“The real good friends will pay attention to you no matter what.”
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Transcript for I Have This Fear That I Come Off Weird
Taylorville was a town of roughly ten thousand people. We lived in rural Illinois, so everywhere there was corn and bean fields. Everywhere. You know, you couldn’t drive more than five minutes without running into one. It was that stereotypical little town where everybody knows your name and everybody knows your business. You couldn’t do anything without anybody finding out about it. Which was, in my opinion, a very bad thing. I liked my privacy, so… But at the same time, it was the town where I grew up, so I felt a security because it was also a small town, because, you know, everybody knew everybody. You know, you grew up with people and, you know, you made such strong friendships.
As the first semester kind of rolled by, I was in this group of, you know, fifteen to twenty people. And we would go to dinner together and I would feel just really insignificant because there were so many strong, opinionated people at one table. And I would feel sometimes like they weren’t paying attention to me, and at first I thought it was my fault because I just wasn’t being assertive enough, but then I realized that it really wasn’t my fault, they just—well, it was because I still wasn’t being assertive as I could’ve been, but at the same time I figured, you know, the real good friends will pay attention to you no matter what. Especially if you need to talk to somebody, and they won’t be like, ‘Oh, well I’m busy,’ which these friends did. At points.
I narrowed my group down to three people besides myself, and now we’re just so close, we do everything together. We’re with each other every night, unless one of us is gone. But otherwise we’re in me and my roommate’s room every night, goofing around, you know, we just—we have a really good time.
Yes, I definitely felt more trust. I felt like I could be more myself around them because I have this fear of that I come off a little weird whenever I’m with people for a longer amount of time. Because I don’t filter so much of what I say; I speak my mind more often, and the smaller group of people didn’t judge me like I felt like the bigger group was.
Whenever I just came out to my friends and told them that I was bisexual, like, I didn’t have to hide it. It wasn’t one specific time, because I told all three of them at different points in our relationship. Just whenever I felt comfortable enough and felt like they wouldn’t judge me for it. And, you know, they didn’t even blink an eye at it. They were like, ‘Cool. It’s your life, your decisions.’