m surprised. I feel like there are people who get things on the first try and then there are people like me with a slow learning curve who have to fight lo
ng and hard for every inch of growth. I’ve made a lot of progress in my life, but the one lesson that took me the longest to figure out is the one that almost derailed everything.

  I couldn’t stop the bad things from feeling so damn good.

  How Not to Drink or Do Drugs

  BEFORE I LEFT FOR college and embarked on what would be a decade of mistakes, my father sat me down and gave me some typical advice like, “Don’t eat soft-serve in the dining hall every day unless you want to gain the freshman fifteen,” and “Be sure to invest in a nice pillow to soften the blow of sleeping on a shitty dorm mattress.” He also told me that if I drank any alcohol, I’d run the risk of becoming more retarded.

  Dad: Ryan, I know college is a time for experimentation and getting drunk, but I really think it’s in your best interest to not partake in that stuff.

  Me: Come on, Dad. Everyone is going to be drinking.

  Dad: Need I remind you that you’re not like everybody else?

  Me: What do you mean?

  Dad: You have brain damage.

  Me: I know. So what?

  Dad: So what? You don’t have the luxury of losing any more brain cells!

  Me: Dad, drinking is not going to give me more brain damage.

  Dad: It might.

  Me: Well, then I don’t care. I’m still going to do it!

  Dad: That stubbornness is your brain damage talking.

  My father’s never had a sip of alcohol in his life. He considers it to be low-class behavior and will turn into an instant Judge Judy if someone drinks in front of him. A few years after that conversation, while I was home from college, my father began interrogating me about my partying. I’d just turned twenty-one and moved to New York City, so I obviously wasn’t riding the sober train. The first friend I made at Eugene Lang was this crazy lush, Sadie, who only wore Chanel and lived in a luxury apartment building downtown. Every night I spent with her had the potential to be the Best Night Ever, and it usually was. Sadie just attracted insanity. It scared me a little bit, her manic energy and thirst for a never-ending supply of booze and drugs, but it was also thrilling for someone like me who just moved to the city and wanted to feast on YOLOs. A typical night for us meant drinking a bottle of wine before we left her place to go out and then downing as many margaritas as we could stomach at some epic party. By night’s end, I was usually passed out on her floor while the rest of my friends stayed up to call their coke dealers and danced around my lifeless corpse. I couldn’t tell my dad about any of these shenanigans, though. He’d have an aneurysm, and I’d be strapped to a gurney and sent off to rehab at Broken Promises. So I lied and told him that I only drank once a week.