Op-ed: Turns Out You Shouldn’t Trust Everyone After Meeting Them Once!

Recent events have been haunting me. I’ve been making new friends which under any other circumstances would be slaytastic, as the kids are saying. The funny thing is, these guys are really needy and lack the basic empathy that I certainly do not. Maybe I’m a little too forgiving of that I guess, whatever though. It’ll start out simple enough. Want to borrow my charger? Of course! Can’t have you missing the BeReal! It’s totally fine you’ve returned it broken in eight places that’s what makes it unique! Want to borrow my fake completely real government-issued identification? Totally girl, it’s really no problem that we have completely different 23andMe results, nobody was missing me at Purg anyway. Oh, they snatched it and the bouncers kicked you out…? That’s no biggie hahaha I’ll just pull another $80 out of my ass, I understand you’re saving the weekly allowance your parents give you for the Mexico trip you’re not inviting me to. Next thing you know, the girl’s leached me dry, and not a single peep outta me. In reality, I’m fed up but for some reason, I just can’t say so. 

And so there I lay, on my therapist's back-breaking brown couch à la Freud, a dusty box of tissues within reach (in the unlikely case I let my guard down and shed a tear in front of a stranger). As I relayed the most harrowing parts of my week to the therapist that my father is convinced wouldn’t be necessary if I went to Church more often, this shrink tells me I’ve got some sort of trust issues?? “Sweetheart,” she calls me sweetheart because she’s definitely forgotten how to pronounce my name, “What we can start to do is help establish some boundaries in your relationships…” She kept talking but I tuned her out because what do you mean I’m “delusionally optimistic?” Lock me up, but I love living in delusion. It's so peaceful here. If something makes me uncomfortable, I ignore it. It’s been working great up ‘till now. 

After that, I got up and left and decided to debrief with my childhood best friend Becca, who I let follow me up here to Tallahassee since every school she applied to last fall rejected her. I was so surprised considering her bomb-ass application and GPA. Come to think of it, I was the one who wrote her applications… and did her homework all throughout school… weird. Anyways I come back to my apartment and lightly nudge her awake from her slumber in my bed, which is now hers (really I prefer the couch). “Oh shit hey. I’m glad you woke me, I was gonna tell you to go grocery shopping like we have no Sprite Cranberry left dude you know I love those.” After I relayed my session with my therapist she responded with an appropriate “damn, that’s crazy” and we continued on our business of quietly co-existing. 

Now that I’ve had time to unload on you all maybe I do sound crazy and overly trusting. But that’s how we all make friends right? We all take off work to drop our friends off at the airport and when we ask them to return the favor, we get a super vague response about how they have that thing at the same time, even though you never told them what time your flight is. We all put every single person we’ve drunkenly bantered with on our close friends’ Instagram stories, where we post every single detail of our lives down to the sloppy crying over the ex-boyfriend who cheated on us in high school with our best friend Becca, but who we forgave because it was easier than being alone. We all get really surprised when said close friends never come up to you in public. We definitely all have done that and continue to do so.