Sleep And Water

Somewhere in the last few weeks I turned 26 – after years of denying it could happen, I can’t run away from my late twenties. But somehow, in the last few weeks before it happened, I started looking forward to it. Or maybe I just started accepting it with pride.

I think I’m a lot better now than I was 5 years ago, or so’s my mantra anyway. But I’m going to make myself go back over these precious young twenties in more detail. I’m not getting them back; I want to know that I spent them well. I hope I did.

21

Living with my recently-become-ex-girlfriend and working my first post-college job at a Worcester convenience store, my 21st birthday was by far the most miserable one I’ve ever had. We got dinner I don’t remember where and fought afterwards, I think.

But within a few days of it, I’d found my first “real” job in Boston, as a software developer at Tenebril, whose website at the time looked more like this. If you couldn’t tell, Tenebril was really silly. I worked as a “junior researcher” to support a mediocre product, and half of my work was barely skilled: observing the effects of software and following instructions. The other half was coding on internal projects without any strong oversight.

They paid me $48K, good for a new CS grad in pre-2nd-bubble 2005, and with it I afforded a too-expensive $725/month carpeted room in a 2BR near Davis Square, in an apartment complex. The halls were dim and my roommate quiet.

I moved my things from Worcester via Zipcar in an SUV, in two drama-filled trips featuring terrible fights and the hospitalization of a close friend. Both also ended with me making the final drive at 3am, nearly falling asleep at the wheel, to lay my possessions out alone in the parking lot of my building and carry them up one at a time until I could sleep.

Finally away from WPI, I tried to recover from the wreckage of what had eventually become a brutal relationship. During it, I’d discovered all sorts of terrible things about myself and other people. For example: one who loves me might still drag my ego over dead glass with intent to kill. Another: I am capable of seriously losing my temper even with one I love – at the worst of it, I broke my hand while punching a closet door, and then ripped another door off its hinges with that broken hand. That was 20, and at 21 I was left with a lot of self-doubt.

To fill the void, I joined up with The Tribe, a renegade improv theater whose website miraculously still exists. The Tribe was awesome, and some of the best young talent in Boston joined it. And then there was me – improv never felt like my strong suit in college, but I could use my basic survival instincts to get by. I barely made the cut at auditions, being initially cast in a bit role in a group called Sea Mission, and evolving from there into a regular player on the team.

I had a great time with Sea Mission, but my relations with other people in the Tribe were troubled. I got caught up in cool-kid syndrome and tried to hang out with the popular crowd, but they tolerated me at best. I got sick drinking twice that year, and my dominant memory of 21 is being in dark bar halls with loud music, thinking tipsy thoughts near intimidating people and trying to stand out. I wasn’t at my best.

The lowest point was a trip to Ireland in February of 2006, which even now fills me with a terrible resentment. I went with a few close friends and a couple less close friends, who I thought were all pretty cool. Unfortunately, they didn’t think I was very cool, and the initial minor friction that we felt at first, through my desperation and their immaturity, spiraled into something more serious, and the trip went very poorly.

A few days after we got back, one of my close friends relayed everyone’s collective judgment that they thought I had Asperger’s syndrome. They thought I wasn’t picking up their signals to leave them alone; perhaps they forgot that we were on a trip together in a foreign country, and that that wasn’t an option. I laughed at the idea of Asperger’s, but was deeply hurt nonetheless, and that was pretty much the end of my respect for everyone involved.

But since I was already low and vulnerable, I despaired and tried seeing a therapist a few times (not about Asperger’s, just insecurity). The therapist was pretty passive and I was bored, so I stopped. When the two less close friends approached me a few months later to see if things were okay, I foolishly and falsely laughed off the hurt and anger, and made nice. My cowardly refusal to call them out has left me with no closure, only a burning.

Eventually Tenebril went from a mediocre place to work to actually terrible, and so I spent the rest of 21 hunting for a way out. In one of my last weeks at that job and that apartment, I made a promise to myself that by 26, I wouldn’t be a full time software developer anymore.