Drugs and/or/as/vs Friendship.

everybody lives with their first memory
of when they tried drugs when they tried drinking alcohol but most people don't have that experience or that time of their life documented on the internet more and more i think this will be the case recently i was watching a video from hitomi mochizuki hatomi is about four years younger than me so she grew up even more in this internet era she had developed early in life and this had transformed her teenage years and she had all these experiences early in life that other people might have a little bit later so by this time she was maybe 15 or 16 she had like gotten over this experience of first trying alcohol first doing drugs first having sex with somebody this for her was a part of life that was shallow and she decided she would rather be alone than try to be friends with somebody who was drinking and doing drugs these memories can be very vivid from your childhood adolescence teenage years partly because they can be painful they can be difficult they can be triggering to revisit a lot of the times people don't want to remember them and they spend most of their 20s 30s pushing all that away for this reason i thought it was interesting to hear hitomi mochizuki's perspective on some of these formative events in her life and how her experience is probably different than others so she uploaded a video and the title appealed to me because i recently had gone back and looked at some old pictures old video of me and friends basically from 10 years old to 16 years old looking through these time periods it was kind of surreal for me to look back and see i was that old at that point and it was kind of shocking to me and i think for her as well i got to see that it was triggering for her to look back at some of these videos for most people they have these private videos or most people they just have private memories and for most of the time period of human history these memories were not forever encapsulated in youtube videos or in pictures for a lot of people these are just memories that live in their minds and then they don't have to think about them they don't have to see them and they're not part of their internet persona but for her tell me from the time she was 12 years old she was uploading videos she was uploading videos about her life she comments how she wanted to talk to that person you know you see yourself on video and you say like man i wish i could talk to that person again and tell them you know what to avoid and that's the tragedy of life having these experiences and then realizing wow that was kind of messed up like i wish i wouldn't have done that at that time what was interesting for me to hear and reflect on in my own life she says that when she was young she developed early and i didn't i was a late bloomer i had also the experience of being young for my grade so when i was 12 most of the people in my class were 13 and when i was that age i had a friend who was not only older than me but she also developed earlier than me so she looked like she could be 16 years old she could be mistaken for somebody who's you know really just developed into a fully grown woman whereas i still looked more childish more just girlish and young you know this was a formative experience in my life that this was somebody who not only had developed really physically but in what she did with her time and the kind of friends that she hung out with she was i guess you could say a bad influence on me so i had this experience of drinking early that i wouldn't have otherwise this is like a series of this where i would be friends with somebody you know there's this expression thick as thieves what does that mean you know it's because if you both engage in some illicit activity if you're engaging in something that you know is wrong you develop a bond this connection to somebody that seems deeper and more real than other connections when you aren't doing anything wrong you know if you both incriminate each other and you know you don't there's this kind of trust that that builds between you and that friend but i had the experience multiple times of having a friend being involved in some activity with them that made me uncomfortable and reflecting on it later i regretted that i did it and deciding really i wasn't going to continue that friendship or we just grew apart that was part of my experience in my childhood and my adolescence now it was interesting to hear hitomi say that she had these experiences early on and she decided that she would rather be alone she would rather not have friends if the options were have friends and do drugs do illegal activity or not have friends be alone i also had this choice presented to me stay friends with somebody but then have the heartbreaking realization that they don't want to talk to you about these things because they feel judged by you now it turned out later on i did have a conversation with one of these friends when we were both six or seven years older and she told me that she didn't want to be friends with me anymore at that time because she felt judged by me this is just a difficult part of life that you have to come to terms with that if you want to live your life in a certain way if you want to be a certain person sometimes you have to let people go that you really love you know i know wasn't romantic love but you know i loved these friends of mine and i had to make the decision the hard decision that i'm not going to try to maintain this friendship because they're doing things that i don't agree with and instead of confronting them i basically just decided well i'll try to put more of my energy and time into friendships that i feel more comfortable with now this is actually a regret of mine and i'm not advocating this i don't i don't know all the answers and i don't know what the right answer is for for you in your life or for anybody who has this this crisis you know this turn in the road where either you confront a friend of yours about some behavior that you think is unhealthy for them that you think is wrong and try to continue the friendship even though you have this conflict or you just stop communicating with them and just grow apart you know you stop making this effort looking back on it i think i do regret not making the effort and i do regret not trying not having this confrontation because it's not about just living for your yourself and living for who you want to be it's also living for other people i didn't want to be alone you know like i had a lot of these experiences where i didn't want to be alone but the only way i was able to have the kind of identity that i wanted was to be alone you know i still struggle with it because i don't have any friends in real life you know i have my boyfriend and it's wonderful to be with somebody who really understands you and is working towards similar goals in their life and you know we have so much in common so of course that's wonderful but still i look back and i reflect on those videos of me with some friends when i was that age and i just think i've never had that again i've never had the closeness with that friend that i had then especially my experience with being friends with the same sex with with female friends it's been really difficult and i think it requires a certain amount of effort on my part that i just haven't been willing to give because it's hard to find somebody with similar interests who is willing to alienate themselves from others by not drinking alcohol by not doing drugs by living their life as an atheist intellectual somebody who wants to read books and actually talk with me about the books that they've read it's just something that was alien from my experience growing up as a young girl most of what is expected for girls to talk about is not these big concepts these issues of history and culture and war these are just concepts i have literally never talked to another female human being with in my life i don't want to live my life that way where i'm just alone and i don't have friends i want to be able to make that effort but it's it's so difficult when you feel like the culture that you're in nobody has these same values as you and nobody wants to read the books that you want to read and nobody wants to talk about what you want to talk about are you willing to be friends with somebody if they want to go to a nightclub and get high if that's what friendship means to them are you going to show up no that's the sad fact is that i don't want to go to a bar i don't want to go to a nightclub i mean the alternate that i think most people tend to think of well if you're not going to a nightclub if you're not going to a bar if you're not drinking or doing drugs then you are this puritanical christian weirdo that like you know it's it's either one of the other whereas like you know it's hard to find this in-between path so no i i don't feel like i'm i'm willing to make that sacrifice of my time and energy to go to a nightclub in order to be friends with somebody at some point in your life inevitably you're going to encounter this with a friend where you either decide to continue the friendship or you decide that you two are so against each other on one top or the other that you have to cease being friends that the friendship is over sometimes i question would my life have been better had i just continued down the same path and put more emphasis on the friendships on the connections that i had made with these girls instead of my own sense of integrity my own sense of what i should be doing with my time but when i was going to church every sunday when i was going through lutheran confirmation at the same time that my best friend was drinking alcohol and doing drugs and sleeping with boys you know like that to me was such a dichotomy like it i just couldn't continue but sometimes i do wonder like what if i would have just continued this would i've been better socialized would i've had more friends would people have thought i was cool or likable somebody like hitomi kind of has this likability because she went through all that she seemed to be older than she was she dressed well like she took videos of herself and uploaded to youtube people actually wanted to look people actually wanted to see her on camera i mean yeah like i could have surrounded myself with people like this in order to feel like i had this same connection that i was also cool or something but i had to ultimately decide that no that's not me i don't care if i'm not cool that's how i'm going to live my life i've had to reflect that i was judgmental that was the reality that was who i was when somebody who i was friends with started getting more into drinking and doing drugs started having sex i think they could sense that i was judgmental and that i wasn't comfortable talking about it and for that reason actually i think it delayed my development and it delayed my maturity about a lot of these issues because i didn't talk about it because i felt i felt like i already wanted to be beyond it like i wanted to be beyond this immature stage i wanted to already be past it because i felt like in so many ways i already was past some immature phases i don't know i mean i grew up with people telling me like you know melissa you're so wise you know not not that many people but yeah some people told me that people told me that i was mature and wise for my age and looking back on it of course no i wasn't i think they were just gassing me up like i don't think that was the case at all but yeah i do remember distinctly feeling like you know i don't want to talk about you going to this guy's dorm room this was when we were in high school you know hearing one of my friends saying that she went up to the university stayed in his dorm room got so drunk and fell downstairs and stuff you know like dude i don't want to talk about this with you why would you do something so stupid are you are you dumb you know like that's how i felt i i was judgmental i thought man i'm not this stupid the reality was i was that stupid and if i could have had those experiences if i'd have been this kind of confidence in myself or this kind of level of wanting to be in a relationship with somebody it's not that i wasn't ready it's like i did have interests i had crushes but i was too afraid you know like i had some experiences where i got really emotionally attached to somebody and it didn't nothing went forward and i just decided you know love is this little [ __ ] thing i don't wanna why would i wanna get involved with somebody i'm only 14 15 16 years old but that's when you should be making these realizations that's when you should be having these experiences with boys when you should be going through these phases and i didn't until later than most girls it felt i mean maybe that's not the reality but it did seem like everybody else around me had more experience with boys than i did this ultimately led to a situation where no girls talk to me about sex no girls talk to me about their experiences they probably went through some stuff and formed their sexual identity earlier they were able to come to conclusions about drugs and alcohol earlier than i did and i'm not trivializing it i do think these experiences early in life do really mess people up i've had friends tell me that because they had sex before they were 15 or 16 they they feel like it messed up their sexuality and i mean that's possible i don't know it's like a case-by-case individual basis i remember in hatomi's video that she said that she was feeling triggered by watching these videos and you know i feel for her and i know that she's going through a lot dealing with her past and a big part of her video was talking about how she was starting her spiritual journey and i think her spiritual journey is in part repairing some of this lost youth this inner childhood that she felt that she couldn't have because she had all these experiences too early that's the reality that most people live with most people have these experiences and they don't have them documented on the internet but i do think more and more we are documenting them online and uploading them to youtube and people can learn from those experiences young people can watch hitomi's experience growing up and decide to live their lives either like her and go through the same kind of difficulties that she has had to go through or they can see it as a warning as something to avoid a path that they don't want to go down you know that phrase don't grow up too fast yeah that's true don't grow up too slow right yeah i know it's a really precarious balancing act of knowing when you're mature enough and also sometimes you do have to push beyond what you think that you're mature enough to handle and going through all these periods of growth it can change who you become and you don't know how it will change you and what kind of person you'll turn into if you have to go through these experiences and then later on examine them later on reflect on how they made you the person that you are today [Laughter] all right i'm here to inform you that meat is bad it's gross and it makes me want to vomit