Amanda Under Construction

When I was younger I used to wish that a book existed with all of the mean things that people have said about me behind my back.

I imagined the pages to be filled with things like: “Amanda’s so annoying,”She talks way too much,” “She’s so quiet it makes me uncomfortable,” “Her nose is too big,” “I don’t want to eat lunch with her anymore,” “She’s gained so much weight,” “She’s horrible at dancing,” “She’s so dumb,” “She’s so awkward,” “She doesn’t give a shit about other people,” “Her mom is crazy so she must be too,” “Why does she even try to be friends with us?” “She lies all the time and I’m tired of it,” “I don’t want to deal with her family shit,” “Why does she get so upset all the time?” “Amanda needs to learn to grow up,” “Why is she such a bitch?” “Amanda is so fake,” “She’s so passive about everything,” “There’s nothing more to her,” “She’s a horrible friend,” “Amanda is so selfish,” “Amanda is such a gossip,” “Amanda isn’t there for me and I’m there for her all the time,” “She can’t think for herself,” “Thirsty bitch,” “She won’t leave me alone,” “Amanda needs to mind her own business,” “She needs to stop running away from people,” “I hate her,” “Amanda needs to stop talking about _____ because it’s so annoying,” “She’s crazy because __________,” “Amanda is crazy because she does ________,” “Amanda is crazy,” “Amanda is crazy,” “Amanda is crazy.”

I would think about this book and all of the things written in it, and how it would get longer and longer as I made friends and lost friends and maintained friendships as time went on. These things would be the worst things I would think about myself.

Some of them are true. Fuck it, all of them might be true. It is the worst when I think about how people think these things every time they talk to me or I hang out with them, so I become exceedingly shy or so enthusiastically and unrealistically nice that it’s almost like I’m forcing them to like me.

The whole point of this “Burn Book”-type list is that all of these things are what I am/was insecure about. I so badly want people to like me and to be friends with me, and I so badly want people to accept me, that I focus on all of these bad things and focus on fixing them, and that makes me become less of who I am. I don’t even know who I am anymore because all I do is spend my time trying to fix what people don’t like about me, or what I don’t think people like about me. I’m Amanda Under Construction, and I have been my whole life.

It has almost gotten worse in college, and that’s because I have felt so unstable without a solid friend group at Ithaca that I needed to make people like me.

Yes, I do have friends at school. These people don’t know who I am, but who I am trying to be. In high school I was a terrible person– I was a gossip and I was mean and aggressive and didn’t treat my friends like they should have been treated. And I am so scared that I am going to go back to being that person that I have made ridiculous attempts to become the opposite.

What I’m typing right now is really self-destructive. I’ve been in an awful mood all night, and it’s because I’m feeling nostalgic and I have low self-esteem right now. I think that what I needed was to write something about it, so that’s what this is.

I dated a boy once who said his favorite thing about me was that I was “genuine.” It confused me so much, because I didn’t know what was “genuine” about me at all. I didn’t know who I was, and I still don’t know who I am, so how can I act genuinely when each time I look at myself in the mirror I hate what I see and I hate who I am and keep trying to change and fix myself? If I was genuine at one point, I am definitely not anymore.

This is just beat down on Amanda night. Sorry, Internet. I am under construction. I will try to write about more positive topics in the future. But right now I’m just down on myself.

I’ve written before (not necessarily here but for other places/myself) about how when I don’t want to deal with things I run away.

It happens a lot when I’m friends with someone and we get into a fight, or I don’t understand exactly what they’re saying and there’s miscommunication, or I don’t like what they’re saying. So I just kind of give up and walk away. I don’t want to deal with it, so I just run away. I don’t try to fix it, I just run away.

I literally run away from my problems. I’m crazy. I’m a crazy person.

One of the better stories (I’m talking about one of the times that I’ve done this) I have of this is from the 11th grade. I was really in love with this boy, I’m sure that those who know me and are reading this can guess who it is, and I was confused as to whether or not he liked me back because he was giving me mixed signals, like kissing me and then all of a sudden not talking to me for a week. I was so stressed out about it, and I was scared of losing him, so I decided to do something really brave, something that I’d never done before.

I knew that he had study hall at a certain time, so I asked him if he would just come into the hallway for a second so I could talk to him about something, which he did. And I told him that I was just going to try something, to which he tentatively said “okay…” And then I took a deep breath and kissed him.

Just a peck.

And ran away.

It was one of the bravest (and one of the most cowardly) things I’ve ever done.

I found out later that day that the reason he didn’t like me, or was trying to pursue me, was because he was actually dating one of my friends that I hadn’t talked to in a while from the town over. Which had developed over the week that he hadn’t talked to me, which he hadn’t told me, and which was so horrifically embarrassing… So I ignored him for a really long time.

It broke my heart. It broke my heart because I put myself out there and I tried something that I knew that I would never do, and I failed. I was a failure. I couldn’t face him, so I just pretended that he didn’t exist. It was much easier. But all the more awful because I still cared about him so much. I ended up in a relationship with him, but because I kept running away from him about things like this (similar situations kept happening where I wanted him but he didn’t want me back) it made everything different.

It changed what he thought of me, and what our relationship could have been. We could have been friends in between, but because of how I act and because I ran away and ignored him, we couldn’t. It’s my fault.

I’m always scared that I’m going to do this to people, or that they will get to know me too well and I’ll like them too much, and when some problem comes up between us I’ll run away and never talk to them again, just like what happened with this kid. I’ve done this to so many people in my life, and really important people, too. And it’s awful. And it makes me hate myself.

When I misunderstand people, or ruin relationships by doing this, a lot of people (not necessarily the people that I do this to, but a lot of people) get really angry with me. I did it to my mother, for example. But my mother is a special case.

A lot of people do get angry with me. They don’t understand why I act the way I do or why I do this. They think that I’m just being ignorant and that I don’t want to listen, which I guess is true. They think that I can help being this way. But I can’t.

I physically can’t make myself try and forgive that person. I’m not being dramatic– I’m being truthful. I have to ignore them. I have to make it like they don’t exist.

Cutting people out of my life is easier and less painful than keeping them with the constant reminder of what they did or what happened. And I’ve gotten so used to this way of cutting people out that it’s becoming easier and easier for me to do it, which is awful and hurtful to the people I do it to and the people I love. And it makes me not want to know people or get close to them. I want everything to be perfect, and I want them to like me. So I pretend like everything is okay and that I’m happy because I’m scared of what I might do if it’s not.

I don’t know why I’m writing this today of all days, but I think that it needed to be written, or I needed to expand on it. I feel the need to explain myself all the time, and figure out why I am the way that I am. I want people to understand, so that they can forgive me for being like this.

Sorry that I’m crazy and that I do this.

A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my friend Vivian on the phone. I was going through some stuff, not necessarily heavy stuff, but it was some type of normal college problem that I was complaining about to her. Probably about boys, or that I was lonely, or that I had a truckload of homework hanging over my head that I did not plan on doing. (It’s more likely than not that it was about boys. But that’s besides the point.)

When I was telling her this story, she started laughing at me. And for a second there, I was pretty confused because, I mean, this was my life we were talking about and it was all serious to me. It directly affected how I went about on a day-to-day basis, and had to do with whether or not I was happy, and on top of that it was a ridiculously dramatic situation and anything could change and it could get a lot better or a lot worse for me.

But Viv laughed anyway.

We actually talked about this, and came to a conclusion: since I was speaking to her as an outsider that had no part in whatever I was complaining about, it seemed funny to her because it had nothing to do with her. And in a few weeks, it would seem funny to me too because it would probably all be over and I wouldn’t be worrying about it anymore.

Thinking about it now, as in the few weeks since that happened, I find that thing that happened that I was complaining about hysterically funny. I’ve actually told the story to a bunch of people and they find it equally hilarious, because that’s what it is. At the time, it was serious and unfortunate and awful, but now it’s just funny because it doesn’t really matter anymore. It doesn’t matter at all.

There’s a bunch of stuff that I’ve done in the past that are so embarrassingly terrible or just plain bad, that whenever I think about them I cringe. But they don’t matter anymore– or at least, they shouldn’t matter anymore.

The point about these shitty things that have happened to me is that they happened and they’re done, and aren’t happening anymore. What I can do about them is move on and get past them and learn from them…

A lot of the time I do understand that there are certain things that I shouldn’t do, like ignore people or walk away from things that I don’t want to deal with, but I keep doing those things. I’m trying to change, but it’s hard to get over whatever happened without the constant reminder that I had to change because of it. It’s something that I’m trying to work on, and still need a lot of work on. But the point is that I am willing and understand that something needs to happen in order for me to get better.

I used to love gossip but now I hate it.

There isn’t anything really special about me. Maybe sometimes I’m enthusiastic and charismatic and funny in a weird, cynical way, and my naïveté is charming at some points. But when I would talk to other people about other people, that gave them a real reason to talk to me, too.

Their incentive was to listen to what I had to say, because it was at the expense of someone else. They gained something small from whatever I said– they gained insider knowledge, and secrets, and the feeling of being included in something special.

I loved to gossip because it made people pay attention to me. Maybe they wouldn’t like what I was saying, maybe it would fuck up my friendships with other people, maybe other people would think that I was just being a bitch… But it didn’t matter because for the 30 seconds it took for me to tell someone that so-and-so had hooked up with so-and-so, their eyes were on me. I had their undivided attention. I wasn’t unimportant or someone to look over… Gossip made me matter.

Gossip gave me something. It made me not boring. People would come to me, expecting me to know stuff about something else. They needed me, for whatever reason. And it felt good to be needed. It made up for what my personality lacked.

It would work both ways, too. People would come to me and they would tell me things they knew. “Have you heard this about her?” “Can you believe he hooked up with her?” They would message me on Facebook, call out to me in the hallways, pass me notes during class. This might be exaggerated, but I knew everything about anyone that mattered. They trusted me, which was foolish.

I hurt some of my good friends through gossip. One of my best friends in high school liked a guy, and I tried to help her along by telling the guy in a very subliminal way. That, of course, backfired on me. When I was drunk, I told one of my guy friends to ask another one of my best friends to the prom because I wasn’t sure whether she would have the confidence to ask anyone.

I was a bitch. Those were bitchy things to do. But I did those things for attention, and so people would care about what I had to say. It’s not an excuse, but it’s an explanation.

This past year away at college was hard… I tried to learn from my mistakes and not gossip about others. I tried to be funny and nice and appealing. But I didn’t have gossip on my side anymore, and I didn’t know how to be a person without it.

This summer, something awful happened to me. Or rather, I did something awful. And I didn’t want anyone to know about it, so I didn’t tell anyone for about a week. I couldn’t make myself talk about it. I didn’t want anyone knowing what had happened, because all they would do was ask me about what had happened, and I didn’t want to talk about it. I was ashamed, and it was none of their business.

Then all of a sudden people started asking me, “I heard you guys broke up! What happened?” when I hadn’t told anyone. And it hurt, because what right does anyone have to ask me that? Don’t I get to choose what goes on in my life? Or who I get to talk to about it? It hurt because I hadn’t told anyone, which means that he had…

After experiencing the repercussions of my gossiping in high school, I tried to be better. I tried not to talk about others when it wasn’t my business. But this was awful. It was terrible. It was worse… because it had happened to me. And it made everything hurt more. And it still hurts