How to Crush Without Being Crushed

High school is a tumultuous time for most people.

Hormones are doing nasty things to our insides and outsides. Social pressures are forcing us to make choices that seem so much bigger than they are. Our very minds consipire to cause us problems trying to reconcile new ideas, strange interactions and the pop culture “standards” we’ve been fed our entire lives.

It can really suck.

And for me, it did.

You couldn’t pay me to go back and re-live those four years. When I graduated, I was happier to be done with that place and time than I ever was for anything else.

It would be years before I put enough distance between the person I was then and the one I had grown in to and was able to even remember half the good stuff that had gone on.

I never had a Winnie Cooper or a Watts. I was more Cunningham than Fonzereli. I most certainly wasn’t as lucky as Lloyd Dobbler.

What I was, was some strange and confused embryonic form of who I am now. A lot has changed–so much that the “me” from back then wouldn’t even be able to imagine the person I am now as a possibility.

Anyone who’s still the same person they were in high school has serious problems. It means they haven’t grown, haven’t learned anything new about themselves, and are probably stuck in very unhealthy relationship patterns–both intrapersonally and interpersonally. High school, at best, helps set the baseline for who we were and plants the seeds for who we can become.

What we do with those seeds, how far we rise from that baseline (or sink below it), is up to us. It’s what happens when we really get out on our own, when we decide which influences we’re going to accept and which we’re going to shrug off as unimportant or detrimental.

At it’s worst, high school lets us know exactly what we don’t want to be part of. It stings us so badly and disgusts us so much that we seek to turn our backs on it as useless and horrid. Even at its most horrid, though, it serves as an inspiration–a motivator to ensure we never go back to anything resembling that state of development.

High school is part of the baggage we carry with us into every relationship. For some, it’s a small tote and for others it’s a steamer trunk or three. It’s part of what either held us back or spurred us forward along the path to who we are now. It’s part of the last bit of generally shared experience for most Americans… something that we can all talk about together and be able to compare notes.

Love it or hate it, high school is part of who we are.

And it’s one of the biggest reasons I write about what I do.

Tags: growth, high school, relationships

You’d think that with three years of a totally obsessive and self-destructive crush behind me, I’d have learned my lesson.

Especially with everything else that I started to learn in high school.

Well, you’d be wrong.

I still had a habit of fixating on people. Usually people I was interested in dating and horribly crushing on. Sometimes, those crushes would come and go–their intensity waxing and waning over time. Most of them never got intense enough one way or the other to overcome my personal anxiety barriers.

There were some, though, that did. For good or ill, I think I actually went on more dates in high school than I did in college or since. Almost none of them are what anyone would call “successful.” (Especially by high school-themed pop culture standards.)

One of those waxing and waning crushes had been in place for at least a year before it really hit me.

She was a year behind me, in the orchestra, a bit of an athlete, tall as anything and, as far as I was concerned, near perfection.

In my sophomore year, my courage peaked once or twice and I actually asked her out to dinner and a movie. (That was the standard thing to do back then, some days I wonder if it’s changed all that much in modern high school culture.)

Amazingly, every time I asked, she already had plans to go. Fantastic! We had the same taste in movies, too! What’s that? And I can come along with her? Well that’s a win-win situation… me surrounded by women! It doesn’t get any better than that!

Yes. Those are almost exactly the thoughts that ran through my teenage head back then. Totally oblivious to the reality of the situation.

To put it bluntly: she really wasn’t that in to me. But she was trying to be nice about it. Which was great.

Except for the fact that I was way too dense to get the hint. My wishful thinking and obsessive habits blinded me to the harsh truth, just as they had in prior years.

And so, more than a couple of times, I paid for dinner for three and bought three movie tickets.

Some of those nights were fun. One time, the friend she miraculously already had plans with was the older sister of a guy in my scout troop. I actually got along better with my troop members sister than I did with the girl I was supposedly on a date with. I can still remember that odd flutter when I ended up holding her hand and locking eyes with her (for oh! such a fleeting instant) at the McDonalds across the street from the movie theater.

(Being the proper sort of gentleman, I put that flutter right out of my mind. Because, after all, I was on a date with someone else. *sigh*)

Some of those nights were not much fun at all. Like the one where lobster was ordered and my supposed date and her friend sat in the row behind me during the movie.

Thankfully, she eventually started dating someone else and my attention shifted onward.

There were other, low-key crushes that were a near constant in my high school career. Being in band, my homeroom and first period class took place in the lower-floor rehearsal space of one wing of the school. That left me plenty of time to just hang out in the hallway after my bus got in. Dozens of people walked past me every day as I held that wall up. At least half of the girls I had, at one time or another, had a crush on.

Many of them were in the band or orchestra.A few were just passing through. Cora was one of the latter. Every morning I’d greet her with a smile and a kind word or two. We never spoke too much outside of those morning greetings, but I was modestly smitten. Never drawn enough to overcome my fears, I never did ask her out.

What I did do was invite her to my graduation party.

She was the only one who wasn’t family who showed up at the beginning and didn’t leave until the end.

And still, it seems, even at the end of my high school career, I was blind to obvious signs.

Tags: crushes, dating, high school, lessons learned, obsession

Despite my best efforts, I never was able to fully overcome all those little anxieties that had settled into place over the yeas before high school. They were always at their worst, though, when I was surrounded by the same people who had been around when they first formed.

The odd thing was, anytime I removed myself from the ordinary and familiar, I felt much more alive. Much more myself. Much more at home.

Key Club was the most common escape route. Every year there was a district convention that,  while it happened more or less right in our own back yard, always felt like somewhere foreign. Also once a year there was an international convention that took place well beyond the confines of my home county. I made it to four district conventions and two international ones.

Finding myself on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, surrounded by lovely young women was something I would have never considered possible during the first half of my high school career.

These were the places where I thrived.

At my very first district convention, I broke through a lot of personal issues and got to know someone who really did change my life.

Removed from my ordinary rut, I allowed myself to be more true to who I was. Without the worries of overcoming past impressions made, I was free to experiment a little, to try on who I wanted to be.

It worked quite well.

During that time, I managed to make a good number of friends, in the space of a weekend or so, that I felt closer to than people I had known for years. A few would surface again, when I was in college. Some of them I’m still in touch with–more frequently than most people I graduated high school with.

Fear follows us only where we let it. When I was within the walls of my high school and, most of the time, within the confines of my home county, I was steeped in fear and depression caused by years of emotional baggage. Traveling, being surrounded by a fresh batch of people, sharing a common “newness” of experience–those things let me leave my fear behind. For those brief weekends, I was free to discover who I actually was, deep down inside.

It wouldn’t be until years later–nearly half-way into my college career–that I would fully understand just how much I limited myself when I was on my “home turf”. The shock of returning to the normal grind after a convention inevitaby shot me into a depression that would block out most of what I should have learned.

But, during my darkest times, those bits of interaction–the quick crushes, the shared laughter, the adventurous exploration–would be beacons to keep me from falling too deeply too quickly.

With my descent slowed, I could always find a kind, local hand to reach out to.

Tags: high school, introspection, key club, lessons learned, travel

With my nearly three year long destructive crush fading behind me, I discovered I had a whole lot more energy to dedicate toward thinking about relationships with other people.

High school, with the plethora of pop culture mythology I had firmly loaded in my head by the time I started, struck me as the perfect time to explore those thoughts.

Unfortunately, reality proved to be far removed from The Wonder Years, Happy Days, and Some Kind of Wonderful (as well as a whole lot of other TV shows and movies I’d been watching a whole lot). I most certainly wasn’t one of the popular kids. I didn’t have a group of “adventuring” buddies. In fact, I barely felt connected at all to the people around me. Most of the time, it was more like being on an away mission in Star Trek–observe, but interaction can be problematic.

Not that I was stopped by problematic things. Heck, I’d spent the previous three years punishing myself in that crush… I was bound and determined to have high school be different.

And in some ways, it was.

My status as a more or less invisible man let me see people from many angles. That gave me some insight into what was going on inside the heads of those around me. What it didn’t do was give me any kind of clue how to apply that to myself or my interactions with them.

So I floundered about just like any high school kid does. Except I think I may have kept more excruciating mental notes than most.

The first thing I realized was how quickly I’d fall for someone. Without the fixation on one person, my attention jumped like crazy. Each and every crush was different. In some, there was a promise of adventure (yes, I fell for the “bad girls”). In others, a personal challenge (yes, I fell for the “popular girls”). And in still others, something that I’d later figure out was a feeling of being around a kindred spirit–someone who was as lost as I was an as actively trying to find their own way.

Mostly, though, I found that as much as a crush inspired me to action, my fears and uncertainties rarely let that inspiration become reality. The mental blocks were too large to climb over or push through. I’d get caught in loops of planning and miss every chance to execute.

Eventually, I figured out two things: 1) The more I looked at my crushes, the more I learned about myself and 2) if you can’t go over or through your barriers, you have to find a way around them.

The first realization led me, eventually, to engage in this blog project. The second realization led me to change the way I looked at things to the point where I could manage to not get hung up on the idea of dating.

Instead, I focused on the little things–like saying “Hi” and engaging in some sort of conversation. At first, that was very difficult. But when I saw an opening for conversation–especially if it was on a topic I knew something about or could help with–I’d take it.

I never got quite aggressive enough to get a lot dates out of that method (which is probably for the best), but it did let me help a lot of people out… and gave me the distinction of spending a good deal of time with some of the most beautiful women in my class and the one ahead of mine.

If nothing else, it was a good solid ego booster, which would come in handy to offset a lot of the other things that went on in high school, relationship-wise.

Tags: crushes, high school, introspection, lessons learned

As muddled as my mind was for most of high school, some things began to become clear during those years.

First and foremost, the idea that, among my peers, I was actually a worthwhile person began to creep in. That was mostly due to finally shedding the destructive crush of years prior and finding the wonderful support of a small handful of people who let me have a positive impact on their lives.

Yes, it’s true that unlike a lot of other people I know, I had (and have) a very supportive family. But in those teen years, especially for someone like me, that doesn’t count for much inside one’s head. In fact, I still don’t think that, no matter how meticulously I try to explain things, my parents even come close to understanding where I’m coming from half the time. Back in high school, there was no way you could have convinced me they would. But they were always there and they did do a damn fine job of laying some positive groundwork for me to (eventually) build on.

What mattered most was the people I spent half my day surrounded by. My classmates. The same people I’d spent the previous three years with. The same people who were mostly indifferent toward me–which was an improvement over the previous years. That bit of indifference, while painful and confusing at the time, turned out to be a fantastic asset in the realm of self-discovery.

With no one to talk to most of the time, I had a lot of time for introspection. As an extra added bonus, because I was often ignored by those around me, I got to see sides of people they didn’t often bring out in public. Mostly because they had apparently just forgotten I was in the same room. Other times, because I stood mostly outside of any given social circle, people would confide in me, knowing that their secrets were safe.

These factors came together to give me a much more well-rounded picture of my peers than most others ever had. I could see the strange interplay among and within the different groups. I learned where people became boisterous or sullen to cover up self-doubt, how  they deflected attention from certain areas of their lives they didn’t want to share with the world.

I had a front row seat to the back-stage of high school life.

Try as I might, though, it was still difficult to apply that same point of view to my own issues.

As time went on, I did get better at it. Running through scenarios in my head, taking note of my own fears and hopes, trying to overcome my shortcomings. It was a rough process–and one that wouldn’t even be close to finished until my second year of college (and that just opened up a new level of things to work on).

There were crushes and clumsy attempts at relationships–romantic and platonic. More often than not, I just sat back and watched and learned.

The most important thing I learned was that, no matter what, I was most certainly no worse off than anyone else. I had things to offer–ideas, poetry, insight–that really could change people’s lives.

Even if it was only for an instant.

Tags: growth, high school, introspection