principles of uncertainty

Dodie Park

Bergen County Academies Personal Essay

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 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.”

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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At this point, you’ve been in enough friendships to notice a pattern. It won’t last after two months. Maybe, it’s a natural ebb and flow. Some days they come to you, some days you’re the one searching to meet someone. But it becomes tiring, and you become numb to the point you feel like a hotline call center. You reach a breaking point when at a sleepover, you have an out-of-body experience where you become the birthday candles. Seeing yourself melting onto that peacock blue fondant is enough for you to silently break down.

Numb You still get the surge of notifications, but now they annoy you. Those notifications sound like wake up alarms, making you turn on “Do Not Disturb” 24/7. How ironic. That something as simple as your phone lighting up your bedroom had excited you. You finally settle into a solitary life. Wake-up, study, like some posts, snap, shower, and repeat. It isn’t exciting, but it’s enough. You still meet new people. The constant “what are you doing” texts you always wanted are now unwanted. You don’t even want to start replying to texts that will stretch into a morning of sleepdeprivation. They are the exact opposite of perfect. You hate how her voice is so high, something about her mannerisms feels off and her values are subpar. You pull the go-to text “I’m busy on Saturday,” and you are, but you’re just trying to avoid feeling anything by experiencing emotional work by yourself. Uploading pictures for the random DMs of compliments, commenting on your friend’s post to hype her flopping visuals. It’s not new. Remember? You’re a veteran and it’s comforting to know you’re not phased by the ups and downs of a friendship anymore.

Hope Then you meet him. After the first moments of neglect and ignorance, you stumble upon a sudden convergence of reality and imagination. Have you ever felt this before? What’s even more confusing is that you are starving, sleep deprived, and you corroded the idea of faith into apathy and doubt. None of that matters anymore. As you listen to his story and watch his passions about quantum physics unfold at 3 a.m., you feel something igniting in you so deep that it can’t be described. It’s like the warmth of a fireplace in the middle of a snowstorm. You continue noting his quirks, his crooked humor, and the uncanny resemblances in the crevices of your personality. Every moment makes the sand in the hourglass flow continuously. You develop a curiosity for hope which is now tangible in a place where space and time exists. That’s when you realize. Will we still be friends after two months?

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