Dear Diary

Note: Hi. I'm John. If you read all of this post. You'll get to know me. A lot. Perhaps even too much. Well, I've warned you. Oh, it's also just stream-of-consciousness type writing, so what you read is what I'm saying in my brain.

Dear Diary.

It's a common trope. Little kids writing to their diary about what happened to them during the day. Writing about fun things, sad things, interesting things, boring things. Why? I'm not so sure. I was never much of a diary writer myself, I found talking about my day difficult since every day felt so same. What is this then? I'm talking about this blog. Why did I make this? In my first post, I claim that I made this blog to practice writing to get ready to write college applications. To be fair, that's not a lie. That is why I made the site. But it has evolved a bit into something else.

This blog has become a way for me to dump whatever I'm thinking about so I can move on with my life. Thinking about it now, it makes sense, it's almost even a stereotypical piece of advice from a therapist. Write about it to get it out of your system. I guess I find this site, which basically nobody reads, as a relative comfortable and safe environment to dump my feelings. If you're a human, hi.

Yesterday was my last Homecoming dance of high school. Somehow, I've been to every homecoming dance from freshman year to senior year. Dang, I'm already a senior? The first two dances were at Bozeman high school, with my good friends of a few years. The third was obviously the worst, as I had just moved to Indiana, and I was basically trying to have fun at a school dance by myself. I'm mostly just proud of myself for having the courage to even do that. Or maybe it was foolishness. I don't really know. Meeting and becoming friends with H was basically the only good thing that happened. It was a stroke of luck. The fourth and last dance was with my new friends in Indiana, who I had known for just around a year at this point. This time around, while I gave H a ride, I was hanging out with my friends mostly, C, M, et cetera. It was fun. It was nice, finally hanging out with people I knew.

Afterward, though, I realize that night might have been more bittersweet than I initially thought. Yes, I'm writing this the day after. I felt something during that dance, it wasn't just happiness. Having thought about it for a few hours involuntarily last night, I think I've figured out what it was and is. I think I'm a little lonely. It's ironic, since I wasn't that lonely last year, when I had literally no one that I knew at the dance. Then though, I was ready. I knew that nobody would be there. This year, I guess I expected it would be different.

At the dance, there were a couple of people I was good friends with. The thing though, is that my friends have friends. Duh, right? Yeah, that's how friendships work, it's a big group of friends all friends with each other. I know that. It just feels a little weird being at the very fringe of the group. This isn't their fault obviously, its just a result of having moved here a year ago. I didn't know how much I wanted to have deep friendships.

Born in Delaware, early childhood in Italy, elementary school in Saudi Arabia. As all kids starting school do, I easily made friends in elementary school. At first, all my friends are random. Funny kids, quiet kids, excited kids. Slowly, these random friends influence each other into becoming more similar. I sort of keep in touch with just one friends from Saudi Arabia, AC. AC and I became friends interested in technology and computers. We made little circuits by snapping pieces together, and wrote Scratch programs to have fun. We shared fun or interesting chrome extensions with each other. Five years after arriving, we left. I wasn't afraid or sad, people moving away was a part of living in KAUST. People came and left all the time as contracts expired or renewed. Middle school and two years of high school were in Bozeman, Montana. Ah, what a beautiful place. The first month or two of middle school was awwwkward. I was some Korean kid in a sea of white Americans. Thankfully, I was soon "adopted" by a group of friends, made out of people who had also moved to Bozeman at some point in their past, seemingly out of pure chance. Since we were in middle school, some of us didn't really know what we were interested in either. That lead to a few of us developing similar interests. However, others had already found their common interests earlier on. My good friends N and HB had formed a common interest of acting and theatre. If you somehow read this, N, I'm very sorry, but I must admit you weren't quite a natural at acting like HB was.  Regardless of this, we were all great friends and we were a strong friend group. I keep in touch with a handful of them today. When my parents told me that we were moving to Indiana, I knew it would be hard. I suppose I didn't know and couldn't know what it would actually feel like.

Indiana. What a place. Corn and beans into the horizon. My peers and I were half way through high school. We knew what we wanted to be, or had an idea of what our interests and passion were. The random friend tactic wouldn't work here. As a natural result, basically all my friends here are from participating in a club or activity around common interests. Which is a perfectly fine and valid way of making friends. The thing is though, my "best" friends (if you can even call them that after only knowing them for a year) have their own friend group that they've known and lived with for years. And from how diverse their interests are, I think this group has been around for quite a while. They have stories, memories, relationships, ex-relationships, you could even call it lore. It's wonderful, I had that too in Montana. The only people in the group that I know well are the people I'm connected to directly. Everyone else in the friend group I only know tangentially. Some I've only read their messages in discord, some I've only heard in voice chats, some I've seen in person, some I've talked with, but I don't really know them well. For like a quarter of the year, I thought A's name was Melissa, because I had only heard it in a crowded voice chat. Funny I guess.

Anyway, that was a long way of just saying I wish I had childhood friends I knew really well. If you think about it, what I've been missing is intimacy. (No, you gutter brain, I mean the emotional kind.) People I could talk about the good old days with. People I could discuss controversial and political topics with. People where I wouldn't have to think about not overstepping boundaries or pre-existing relationships. That last point hit harder than I thought it would. I don't want to... I might need to take a break. My eyes aren't cooperating. -|- Anyway, its 9 pm now. What I was saying was that I don't want to just kinda appear out of nowhere and disrupt a perfectly fine friend group. Because of that, when there are the most friends around, I'm in a higher tension state of recognizing all the new stuff happening around me and the new info I'm getting. Stuff like ah, that person enjoys doing this, this person's pronouns are this, apparently this person had/has a relationship with some other person, whatever whatever. Playing a game of catchup that can never end.

I don't feel like this most of the time though. What I've been describing is the stuff I might think about at 11pm at night on my bed trying to go to sleep after a long tiring day. Everyone has probably felt that before. That fuzzy void in your chest feeling. Although, school and doing things with my friends at school keep me far too busy for me to be lonely for long. Idk, I'm kinda feeling more motivated now after being away from the keyboard for a while. Ironically, earlier today, I posted the blog post about being content. While I should note that that was written a few weeks ago and forgotten until today, it still stands true. If I were to unfortunately perish today, I wouldn't regret my life decisions. I would be rather proud of what I accomplished. I aim to keep that up.

Are college students lonely? Surely when they move from home and study somewhere new with new people they'll miss their friends. In that case though, everyone is in the same boat. Everyone is looking for new friends, a new start, new people to meet. That's probably a major factor. Oh well, less than one year left.

On a potentially related note, I just started playing through Omori. A bunch of my friends really like the game apparently. After watching M play it on a stream, I got past the "i don't like horror games" part of my brain after I saw that it was more of the story that gave it the psychological horror tag on steam. Did this event make me more aware of what I was feeling? maybe. idk. who knows. howlongtobeat.com tells me that it takes around 21 hours to finish Omori, so I might be playing for a good while. I hope the story is good. Bring me to tears, make me laugh or grin from wholesomeness. Are my expectations too high? Well, only one way to find out.

If you happen to be one of my friends reading this, thanks, and I love you guys. You guys have and continue to keep me sane. If it wasn't evident enough in what I've written so far, I explicitly don't want you guys to change anything. Y'all are great, keep being who you are.

Talking into the void, that's what this is. Taking my late night thoughts, binding it inside a blog post, and casting it off into the big, dark, wavy sea of the internet. Will I regret publishing this for potentially anyone to see? Maybe. Will I post it at all? I don't know. Maybe. Will I feel a bit better now, off my heart and in the void? Questions whose answers cannot be determined, only discovered.

See you tomorrow.