PRINCIPLES OF UNCERTAINTY Dodie Park
Bergen County Academies
Personal Essay
doesn’t stop you, because you are a veteran. All you need to do is swipe right or left. Drop them when they don’t “match your vibe.”
Lonely People say to you “You are not alone” as if you needed the reassurance of presence, and you have a lot of friends. And you do, by their definition. You realize your thousand follower count on Instagram and 414,147 Snapchat score doesn’t mean anything until you get a pencil and paper to write down the names of those who would really understand you. Not everyone you have a streak with on Snapchat will even show up to your funeral. That’s just the ugly truth. And quite frankly, you just have a lot of more-than-acquaintances. I’m not saying these relationships are bad in any way. You still learn from them and acknowledge how they are human too. These relationships are superficial, but it’s easier that way because you don’t want them to know the icky details of your private life. Living in your own shell as your own person requires a good amount of resilience in dealing with the random pangs of loneliness, but the feeling of freedom is liberating. You constantly feel the need to meet new people to forget the pain of loneliness. And by new people, I mean a variety of people, good and bad. But that
Repeat Once you get drunk on the feeling of the firsts of every friendship, it becomes an addiction. Every new friendship hones your next act, a synthesis of curiosity in their curated museum of relatable LOL moments and superficial sob stories. Your backstory is basically a quilt mended with snippets of conversions you pieced together from your memory. Some are funnier than the memes that made you laugh at 3 a.m., some make conversation like breathing, and there is rarely a person that can pull you out of your hermit crab shell. But it’s strange; no matter how great you think they are, you’re always back to day 0. At first, it was a crushing realization that whatever adrenaline rush you felt completely evaporated from a chatroom that now says “Read 10/6/18.”
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