Feel Good 101_The Outsiders' Guide to a Happier Life Read online

  Of course, with college being an education facility with hundreds of teenagers who all knew each other in some capacity, word got around very quickly about what we had done. Although Arnold got off pretty lightly with his peers, I most certainly didn’t. Girls who would usually say hello at lunchtime now scowled at me, surrounding Beatrice like bodyguards ready to pounce on me if I so much as looked at her. I was completely cut off from the few friends I had managed to make in those first short weeks of college, and once Arnold and I had broken up, that reputation stayed with me for the entirety of my first year. Needless to say, Beatrice had a few choice words for me when I eventually tried to apologise, and I don’t blame her in the slightest. I would absolutely understand if she still thinks of me with disdain – even though she and Arnold ended up reuniting and have been together ever since. It’s been almost ten years since it happened, and I still feel guilty for being their ‘blip’.

  A word to the wise: if you are tempted to do what I did, please don’t. Don’t ruin someone else’s happiness to find your own. If the person you like is happy in a relationship, be happy for them. If you think the person you like is unhappy in a relationship, let them discover that for themself, in their own time and on their own terms – you could actually be very wrong. I know it can be hard seeing everything you want right in front of you, just out of reach, but the feelings of guilt you end up having, in addition to the consequences of your actions, will cancel out any joy you get from stealing your crush away. Start a relationship in the right way – if it’s tainted from the start, that’s how it will probably continue. If you ‘won’ someone through making them cheat, can you ever truly trust that they won’t do the same again, only to you? That isn’t to say all relationships that start out this way are doomed – but for me personally, the hurt you end up causing completely ruins that feeling of victory when that dream person is led astray.

  Let me tell you though, and I’m sorry for getting a bit too real here – the heartbreak never gets easier. In the time since, I’ve had crushes that have ended in disaster (again, don’t date your bandmates!), crushes that have been reciprocated and blossomed into long, happy relationships, and again gone through the motions of having a crush on someone who already had a girlfriend. It hurt at thirteen, and it hurt again at twenty-four. The only real thing that changes is your level of naivety – last year, when I found out my then-crush was already taken, I knew the sort of pain I was in for, because on paper he seemed perfect. Funny and cute, with a love of wrestling? Count me in. Looking back, I was definitely still hurting from the break-up of my longest-ever relationship, and it was definitely too soon in my personal healing process to be looking for someone new. However, things moved quickly. Pretty soon, we were sliding into each other’s DMs (wow, that reference is going to date this book, isn’t it?) and talking every day. Twitter messages evolved into texts, and pretty soon, I was hooked. Now and again, he would mention a ‘lady’, but because of how casual he seemed about her, and how deep our conversations would get, I was under the impression that he was just sort of ‘seeing’ someone. Even at twenty-four you can be as naive as you choose to be. I should have walked away the second I heard another girl’s name, but by the time I began to wonder how involved they really were, I was in too deep, and I found myself sitting on a chair next to him and some of his friends in a bar halfway across the country, overwhelmingly smitten and drunk enough to pour my heart out.

  After an awkward, drunken conversation, I ended up asking the question I knew I should have asked at the start, back in the Twitter DMs:

  ‘How long have you been with your girlfriend, anyway?’

  ‘About two years.’

  You know those vertical-drop rides at awful amusement parks, where you slowly rise to the top and, after an excruciating pause, you’re dropped at full speed to the floor, and your stomach feels like it’s going to come out of either your mouth or your butt? That’s exactly how I felt. Except for a whispered, ‘Right . . .’ no words could leave my mouth. A few moments later, the ‘perfect’ guy, who had only really mentioned a girl in passing to the point where I thought they’d been on a couple of dates, made an excuse to leave, and I was left in the bar with a handful of his friends. As soon as I said goodbye to him, I remember physically falling to my knees and crumpling into a drunken ball of tears (I am a dramatic drunk), sobbing as one of his female friends rushed over to comfort me, furious at how he’d strung me along.

  It’s odd to me now that I knew on the drive up to see him that I would probably have to have this conversation, and yet I’d somehow fooled myself into thinking that I was mentally prepared for it. Needless to say, the long drive back home was horrible. This is one of the few instances that I can say I’ve experienced the physical symptoms of heartbreak. The morning after that awful conversation, I just felt . . . not anything like my usual self, and it wasn’t related to the hangover. My body ached, my mind was working at limited capacity, and I just felt generally awful. Okay, that does sound like a hangover, but I promise you it was different. I don’t know how else to describe it, but my friend who had come with me explained it in a way I’ve never forgotten – when you’re in love, your brain forms connections that produce happy hormones when you think about that person. When you experience heartbreak, your brain has to destroy those links. Listen, I’ll level with you, I don’t know if that’s scientifically proven. I suppose I could look it up, but the imagery of that is so compelling to me that I sort of don’t want to find out. The thought of being physically tied to someone and having to physically detach yourself when the time comes – it’s an awful, painful process, but strangely beautiful, too. However, if I was asked if I wanted to voluntarily experience that feeling again, I think I’d just laugh at you.

  Let’s get to the moral of the story. My advice to you is simply that if your crush mentions having a girlfriend or boyfriend but continues to play up to your affections – they’re stringing you along. Whether or not you choose to distance yourself from them or not is down to you, but simply be aware that their relationship status isn’t likely to change, regardless of what you buy them, what favours you do for them, and no matter how much you change yourself for them. Unrequited love is hard, and only time can get you through it – but by dedicating your time to friends and family, not saying yes to every little favour and using creative outlets such as art or songwriting, you’ll get through it! Wait for someone who loves you back, openly and honestly, and who ultimately will respect you and not use your feelings to get something they want, and wait for a love where nobody around the two of you will feel abandoned or betrayed. Those relationships are the ones truly worth holding out for.

  Breaking Up

  Want to know what’s worse than wanting someone and not having them? Having someone and then losing them. Whether it ends in a screaming match or you both hugging it out, a break-up is absolutely devastating because it signifies a state of change you could never have prepared yourself for. Change is scary, regardless of how it happens. Before I talk about a few of my break-ups, I want to state this: if you’re going through a break-up, no matter what it was over, love yourself. Be kind to yourself. Allow yourself to grieve (yes, a break-up is still a loss, and you will go through a grieving process similar to that of mourning a death) and don’t rush into something else in an attempt to get over it. The only thing that will heal you is time. ‘They’ (‘they’ say a lot of things, don’t ‘they’?) say that it can take up to a third of the time you were dating someone to fully get over them, sometimes longer. Do not look for someone to fill that sudden void – love yourself again before trying to love another.

  My first relationship started and ended when I was sixteen years old. His name was Ben, and we were together for ten months back in 2007–2008. I truly (foolishly) thought I’d found the one. We’d met on MySpace, as many kids did back in the day – and through a couple of black-and-white photos of him performing in his pop-punk band on stage, I developed the biggest
crush on him. Ben was two years older than me, and cooler than any other boy I’d fancied – in my mind, he was the dream boy. Somehow, after hundreds of instant messages sent back and forth between us, he agreed to go on a date with me. He turned up to that first date an hour late, but later on we ended up hanging out at the top of a massive hill, where we ended up kissing. Yes!

  After returning home from our successful first date, I logged on to MySpace, only to see a message from him:

  hey it was fun hanging out, gotta be honest with u though i felt like it sort of lacked something. you just didn’t have the wow factor. But yh lets chat later x

  Saying that I didn’t have the ‘wow factor’ . . . ouch. Looking back, that probably should have been a red flag. Ben had also just been dumped by a girl he really liked, but in my mind, he was still the dream boy, and I was sure I could show him just how great I was. After agreeing to go on a second date, he asked me to be his girlfriend. In retrospect, I probably should have realised he’d pretty much just settled for something to distract him from his last break-up, or even worse, to make his ex feel jealous – ah, youth.

  Ben and I had been together for almost a year when I went with him, his sister and his best friend to a forest getaway resort, and after a couple of days in each other’s constant company, we began to argue. As it turns out, we were totally incompatible with each other for more than a few hours at a time. Before the holiday, we’d only really hung around with one another for a few hours each Saturday at his parents’ house. Being around each other every hour of every day for more than a week was something that we’d never done before, and these arguments that we had on this holiday ended up getting so bad that eventually he was sleeping on the sofa in the cabin instead of in our double bed, and any conversation between us during the day was strained at best.

  As soon as we were back from the holiday, I met up with him and suggested that we break up. Immediately the words left my mouth, I regretted them – was I really going to throw away our otherwise perfect relationship over a couple of bad weeks? To my surprise, though, Ben seemed more than happy for us to split up. I later found out through ‘Arnold’ (remember him?) that Ben had referred to me as a ‘rebound that went wrong’ to his friends. However, despite the sadness I felt for our failed relationship, and his friends shouting abuse at me whenever I walked past them, nothing compared to the heartbreak I felt when he fell for someone else almost immediately.

  A couple of weeks after Ben and I broke up, I started my first year of college. Of course, I had chosen the college that he was already attending, and I began to regret my decision almost immediately. Don’t make important decisions based solely on love, kids! Whenever I passed Ben in the hallways, my heart would begin to pound, and yet we simply looked away from each other, not even saying hello. Someone I cared so much about was becoming a stranger, and after I suggested we meet in private and asked if he wanted to give it another go, he coldly shut me down.

  A few weeks pass by, and I’m walking down the hallway towards another class when suddenly, out of a door in front of me, comes Ben – holding hands with a girl from my year, ‘Jasmine’. Jasmine was a girl who had a much cooler music taste, long, flowing blonde hair and a beautiful face – and I was distraught. For the next thirty seconds, I had to walk behind Ben and his new girlfriend holding hands, seemingly so in love that nothing could tear them away from each other. I quickly dived into the nearest bathroom and cried my eyes out.

  The next few weeks of feeling replaced were unbearable, but in time it became less painful. Eventually I found a new group of people to hang out with at lunchtime, away from where Ben and Jasmine sat making out, and as my feelings for Ben faded, they were replaced with feelings for Arnold. Those couple of months were extremely confusing, upsetting and filled with gossip and drama – and being only sixteen, with emotions running wild, coursework stress already mounting as well as personal family drama going on, I felt completely out of my depth. At times, I felt as though things would never get better, that my life would always be full of this sadness and confusion and I would regret breaking up with Ben for ever. Funnily enough, almost ten years on, I’m sitting here laughing as I write this. Not that my feelings then weren’t valid, but the knowledge that hard times are always temporary has never been clearer than it is right now.

  This story definitely has an interesting ending, though. Ben and Jasmine stayed together for a few more years, and I lost contact with him after I left college – that is, until 2013, when Ben discovered that I made YouTube videos that were becoming pretty successful. When he messaged me out of the blue asking to meet up with him for a coffee, I agreed, mostly for a bit of closure, and admittedly because I can be a bitter old fool at times, and I was feeling a bit smug that the musician dream boy from years ago was suddenly trying to worm his way back in with me. We met up in my town, which he’d never agreed to during our relationship. By this point, my feelings for him had obviously completely died, but his had come surging back – and he’d even begun to distance himself from Jasmine. Was it because I was ‘cool’ now? Was it because suddenly, through hard work, I was achieving all of the things he and his band wanted?

  Little did he know that, in those short years, Jasmine and I had become good friends after she and Ben began to experience problems, and we were messaging back and forth about Ben’s shitty behaviour. Turns out Jasmine was still (just about) dating Ben, even though Ben clearly had other intentions with our coffee hangout. I told Ben in no uncertain terms what I thought of his behaviour once I found out, and Jasmine broke up with him and never spoke to him again. Sometimes we still laugh at the fact that we both somehow put up with his behaviour (not to mention his lack of personal hygiene – you gotta scrub everywhere, boys). Time has healed us both. However, this isn’t the only story involving Jasmine in this book – remember her name.

  And, Ben, if you’re reading this, part of me hopes you’ve learned a thing or two about the way you treat women. I sincerely hope that with time, you have become a better human. Judging from what I’ve heard on the gossip mill, though, you haven’t. Please stop trying to friend request me on every social media website you can find. I’m not interested in helping your new band out. I hope you find happiness as Jasmine and I both have without you.

  So, It’s Over

  Now, without trying to go all when I was your age on you, it’s interesting to me that over the course of my life, I have said ‘I love you’ to many people I’ve dated, but have only been in love once. That’s not to say I lied to the other people I was with – simply that I thought I knew what love was, right up until I actually found it. Let me tell you, if you haven’t already experienced it, being in love with someone is entirely different to simply being happy when you’re around someone. Breaking up with someone you really care about is still hard – but losing the one person I truly loved was the worst emotional pain I have ever experienced. Wow, how dramatic. That said, after being in love, which is what we’re all told as kids is what we’re ultimately searching for, let me state a few truths about love – if not for you, then definitely for myself. I’ll try not to get too deep:

  You can be in love and still be unhappy.

  Love cannot solve every single problem you have. You can definitely be angry at someone you love.

  It is okay not to see the person you love as completely perfect.

  The movie of your life doesn’t end once you find love.

  Love is not an emotion, but an emotional state that can take years to come out of.

  Staying friends with someone you’re in love with makes losing them harder.

  Up until recently, I’d never had a break-up where the two of us managed to stay friends. It was simply too difficult – questions and bitter remarks would always arise, and things would get awkward. The relationship between myself and the bassist from my first band actually ended with us yelling at each other and both of us writing songs about each other. However, in 2016, my longest, most serious relati
onship ever had come to an end. I don’t want to go into this too much, as my ex and I both make videos online, and our relationship was very public, which of course meant that our break-up was, too. The thing is, nothing bad actually happened between us – sometimes communication doesn’t have to break down to the point of screaming and shouting. Our relationship simply ran its course. We both began putting most of our time and energy into our careers, and our relationship ultimately paid the price. We worked hard to remain close friends, but, as I found out, staying friends with someone you still love can sometimes be harder than drawing a line under it all and never speaking to them again.