"What’s the most vulnerable you’ve ever felt?"
"Vulnerability is an interesting place to start. Where you feel vulnerable tells a lot about who you are as a person. Vulnerability reflects what one person really fears about themselves because they know that to be vulnerable means to have a moment where you can’t guarantee the outcome, no matter how much control you think you have over it. Seriousness aside, I’ve felt the most vulnerable under substances, especially pharmaceuticals. People talk about overdoses as if they are a cautionary tale but in the real world, they happen. They happen when you least expect it and to the people who you’d never imagine.
Some time ago, I felt that vulnerability as I nearly overdosed on Adderall during a binger. I remember the night it happened, it was the same night as that Orlando club shooting. After a couple days of popping them and drinking Vodka Redbull at every gathering I went to, I laid in bed trying to shake the feeling off to fall asleep. My mind was racing, I could feel the pulse of my blood in every inch of my body and usually that feeling doesn’t bother anyone until you can feel it stop. When I couldn’t feel my own pulse anymore, it sent me into a shock. I felt like I couldn’t breathe even though I was inhaling with all my force. When I was laying in that bed and experiencing that trauma, that is when I knew vulnerability and real fear. Nothing I could do would change the outcome, I just had to hope for the best and in that moment, I learned what I really feared. I feared death.
For six months after that incident, I was scared to go to bed. Whenever I would slightly doze off, just the slightest, that moment of subconscious would be all too like that moment I felt my blood stop. It would wake me back up and for six months, the common routine was talking myself into a peace of mind. To this day, I don’t like to hear or feel my blood pulse when I’m in bed."
"What differences are there between how people perceive you and how you perceive yourself?"
"How one perceives themselves really dictates how we go about ourselves in the world. I studied philosophy in college and for those reasons, I’ve always seen myself as some puzzling thinker like the classic “Thinker” statue. Of course, this is unrealistic. I’m no Aristotle or Marx, but I am a close Diogenes. My friends and family have always seen me as silly and goofy character with a lot of charisma. I’ve been called a “Chatty Cathy” many times in my life. I’ve always enjoyed making people laugh so I fed into that perception. How I see myself is quite different.
They say that who you are around people and who you are when you’re alone are two different people. I would agree with this. At the end of the day, I’m quite stoic. I keep to myself and I enjoy my simple, trivial things like playing video games on my phone and reading Reddit whenever I can. Unfortunately, over the years I’ve been rather recluse, and I keep people at a distance from me. I’m unsure what it reveals about my character, after all, they just think I’m funny."
"What’s something you actually really believe in?"
"Whoa big question here. I don’t know if you’re asking me if I really believe in Santa Claus or if I’m believing some whack-job conspiracy. With that being said, I’m just going to go ahead and give you answers to both. One belief that I hold sincere is the belief that people are bad people because they just enjoy being a bad person. You know how you find those people who enjoy playing devil’s advocate during a casual nonsense discussion? Bad people are like the people who volunteer to play Devil’s advocate but except for actual important things like policies and political stances. It may be that I might just be unable to wrap my head around whatever stance that they have, but I have too much pride to admit that, so I prefer Occam’s Razor and just think that they’re just a bad person because they choose to be.
I also believe that the United States created AIDS by accident and couldn’t control it. That’s just me though."
"Is there anything you’re trying to make amends for?"
“I like the questions you ask. In high school, I had a lot of issues with coming to terms with being a queer person and I took that frustration out on other people. In many ways, I was kind of a bully. People from high school may not remember me that way but I’ve experienced some serious guilt over the years due to the random acts of cruelty I would bestow onto my fellow folk.
Just in the past year, I’ve tried to reach out to some people and just apologize to those people for whatever shenanigans I did in high school. I don’t sugar coat it and say that I was confused or going through a lot. I can own up to the fact that I was a piece of shit for a while. For those reasons, I genuinely try to be a better and nicer person to other people, even strangers. I don’t know what other people are going through; why should I even take the chance of making someone else’s day worse?
I even came up with a silly quote like “the strongest swords are forged in hottest flames” to try and glorify my own redemption. I think that sometimes I’m just arrogant and I’m working on that too.”
"If you could speak to someone from your past, what would you say to them?"
"My ex-boyfriend Christian Turner. In March of 2016, he committed suicide. I’ve had people in my life die or pass away unexpectedly but nothing ever shook me to my core like Christian’s death. When I heard about his death, I was a complete wreck for days. His death was all I thought about; to the point that I couldn’t even leave my room. I just sat there and listened to the mix CDs he made me on repeat sobbing and trying to sing along with the outdated pop-punk songs. I had survivor’s remorse.
He was a philosophy type as well and since we were a long-distance relationship, we would scribble down thoughts and ideas we had in this journal and when we saw each other again, we would hand off the journal and read those thoughts and respond to them. One night, I was cleaning my room and I found that old journal that Christian and I would write in. To distract myself from cleaning, I read through the journal and I wanted to call him and tell him about all the great ideas I thought he had and how I loved the way he interpreted the world. It was already 2am so I decided against it.
The following morning, he was found dead. The single deepest regret I have in my life was not making that phone call."
"Has your sense of self ever been compromised?"
"I struggled with agency when I would abuse Adderall in college. It is easy to take one tell yourself that you’re going to knock out all the things you’re behind on and focus on writing that paper or finishing that presentation project, but it never goes the way you really plan. When I would take Adderall, I would just lose myself in some delusion and I’d spend the next several hours feeding into the hedonistic thoughts that would inevitably sneak into my mind. This was never fun the following day when I would snap out of it. My memory would be shot, my throat would hurt from smoking too many cigarettes that were smoked to keep the buzz going, and all I had done over the course of a night would be feeding into desires that didn’t need fed anymore.
To secure your own agency, you must make a contract with yourself. A serious contract. You need to make standards for yourself and when looking at your goals, one must find a way to tread that line without cutting corners, lest you slip into another sleepless night that you won’t remember the following week."
"Is there a piece of art or media that really speaks to you?"
"Whenever I’m sad I look at this meme of a dog in a construction outfit saying, “I specialize in roofing”. That usually does the trick."
"What terrifies you the most right now?"
"Fear is another weird topic for me. I’m still on the fence about what fear really is to me. Is fear a judgment I have about something or does something inherently possess characteristics that embody the concept of fear? If the former, then is my judgment about fear valid? These are questions I tackle.
Reflecting on myself and what I’ve said already, I want to say that death terrifies me more than anything else. It is not death itself that I fear but rather all the possibilities and ideas about what happens after that I fear the most. If there is another side, then how will I get there and how will I know that I’ve arrived? If death is just this overwhelming darkness, then will I even be able to be conscious my current lack of existing? It sounds contradicting but that’s because it is.
To add to the uncomfortable feeling, whatever judgment I have about death and its aftermaths will determine how I feel about people who have already died. It would be inconsistent to think that there is nothing on the other side but that someone else’s spirit lives on. It really comes down to if I believe there is another side because I want there to be another side. Worse, if I believe there is another side so I can cherish the memory of someone.
I’m uncomfortable just thinking about it."
"Is there something important from your childhood you don’t really talk about?"
In the summer, when I was very young, my grandfather would take me to the airport and we would sit outside off the side of the road and watch the airplanes. He would give me these little packets of strawberry fruit snacks and I would sit on his shoulders and we watched the planes come and go. It was a really exciting day if we saw a helicopter. One time, we saw one of those army black stealth planes come in.
Shortly after this time, my grandfather got into a car accident and he wasn’t there anymore mentally. We never went to the airport again but whenever I drove past it, I think about those days. It may seem like something trivial, but it reminds me of my grandfather and a special memory I had.
I’m thankful to be sharing this with you."
"What advice would you give yourself when you were at your lowest?"
"There was a time when I felt like I didn’t fit in at all anymore. My family and I weren’t close; we didn’t communicate. I didn’t have many friends at the time. I was using Grindr so I could have a place to sleep at night. I fell into substance abuse at an early age. All of these traumatic things happened because I was outed as gay at 14. If I wanted to give myself advice, it would be this:
Look. Everyone has bad days. For some, a bad day can turn into a bad week which becomes a bad month and next thing you know, you’ve had a bad year. It doesn’t have to be that way though. You’ve heard it countless times that “it gets better” and though it may not look like it right now, I promise you that if you just keep on pushing then 6 years from now, you can look back on all of it and it is nothing in the grand scheme of things. The strongest swords are forged in the hottest flames and the fire is only going to get hotter. You can either forge yourself into something stronger or you can melt. Just know that nothing good comes out of melted steel."
"Who do you go to when you need support and comfort?"
"Depending on the situation, it goes one of two ways. Either I can receive genuine support from my best friend, William or Courtney, or my boyfriend, Robert, to help me cope or I can get half-assed support and comfort by screaming my issues into the void on Twitter. 65% of the time it is the latter."
"Is there anything in your life that you’re glad didn’t work out the way you wanted it to?"
"For a while I dated a guy who was very emotionally and physically abusive to me. When I was applying for colleges, he insisted that I stay in town so that we wouldn’t be apart. In an act of defiance, I applied to my dream college and was accepted. I was able to leave him before I was accepted to Ball State but it was refreshing to have my cake and eat it too. I’m just glad I was able to take back my autonomy."
"What do you try to live your life by?"
"Philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle advocated for the best life being driven by virtue and the pursuit of knowledge. I’ve taken these principles upon myself and I try to live my life by temperance, humility, justice, and wisdom. I think it is important to have the temperance to control one’s desires, the humility to know when you’re wrong, the wisdom to make the correct decisions, and the justice to do the right things. You cannot just be a just person because you did a just thing, it is the habitual practice of being just that makes you a just person.
Always learn new things because new things lead to new opportunities."
"Is there a symbol that’s important to you?"
"I’ve always been fond of the simple delta. In chemistry, delta commonly means “change” and I think that it is a friendly reminder that we are capable of changing and adapting to whatever life brings us."