I’m Special (21 page)

I started to realize what I'd actually sacrificed for drugs. Every night of fun I had with the Girls on Pills gang, every stoned morning I spent writing some blog post for my job had all added up to me sleeping alone with a limp dick, and I hadn't even noticed. Pills are smart. They put me to sleep and then slowly robbed me of things in the middle of the night—so slowly, in fact, that I hadn't even noticed that anything was missing. They took away my desire to love, to feel joy, or even to show up to my best friend's birthday party. They took it all bit by bit until one day I woke up and saw that my life had become nothing but static.

Being with Sam, I felt myself wake up. For the first time, I didn't want to grab my clothes and run to my comfortable cave of isolation and drugs and the Internet. I wanted to stay and bathe in his affection. I wanted him to hold me tighter and longer. I wanted him to tell me I could have something real like this and that it wasn't too late for things to change. Each second I spent with him, I was able to see more and more just how small my life had become. I'd been deluding myself into thinking that all my new friendships and happiness were based off something authentic when they were rooted in being high. Nothing had been real. When you take drugs, you don't want to see things for what they are, so you choose to look at illusions instead.

That morning I realized I had a decision to make. I could continue letting drugs dictate my life and ruin my body and isolate me from the people who mattered most. I could keep putting fancy lotions on my face to conceal my rotting corpse and go to parties where everyone but me looks alive, and I could spend more time with people who don't know anything about me except that my favorite kind of pill is a 10/325 Percocet. I could take my parents' drugs and force them even further into denial, I could spend all my settlement money on pills and quit my job and become a full-time drug addict whose life is fantastic until they're out of drugs, and then it's a flurry of text messages and a lot of panic and a lot of anger and a lot of your body shutting down until you can get your hands on the poison that it's been running on. Or I could stop taking pills and have a life that everybody is entitled to. A nice life. A good life. Maybe even a boring life.

When I returned to New York, I stopped going to dealers and my corrupt doctor and slowly started to put the pieces of my brain back together. Making the right choice had never felt so satisfying.

People who have never had a problem with drugs sometimes have a difficult time understanding the dark places it can take you. But everyone has experienced a period in their life when you do things that hurt you simply because you're not interested in feeling good. You think “good” is for old people who don't know how to have fun, and all you want to do is see how much hurt your heart can take before it gets damaged beyond repair. You want to do reckless things like go home with an asshole because you're convinced it will reveal some important truth about yourself, a truth that you need to know in order to keep going. But the only thing sleeping with assholes reveals about you is feelings of profound emptiness and occasionally herpes.

There are people who are moving forward in life, and there are those who are letting everything fall apart. When I was on drugs, I remember looking at people my age and being like, “How is their life so functional?” It felt like I was given tiny adulthood quizzes every day and failing miserably. Something just did not compute, and the more time passed the more I'd feel alienated. In my sad little brain, I thought, “You can have your lame relationship and good eating habits, but I have my awesome drugs, so who's the real loser now?”

A lot of people feel the same way I did (and sometimes still do), and they deal with it by retreating further and further into oblivion where nothing can hurt them. Some never get better, but I was fortunate to be scared straight. When I really focused in on my life and saw the mess I had created, I said to myself, “Bitch, you did not live in a body cast, roll around in a wheelchair, have leg braces, get hit by a car, and lose function in your left hand just so you could take four Percocet and rub $200 lotion around your eyes. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.” I think part of the reason I did let myself succumb to a pill problem was defiance. Growing up with cerebral palsy and getting in my accident had made me into a golden child by default. Everyone was in awe of how I turned out, which created some unexpected resentment. People were banking on me turning my bad deck of cards into gold. But what if I didn't want to be an inspirational story?

I have since given that angsty part of me an Ambien so it could go to sleep, but I will tell you nothing is cut and dry. I'm not perfect, and sometimes, in the middle of the night, I find myself cozying up to a messier version of myself. I never punish myself for regressing, because punishment and shame are what led me to being that person in the first place. Every destructive thing I've ever done to myself has come from not having self-love and not believing I deserve a happy, balanced life. And that doesn't stem from entitlement. On the contrary, it's about realizing you're like everybody else. You want a partner who understands you, a job where you feel valued, and friends who will actually hang out when you ask them to. Once you register how damn similar we all are and that you're not alone on Crazy Individual Island, you can stop going blind from only seeing yourself. It took me a long time to understand this, but the second I did I was finally able to lead a life that felt meaningful. Now I've become a person I never thought I would be. I work out six days a week, I try to eat right, and except for the occasional bedtime Xanax, I don't do drugs. Sometimes my newfound maturity makes me want to barf, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. My existence, while less exciting, doesn't resemble a flimsy piece of trash anymore. It feels like mine. I'd been renting my body for twentysomething years, unsure if I wanted to make the commitment to myself and buy. “I don't know,” I'd think to myself. “It's kind of a dump. Am I really a wise investment?” The answer, of course, is always yes.

Epilogue

My twenties are almost over. If I squint hard enough, I can see thirty. It's drinking a martini and wearing boat shoes and cashing a nice check. It looks happy and, more important, not so different from where I am right now. Still, I'm excited to be older. I never thought I would be. For a long time I thought that youth was the most interesting thing about a person. I can't imagine that thought existing in my brain, but it did. It lived inside me, a different version of me but still the bones of the person I am today. I want to give that person a kiss and a slap.

A few months ago I was looking through old boxes of stuff at my parents' house and stumbled upon my father's old journals. The entries span throughout his twenties, and in them he talks a lot about being nervous asking out girls and whether he'll get into the graduate program at USC. In many ways, it read like an exact replica of the posts I'd been writing for
Thought Catalog
. You could've transcribed his journal entries, posted them online, and no one would've been like, “Um, what is this shit? It's not 1975 anymore, bro!” Looking at what my father had written, I realized a comforting truth: being a fuckup in your twenties is totally timeless! Most of our parents may have landed a job, gotten married, and had kids by the time they were thirty but that didn't mean they knew what the hell they were doing. They were forced into adulthood too soon, which is why when so many of them got divorced in their forties, they acted like selfish kids. People like to throw shade at Millennials and pretend we're the first people to ever feel lost in our twenties, but the thoughts that hang over a young person's head have always been there. The only difference is we have a WiFi connection that allows us to broadcast them. The people who criticize us have apparently forgotten that. They forgot what it feels like to be twenty-three and praying that one day you'll wake up and know how to love somebody and do a good job at work and maintain friendships and save money. They forgot that when you strip people to their core and see what they really want, it doesn't look so different across generations. We all have stories worth telling. We all feel the need to connect via our shared experiences. That's called being human, not a Millennial.

Communication is one difference about our generation that I will easily cop to. The many ways in which we're now able to “connect” with other people have actually made me desensitized. I've become numb to pretty faces. I've become numb to jokes, to hobbies and interests. Everybody looks the same in a thumbnail. Everybody's interchangeable on an “about me.” I think of my parents meeting each other in their twenties and hanging on to each other's every word because their world was too small not to. You didn't have the luxury of looking up someone on Facebook afterward and seeing who your mutual friends were. You needed to be present. This could be your one chance to be with someone you really click with. Chase after them. Get their phone number. Don't flake on the first date. Tell her that you love her. It isn't crazy. Love isn't crazy. You can't afford to not be brave.

When I think of how we socialize now, I get sick wondering how many great people I've missed out on knowing because I only gave them three seconds to prove themselves. Instead, I went back to me, always me, and relied on my narcissism to keep me warm at night. I hugged my bent arms and massaged my tense legs. This felt familiar. This felt like something that couldn't disappoint me. But all of this living gets hard to do when it's just for yourself. I'm learning more and more that this world was not meant to be experienced alone. Whether you spend it with friends or lovers, you must have someone there to inspire you to be better and force you to be accountable for your actions and to pour your love into. You can find that person! You can do whatever you want. I've spent so much of the last decade feeling like I was somewhere I didn't want to be and wondering how I could get to the place that would make everything better. There was impatience, a need for instant gratification that my parents and the Internet had engrained in me, but now I'm not so worried about what's over there because I'm content with where I am. Here feels good. I like here. Here likes me. I'm not fighting it. I know I will eventually find a lover and embark on my greatest project to date, which is a long-term monogamous relationship, but until that happens, I'll be okay.

I don't regret anything. And neither should you. You should remember all of it. You should remember all the time you wasted in your bed or in someone else's bed or at some bar where you overheard the same drippy conversations. You should remember how thin you once were despite subsisting on beer and pizza. You should remember all the people you tried to love and all the people who tried to love you. All the awful overpriced apartments, all the toxic friendships, and all the money you spent on things you can no longer recall. Then I want you to remember the moment you developed a keen understanding of what works for you and what doesn't. I want you to remember being comfortable in your own skin and not feeling like you have to apologize for every little thing. I want you to remember the first time you decided not to put the entirety of your self-worth in someone's careless hands. Because moments like those are the most valuable—instances in which you felt yourself no longer becoming the person you want but already being it. That's pretty fucking special.

First of all, this book would not be possible if it weren't for my lit agent, Lydia Willis. Her unwavering support, guidance, and endless rotation of chic Comme Des Garcon ensembles are what got this book finished. Also, thank you to Nora Spiegel for discovering my writing and telling Lydia, “Hey, we should meet with this dude!”

To my editor, Michael Szczerban, I still have no idea why you, a smart thoughtful straight man, decided to buy a book from a gay bimbo like me but I'm sure glad you did! Through editing this book, you taught me how to be a writer. Thank you.

Sydney Tanigawa and everyone else at S&S: Thank you for taking this insane (and delayed) book to the finish line and giving it a beautiful final shape.

To my wonderful agents at CAA, Chelsea Reed and Mackenzie Condon. You ladies are the best cheerleaders a wildly neurotic boy could ever ask for. Thanks for believing in my writing/ability to make you $$$!!!!

Chris Lavergne: You are my #1 freak on a leash. If you didn't give my feelings a home for so many years at
Thought Catalog
, I wouldn't be here writing this acknowledgment to you!

Stephanie Georgopulos and Brandon Gorrell: I love you guyzzz so much. We were like an insane throuple in New York. Also, Steph, babe? Thank you for reading all the terrible drafts of my book and giving me notes on how to make it less terrible.

Mike Chessler and Chris Alberghini: Thank you for plucking me from the blogging world and giving me my first job writing for television. You're a ray of beaming light in an otherwise DARK AS FUCK industry.