This was the time I most relate to the beginning of my mental health issues. The thoroughly unexpected and brutal snub from Jennifer really felt like a knife in the chest.
Don’t get me wrong – while I was quite shocked that she had turned me down, with all the stories going around that she was into me, I’ve never in my life taken a turn-down from a woman as something personal. You can’t make someone love you, and if they’re not feeling it there isn’t much you can do about it.
It’s not a character flaw – something that toxic men seem to think is the case with women who say no to them. I’ve never been “that guy” and I never will be. People will only feel what they feel, no matter how hard you try to “change their minds”.
It was more how she treated me afterwards that hurt. We were never best friends, not by any measurable metric – but we would talk. It was warm, and friendly, and it felt nice.
Then she actively never spoke to me again. Was asking someone out such a horrible thing?
That was the only logical conclusion I was able to draw at the time. When I found out in later years that I had Asperger’s – (a name that isn’t really used for that form of autism spectrum disorder any longer) – it made more sense.
We are totally logical – everything has to make sense and have a black or white answer. Jennifer was being actively hurtful to me, and all I had done was ask her out to a movie. So doing that must be what made her act like this towards me.
There wasn’t any other logical explanation – at least not within my own scope of understanding. I’ve long since moved past how she made me feel, but I’ve never understood it.
As I’ve gotten older and understood myself on a deeper level, I am able to connect many thoughts and feelings together that I couldn’t do when these things were happening in my life.
At the time though – this concept that just asking her out had turned her completely against me as a person, that was my only answer. Instinctively I knew that that was no good reason for her to be so cold towards me, and it really screwed with my head all through the rest of that school year, and all through the next.
Confidence – (already a difficult thing for me) – was further damaged. I had rustled up so much courage to even ask out someone who wasn’t Maddie, that her reaction deeply fractured my mind into deeper and more complicated feelings of self-doubt.
I feel into a depression that lasted long after I finished high school. I went back to the psychologist I had seen during my early mental struggles with Maddie some years earlier. She was concerned about how my thought processes were coagulating into such a messy space.
Maddie still understood that something wasn’t quite right with me, and tried to reach out her hand to me quite a few times. We weren’t in the same class group in that final year of high school, so we weren’t around each other a lot.
We did take time to talk every now and then, and I could tell she wanted to ask why I was so down, and if there was anything she could do to help.
Maddie always understood – (and still does today) – that it was better for me to reach the emotional steps on my own, and that she or anyone else could only nudge me in the right direction. I still had to find my way there myself.
Our friendship in that final year of high school was valuable – Maddie kept me on the level by not even saying a word, but by being genuine with me. By being honest with me.
This was our last year of school together – what was I going to do after that? Unlike that first year where I had gotten this dumb idea into my head that she was leaving, this was real.
That hurt even more.
I needed Maddie more than I ever had before – but this time she really was going to slip away, and in my fragile mental state, I feared that last day would be the day she would walk away from me.