Alias No. 4: The Robot Girl

Now, if you think I've been getting deep in my other posts, you're about to go even deeper into the mind of Doctor Unicorn. It's going to be a fairly long post because this alias was me for a long time and a lot happened during this time.

I only chose this alias to a certain extent. The rest was a direct result of situations I'd found myself in.

When I started high school, I was sure that I wanted to do something with writing, music, or teaching. We had club days for about three months (they were discontinued after that) and I decided to join the Astronomy Club and the STEM Club. One day in the STEM Club, we were talking about things we'd like to do and I mentioned robotics. The guy that sat in front of me, let's call him Don, told me (in a bit of a rude way) that if I wanted to do robotics, I should join the club or team. I decided to check it out since I thought it was interesting. The team consisted of three people at that point. I became the fourth. I think there were bets placed on how long I'd last there, but they all lost because now I'm mentoring a team. .

Me being me, I felt like I had to have a crush during my freshman year of high school and Don became that crush. We got along well and were fairly close while we were on the same team. Since I couldn't drive yet and both of my parents worked, he gave me rides home fairly often. We talked a lot as well. He didn't have many friends and usually got to school right before the bell to avoid having to stand around talking to people, but as the year went on, he got to school earlier and earlier and started consistently going to the library where I usually was with some of my friends. On the way home from our robotics competition that year, we both took the bus home and our coach joked that we didn't stop talking. During the spring, he found out that he'd officially be changing schools the next year to go to a science and math school that he'd applied for.

That summer, we talked a lot. We never really met up in person because we were both busy, but we texted quite often. We started to get to know each other on a fairly deep level. He knew a lot about me and I knew a lot about him. That trend continued when he got to his new school. He'd tell me how he was struggling, but that he couldn't go back home. That was where he needed to be. I know that he struggled a lot that first semester, but that he was happy there. They got one long weekend a month where they had to come home and starting in October of that year (I only remember it because it was his birthday), we started meeting up for lunch on Sunday before he left to go back to school. During that time, we got really close. He handled my anxiety well and we talked about a lot of things. Our parents were convinced that we were dating and told people that sometimes. His mom got a job in the attendance office at my high school and I saw her occasionally in passing. Occasionally, she'd ask if Don and I were more than friends. The answer was always no.

I didn't really notice how Don treated me sometimes. He was always generally nice to me (nicer than he was to everyone else), but sometimes he'd say things that made me question who he really was. Once, I asked him what his friends at school thought of me and his response was that I was fat, but it wasn't like I wasn't active.

As my sophomore year droned on, I began to hate my high school more and more. I was still doing robotics and band, but it wasn't the same and the academics were failing me. I hated coming to school every day. I let Don in on that since he was one of my best friends and he convinced me to apply to the same school he was at. He really seemed to enjoy helping me fill out the application and when I came up to visit, he was happy to show me around and introduce me to people that would unknowingly become very important to me. When I was nervous about anything, he'd calm my fears and reassure me that I'd be fine and that they'd love me. My parents were convinced that the only reason I wanted to go there was because of my "boyfriend."

I ended up getting into the school and decided to go despite some people trying to scare me off and others making bets on how long I'd last before I came home (people really liked to make bets on me apparently). When I got there, I felt like I was in the right place. We had a tradition where Seniors were given Juniors and took them out to learn the area and spend time with new people. Don originally chose me as his Junior even though I'm not supposed to know that. He didn't end up being my Senior because one of his friends knew his Junior and they all played a game of switcheroo. I still ended up being in the same group. My parents were still convinced that I'd only gone there to be near Don again, but I knew they were wrong.

I struggled at first while I was there, but like Don, I knew I couldn't go back home. I got better in my classes over time and wasn't really struggling during my Senior year. It ended up being the best move possible for me as people realized.

Even though changing schools was really good for me in a lot of ways, I was around Don a lot. We were still close, but he'd slowly begun to change who he was and I didn't realize that I was changing as well when I was around him every day. I found myself closing off and not talking to people as much as I usually did. I became a robot in so many ways and thought it was fine because I spent most of my time building robots anyway. I was known as the girl that never left the lab and people there assumed that Don and I were dating because we were close and I was the only girl in his life. My outlook on life changed and I found myself being more pessimistic even though I was telling myself I was being realistic.

Don and I were on the same robotics team while we were there together. We worked well together and spent a lot of nights in the lab working on the robot and generally hanging out. It was our brainchild and we enjoyed making it work. That year, we hosted our own scrimmage and ended up winning the State Competition and progressing to the next level. We didn't do well at that level and Don and I got in a fight because we handled those feelings differently. He was upset because it was his Senior year and he knew that he wouldn't get another chance. I was upset as well because I wanted to do well for him and the rest of the team, but I put my own emotions to the side to try to comfort him. I tried to hug him and he pushed me down onto the sidewalk in San Antonio. That night, I ended up comforting him while he cried in our hotel room.

Once we were back at school, we both felt a feeling of disconnect and depression and ended up coming together to comfort each other. He never apologized for pushing me down, but I got over it. We ended up spending the rest of that year as great friends because of everything we'd accomplished together.

Things got a little bit better for me once Don went off to college, but we were still close while he was gone. He was still one of the only people I talked to about things that actually mattered. He helped me get through my research the summer after he graduated and enjoyed telling me stories of things he did with his friends while he was doing his research. We continued to talk during his freshman year of college and he helped me with my own college search while we talked about his classes in college and the racing team that he'd joined.

On the outside, I was fine. I helped others and was happy, but at the end of the day, I was extremely sad and lonely. I felt like I didn't have any real friends anymore and often was left alone in my room or the robotics lab on Friday and Saturday nights when I wanted to be with friends. Those nights, I questioned whether I had any real friends or whether they just wanted to use me for something. I spent a lot of nights sitting on my bed crying and trying to understand why no one wanted to really be my best friend. My only real friend (or so I thought) was Don and he was over three hours away and didn't respond because he was usually working on a racecar.

Another thing that hurt me during that time was the fact that Don was never okay with the fact I liked to volunteer or help others. He always saw it as a waste of time.

I ended up going to the same college as Don. It wasn't really my choice, but it's where it worked out best financially. When I got there, Don was back to being the way he was to me when we were in high school: the big brother that everyone assumed had a crush on me. I still had a crush on him, but I don't know why. He was never really the nicest guy when he wasn't with me, but I didn't usually see that side of him. I ended up joining the same racing team, but I joined a different division because I wanted to make sure that I knew what I wanted and that my feelings for engineering weren't because of Don.

I distanced myself that first semester because I wanted to make sure I knew what I wanted and was solid in my choices. When I was away from Don, I decided that I didn't want to go into Mechanical Engineering like I had originally planned and changed my focus to Electrical Engineering. I was still close with Don, but we weren't as close. During that time, I started talking to someone else and it didn't end well (topic for a future blog post) so by the end of the semester, he was one of my main solaces again. I didn't necessarily tell him anything about my relationships (then again, I never really had), but told him about my classes and what I was going through. He was always really supportive of me. He supported my decision to go into Electrical Engineering instead of Mechanical Engineering and we spent a lot of time talking about our interests and how they'd changed over time.

I ended up staying with him for part of Winter Break during my freshman year because I needed to be on campus, but couldn't stay in my own dorm. He was really nice to me while I was staying with him. He showed me around his apartment and was being a generally awkward human the entire time because it was something new for him. In a lot of ways, I felt like that girl that was his sister that he secretly liked. I still liked him at the time, but I don't think he knew I felt that way.

We spent a lot of time together during Spring Semester that year. I was still the robot girl I'd found myself being after he and I became friends years before. I think I'd let myself change because I'd latched onto Don and he seemed to not struggle with so many things that I struggled with and because I wanted him to like me. I also felt like it was better to not feel anything at all than to be anxious and depressed all of the time. We were both working on the racecar and we were starting to meet up two days a week for breakfast where he'd walk me to work after. During that time, we caught up on each other's lives and talked about things that were on our minds. At the end of that semester, I ended up getting myself hurt and had to go to the hospital for stitches. I intentionally kept Don out of the loop because I knew he had an exam that evening and didn't want him to worry about me. I told him the bare minimum of what I thought he needed to know at the time which was that I wasn't going to be able to go to the competition for the racecar. He assumed it was because of my social anxiety again and tried to talk me back into it and I told him that I'd explain it later when I got back.

He found out before I got back to our shop that day and sent me an extremely long message telling me that he knew I was probably scared and that it probably hurt a lot and tried to make me feel better. I showed that message to a friend on the team and she asked me if this was the same Don that was on the team. I knew he was different to others than he usually was to me, but I didn't think it was that bad. He was always nice to me, especially when we were alone, but he wasn't necessarily a great person outside of that.

I didn't get to go to the competition that year. I was stuck on my couch at home with stitches to deal with. I tried to talk to people on the team as much as possible, but they were busy. Once, Don called me at midnight while he was walking around in a field because he just wanted to talk. He told me how he felt scared about being a leader for the next season and how things were going with the car and what he generally thought. I think it was one of the last nice moments I had with him. The last day of competition, a group chat was made with the entire team and while I was wanting Don to respond to me, he didn't. However, I could see that he was constantly responding in the group chat and wasn't being a very nice person. I knew that he'd always done that and that he probably just wasn't paying attention to my messages.

When he never apologized for not responding for three days when I said I needed a friend or asked if I was okay when I got really anxious and depressed that week, I knew that I needed to start cutting him out of my life. I decided that day that I needed to force myself to not have a crush on him. It didn't exactly go as planned because I was staying with him on certain weekends to work on the car. One weekend, some of the members of the team decided that they were going to have a cookout. Don and I decided not to go and ended up staying in to watch IndyCar instead. That night, some of the members of the team got a little too tipsy and tried to convince me to make a move on Don. I think he ended up seeing some of the messages they sent because things got really awkward between us that night and we ended up basically distancing ourselves from that point on. I didn't want to stay with him after that night, so I ended up staying with a different friend for the rest of the summer.

I still tried to be his friend that summer even though I probably shouldn't have let myself indulge in that. He helped me get an internship and was trying to help me through it when things got rough. In a way, my mentor put me through some emotional abuse where every time he got angry about anything, he'd tear me down somehow. Usually, it was about the racing team, but it wasn't always. I wanted to understand why my mentor was doing that to me when he didn't to Don. Don tried to help me deal with it, but he ultimately helped nothing because he hadn't had to deal with anything like that. I ended up reducing the amount that I let myself talk to Don and increasing the amount that I talked to other friends because he wasn't helping me. I eventually stopped talking to Don almost entirely.

I didn't realize how much I'd changed until I stopped hanging out with Don so much and started hanging out with people that were genuinely nice. I realized that I'd lost that part of myself. I knew strangers at that point. I didn't want to meet new people and I was heavily judgmental of the people around me and hated that about myself. However, I was still stuck in that trap because I still let myself be around Don. However, I did begin to notice more and more how he treated others. He was terrible to other people and since I'd started distancing myself from him, he'd started doing it to me unless we were alone. Over the next few months, I did my best to cut him out of my life, but I still have to see him occasionally. I end up nearly having an emotional dilemma every time I go to the shop because I hate the fact I let myself become a robot because of him.

I've gotten better in the last few months thanks to some new people in my life (if they're reading this, they should know who they are) that have helped me see that not everyone is like Don and wants me to be a shell of a person whether they realize that's what they're doing to me or not. However, I still struggle to not remain a shell of a person at times. A few weeks ago, I had a breakdown because I didn't want to go to the shop where I'd have to see Don and because I was scared that my friends and potential boyfriend were going to be like Don and stop talking to me even though I feel like they care. I didn't realize how much Don had made me afraid of now. I'm finally beginning to not feel like a robot, but like an actual person again.