Friendship timeline

My earliest memories of going to school was being somewhat sad and somewhat bullied. Bullied for having bad hair, being called stupid, called lazy, called ugly, feeling small and overpowered by mean kids. At that point I was still not fully aware of what friendship even meant. I had cousins my own age and I spent great times with them during the Summer, but school made me feel weird and disintegrated. In fourth grade I had a lot of school-related anxiety and became more aware of the exclusion I felt among my classmates. In fifth grade I met this girl and since the first time we talked to each other between classes I felt the most genuine happiness around someone. Soon after we became best friends. This was the first time in my life I knew how connecting with another human felt like.

It was easy and effortless. It was spontaneous and mutual. It was hours of talking on the phone and not getting bored. They were simpler times before cellphones made their way to our generation. Things felt vivid and they made sense. And even when something did not make sense, your best friend would listen to you and help you understand as much as an eleven year old girl could. My first friendship did not last long, but long enough for me to remember it and learn from it. In seventh grade, my best friend got into a relationship with a guy I had a crush on and our friendship slowly deteriorated then came to an end. Losing my best friend to a boy at thirteen was pretty dramatic. Then came Eighth grade. The school year was so much fun that I’d feel bad if I got sick and skipped a day! but the summer was terrible. I became depressed, I had no friends to talk to or hang out with. Summers at my grandparents house in the valley used to be the most adventurous time of my year, but I was getting too old to be playing in mud and climbing trees. Alternative rock music started having an impact on my life that summer. I also grew an obsession with watching MTV. MTV was definitely the highlight of my early teen entertainment life. I felt thankful that this channel existed. It was my most thrilling addiction. Well.. until it got closed two years later (which made me very sad and angry). Anyhow, Summer was over and ninth grade came along. First day at school I sat next to this girl who soon became my best friend. Shortly after, she introduced to a girl in the other class and we also became best friends. These people became the most exciting thing in my life. I felt appreciated and understood. We had very similar interests, we listened to the same music, we introduced each other to new music. I then met a guy on the internet. He went to the same school and was three years older than me. We instantly clicked and became best friends. The conversations, the music, the perspectives we shared! The humour, the laughter, the messenger chat life with dial-up internet connection! (Ew) The CDs, the mysterious birthday gifts, the birthday cards, the effortless chats that went on and on and felt honest and real and… everything you would expect a semi-virtual, yet perfect friendship would feel like. I had all these people in my life. It felt right and it felt like nothing could go wrong. Or so I thought. Around March that year the Syrian revolution started and my life stopped, slowly but surely. Up until the end of that year’s Summer, my life was in a relatively good place. I was going through my rebellious teenage emo phase at the time, but my sense of belonging to others overpowered by immature DoNt TrY tO fIx Me Im NoT bRoKeN self. The ends of Summer felt peculiar as an immobilizing fear possessed me, watching my city turn into a bloodbath. Death was the headline of every news channel and every conversation. Little did I know, the massacre just began and the worst is yet to come. This is not my story about war, but giving context is important for you to understand what follows. September arrived, I was almost sixteen and I was beginning to build my adult personality. That meant figuring out my interests and what it meant to be ‘me’. My best friends from the previous year moved to a safer area outside the city, as the town we lived in was no longer a safe place to be in, particularly the neighbourhood where my school was located. Me and my family stayed and I refused to change schools despite the life-threatening risk I knew I was taking. I belonged to my school for so long and moving to a different one meant emotional death before physical death. However, the first six months of that year were tragic. I didn’t have the people who understood and supported me no more, I felt incredibly depressed and insecure, I felt ugly, I hated myself, I hated how I felt about myself, I hated war and felt extremely isolated. Nothing was the same and I knew it will never be the same. I knew that I was entering a foreign phase in my life, and I wasn’t able to process those changes. In January of that school year, it was no longer possible for me to go school. The principal decided to cancel their transportation buses because it was crazy to take responsibility of the lives of tens of kids when the chances of death were too damn high. Shortly after, the school completely shut down and that entire neighbourhood was evacuated from its citizens. The circumstances forced me to move to a different school and I was immediately resentful of the idea of going there. I could not stand that school. I hated it with every inch of my heart. I had zero interest in anyone, and I could not fathom the pain it would bring me to deal with this change on my own. Luckily, a girl who used to go to my previous school was there too, going through a very similar situation! When I saw her I saw the last piece of a shattered puzzle and I held onto her like she was the last glimpse of hope in this whole traumatizing experience. Let me just say that that war kept sucking the life out of me day by day and it never stopped throughout this entire friendship timeline. We had a really good friendship for a while but it was never as concrete as I imagined it would be. I was changing and trying to figure myself out but no friendship gave me that sense of security and support anymore. From that point on my friendships made my process of evolving as a person so so much harder. My path towards self-discovery was paved with anxiety and insecurity and judgement. I did not know how to empty out all those thoughts and emotions I felt, and that is when the internet became my comforting place. I read lengthy books, I wrote on tumblr, I wrote on paper, I teared down everything I wrote, I deleted my tumblr. I regret doing those things. I threw away my raw thoughts and emotions in a moment of sadness and confusion. Tenth grade was strange. Gerard Way from MCR sang, “teenagers scare the living shit out of me” and I can finally look back at myself and understand why he said that. “Sweet sixteen” was not so sweet. Going into tenth grade’s Summer, me and my best friend met a new best friend and before you know it, I have three best friends who shaped the next two toxic years of my life. Two toxic years that I will forever be grateful for. Two toxic years that made me work on myself in ways that I didn’t think were possible and were a huge part of leading up to the person I am today. Then I turned eighteen and I had gone to university to study pharmacy. I took my emotional baggage and isolation with me on a search for belonging. That idea only seemed to get further away from reality than I imagined. I turned to writing again, I turned to online friends that I talked to at late nights. One of them I had never met. We lived in the same country, but were separated by miles of distance and war. He knew what it felt like to live in a place where freedom is a sin and thoughts are locked in our heads with very low chances of ever being expressed or welcomed. I had had enough.. of war, of fear, of not knowing myself, of living my life to fit in with what society expected from me to be and to become, of my fried forcefully straightened hair and makeup and this too-muchness, of this everlasting need for belonging, for friendship.. for a friend, for belonging. I had had enough. When the moment came that I could start a new life in a country overseas, I was ready. I was more than ready. I was determined to call the life I had been living a past one, and to start over; not a new chapter, but a different book.