In the car with my brother over winter break one year, I tried to inconspicuously Shazam the song he was playing. That move has seldom led me astray, and in this instance, it brought me to “Situations” by Robert Lester Folsom. I was struck by the song because of its last verse, one that spoke to much of my experience in college: 

I'm at an old friend's party

And I'm sitting all alone

But I wouldn't be so lonely

If I'd only go get stoned…

It's just a situation that I'm in

It's all because my friends don't understand

I don’t drink or smoke. Obviously, this has stunted my ability to connect with my peers. But it was comforting to see myself as a sort of damsel in distress—someone who was surrounded by those who didn’t know how I felt. If I were just a victim of circumstance, the onus wouldn’t be on me to change. But RLF keeps singing:

It's a situation I've got to live with or change

The situation at large wouldn’t change. I would always be sober at the party, and drugs and alcohol would always be pillars of college socialization. Irish exiting was easy, but it wasn’t a solution to anything. I was letting myself feel trapped and alone, but being hurt doesn’t always mean that someone needs to apologize to you; we have agency over our feelings. The options were to live with it or change, and I had been doing neither. But the time came when I grew tired of shrugging my shoulders and going home. Controlling what I could, I pulled away from those I felt uncomfortable with while they were under the influence and spent time with people whose company felt safer.

***

When I was younger, I visualized the endings of relationships as a binary: There was a winner and a loser. The breaker-upper and the one who’d been dumped. The player and the one who’d been played (the playee, if you will). The one with dignity and the one without. Relationships seemed to me a kind of competition; I sat on the edge of my seat waiting for a hint that we might have lost momentum so I could bite first. I learned to hate my friends before things had run their course so I could be the one to say that I pulled away from them—not the other way around.

By the time I got to college, I’d outgrown the competition I felt in relationships, but I hadn’t abandoned the binary thinking—I’d simply replaced it. What was once winner and loser became victim and villain. I knew I couldn’t avoid being hurt. The boys I was interested in weren’t interested in me and I hadn’t found the perfect friendships I thought I deserved, so I turned to thinking of myself as the victim of serious transgressions. Why are they smoking tonight when I’m the one who asked if we could hang out? Why did he hold my hand if he wasn’t interested in dating me? You don’t kiss someone’s forehead for no reason. I read too far into meaningless exchanges under the impression that their missteps were taken out of malice at worst and disregard for my humanity at best.

***

A friend who’d rejected me romantically in the fall put his head on my shoulder and looked between my eyes and my lips in the spring. Although this came at an opportune time (I had a draft due for my writing class that Friday), it stole my focus for days. I stood in the kitchen at a party, my eyes fixed on the cabinets: bottle of soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, why did he choose the Jeff Buckley CD, fusilli, rotini, farfalle, why were we holding hands, garlic powder, onion powder, soy sauce, does he think scrolling through Wikipedia together is romantic too, soy sauce, soy sauce, soy sauce.

“Are you okay?” the hostess asked me.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Sorry, I just forgot about an assignment that’s due tonight.” I walked home and wrote and submitted the draft.

The next day, I sat crying on Liliana’s couch. “If he changed his mind, great,” she told me. “But if he’s doing this just to do it, then he’s a dick and you should never speak to him again.”

The warmth of his fingers in mine had relit the candle: I wanted him to like me. But more than wanting him to like me, I wanted to be important. In the case that he liked me, I could be special to him, and doesn’t being special to him just mean being special? In the case that he didn’t like me, it was more complicated. Whatever hurt he caused had to be focused and intentional. If he had put thought into hurting me, then I was still at the center of something. If he was going to hurt me, it would be because he meant to hurt me. It would be because I meant something.

It was easier to narrativize my experiences if I lied to myself. If I told myself that I was the victim, that I was simply caught in the crossfire of masculine arrogance/inconsideration/what-have-you, I could keep myself at the center of the experience. Nevermind my failure to tell him how I felt, nevermind the fact that I knew he simply wasn’t thinking that hard. My self-pity and disregard for the two-way-street-ness of it all had nothing to do with his actions and everything to do with my desire to feel special. I wanted to be distinct from other girls he had (or, more relevantly, had not) been with. 

***

However you spin it, there’s no denying the truth: Ignorance is bliss. But in the crumpled-up, overdriven mind of a 21-year-old college girl, there is no ignorance. In “Situations,” RLF sings:

Stuck inside the basement

And I'm freezing half to death

And this dirty air I'm breathing

Is depriving me my breath

My catastrophizing over one night’s unevents was suffocating me. It was stir-crazy pain that did nothing but keep my mind occupied. It was dirty air that I kept breathing under the assumption that I was locked in the basement. But he continues:

It's just a situation, wrong or right

But did I have to close the door so tight?

I was the one who confined myself to self-pity. I closed the door to the basement. I had placed blame on him, given myself the badge of victimhood to wear proudly as a justification for the way I felt, lied to myself about the nature of the situation. The time comes when you have to tell yourself the truth: “It’s a situation I’ve got to live with or change.” Changing the situation can be an internal reframing. There was a sweetness to the night when my friend-via-friendzoning looked at my lips. I was choking on the dirty air I’d made for myself, but if I had only opened the door, I would be able to breathe in the freshness of the light between us, even if nothing happened.

Looking toward my friendships with the non-sober, truth bubbled to the surface. I was the one who decided to go to parties I knew I’d hate. I didn’t tell people how I was feeling, I just assumed that my crossed arms were perceptible to the drunken gaze of a 20-year-old. I didn’t want to be the loser, so I made myself out to be the victim, closing the door tightly enough to feel that I didn’t need to change. I liked the dirty air for the excuse it provided for me, but I hated it for the pain it had caused me. Ultimately, I was mad at myself for keeping myself locked in the basement.

These weren’t bad friends, much less bad people. They weren’t villains for embracing their idea of the college experience, and I wasn’t obligated to be around them. Sometimes things are simple: I don’t smoke, they do. I don’t drink, they do. I’m not happy, so I’ll leave and place my time elsewhere. Our misalignments weren’t moral failures. There doesn’t need to be a push and pull of friendship ethics and misplaced anger. By letting go of ascriptions of right and wrong, of win and loss, of victim and villain, we open ourselves to the joy of simplicity, the bliss of saying: “It just didn’t work out.”

Overcomplications are easy; what’s hard is seeing the truth, and what’s even harder is operating in accordance with it. I’m not immune to pain, but I’m rarely the sole victim of a situation. It’s done me no good to lie to myself. The truth’s on the tip of my tongue.