Scottie’s and my “story”…and also the story of my Independence Day from my controlling father. Part one, posted today on the one-year anniversary of my “escape”.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

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Online stuff was pretty much the extent of my social life for many years. We didn’t have interactions with other families very much, and I didn’t really have friends my age. There was this one family who had a daughter whom I was friends with, but when she moved out of her parents’, my parents forbade us to have any contact with her anymore. She was the last “real” friend I was ever close to. As a result, my social life became who I met on the internet. Unfortunately, right about this time, all of my online friends seemed to disappear on me, too.

Someone invited me into a group Skype chat, sometime in late 2007, and that was where I officially met Scottie (I had known of him before, from another forum, but hadn’t officially been introduced until then). My first memory of him was one day when I was really feeling depressed and lonely, so depressed and lonely I actually said it in the group chat (I NEVER did that, I didn’t like people to feel sorry for me or think I was just trying to get attention, because that’s what my dad would say…I was trying to get attention or whatever. Even now, I’m afraid that will happen, even if I’m just trying to be honest about myself) that I needed a hug, and he sent me a Skype-smile hug and a song. Somewhere along the line, we broke off into a personal chat, and as they say, the rest is history!

Really, it is. We were really close really fast. Like three weeks later, I was telling him stuff I’d only told a couple people before. It may be somewhat melodramatic, but before he came into my life, like I said, my online friends all got pretty busy and I felt pretty abandoned, and kind of used by some friends who were pretty close, so I had decided to hold everyone at arm’s length for a while because I didn’t like to be hurt. Yes, I was pretty clingy…one of the symptoms of codependency. But I kind of felt like “everyone I know goes away in the end”. So I kind of surprised myself when I opened up to him so quickly, but he took an interest in my life and my feelings and stuff. So in a way, I felt like he gave me hope in people again.

At that time, as we grew closer, we made it very clear that it was a brother-and-sister type relationship. Besides that, he was interested in someone else, and I kind of had a crush/was in love with someone too. He proceeded in a relationship with the girl he was interested in, but he was still my best friend. I was still clingy, way more than I should have been. I tried to respect his relationship with his girlfriend though, and tried not to come between them. Then a few months later they broke up, and he was devastated.

Life went on, though. Sometime in those months after his breakup, I fell in love with him, even though I didn’t admit it (even to myself). I talked to him and listened when he was really depressed. I think it was fall of 2008 that my dad was looking at my facebook friends list and saw Scottie’s profile. I don’t know what it was about him, but my dad didn’t like it. He stalked the comments Scottie left on my pictures on facebook and kept asking me about him (but it was OK if other guys left comments on my stuff. As in, he didn’t stalk the other guys). He went and visited Scottie’s blog, and didn’t like what he saw. The offending post that he mentioned in particular was one in which Scottie accused the guy in this one video of being misinformed (and pretty crazy) about his views on goth stuff, and I think since the guy happened to hold the same opinion my dad did, my dad thought Scottie was bad news. (Besides that, he had *gasp* LONG HAIR!!!) So he told me not to talk to him. And any other guy. Keep in mind, I’m 21 at this point.

Well, I kept talking to him (and my other guy friends, who had just been busy with life). I couldn’t let him go. My friends told me my dad had no right to tell me who I could and couldn’t talk to when I was an adult woman. I was kind of stuck: I thought I was supposed to obey his every whim, BUT I didn’t want to (and couldn’t) give up my friends, especially Scottie. Soo I kept talking to them. A couple friends told me I should leave, because my dad was controlling and stuff. I remember saying at one point to Scottie, “I could never hurt my dad that much”.

Scottie’s depression subsided a good bit, and that made me happy. We got closer: there were no secrets between us. Talking to him was my escape, sort of like how my writing was. He gave me attention, spent time with me, and cared about how I felt and what I did, more than anyone else did (or at least more than anyone else expressed to me). Then in July of 2009 or so, he decided to start dating this other girl from his college, and I moved to second place pretty quickly. Or at least he attempted to put me in second place. By this time, I admitted to myself I was in love with him. He was in love with me too, even though he didn’t realize it. We had talked about marriage (before he started dating again), but given my family situation, and how many miles apart we were, we figured that was something that would never happen.

So anyway, he got this new girlfriend (even though he had told me he wasn’t interested in dating her). I was pretty much devastated. I didn’t like being put back in second place. I was extremely jealous, which made me even clingier. Probably clingier than his girlfriend was. Anyway. Things went on, and Scottie realized he had to do something about me…either let me go, or let his girlfriend go. Since she was his girlfriend and I wasn’t, I was the one who had to go. He really tried to make me leave, but either I was too stupid, too in love, or too loyal (or all of the above) to let him go. At one point, I decided as well that I needed to be out of the picture. We went like, three days without talking, and Scottie ended up coming back to me; he couldn’t let me go either. Then he kind of decided there was going to have to be some way to make this work, because he couldn’t let me go.

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4