Feeling Deeply
March 6, 2024
Writer: Chloe Pehote
Editor: Chloe Cardello
On my nineteenth birthday this past fall, my friends and I celebrated with drinks and dinner in downtown Ann Arbor. The specifics of birthdays had become a routine for us. For each girl in our group, we would get ready, uber to Condado, split three orders of chips and queso, wash them down with five assorted margarita pitchers, and then dance long past midnight in some dingy frat basement. The best part was always between dinner and going out, when we would surprise the birthday girl with a shower of presents and singing. So, when it was my turn, I knew exactly what to expect.
After dinner on my special day, my friend Jade oversaw the dramatics by ushering me into a different room “to take pictures,” and then not long after luring me back into my own. Upon my entry, I took in the Gold Party City streamers taped above the entrance and the crude message scribbled onto the whiteboard hung atop my door. Inside, the smiles of my two beautiful roommates were illuminated by a set of candles haphazardly scattered across a small vanilla birthday cake. Before blowing out the candles, I took a moment to sentimentally admire the room that was full of people I had grown to love dearly. Despite knowing exactly what to expect, and being so unbelievably happy, I started to tear up. I started to cry. It was one of those “I made it'' moments. The kind of experience that freezes time and makes you realize how loved, lucky, and stupidly happy you really are.
To be frank, I had a lot of anxiety about making friends in college. I was bullied and left out for a lot of my adolescence and longed for the kinds of friends who would decorate my locker and post long corny captions on Instagram. I spent a lot of time dreading whether I would really find that amongst complete strangers. So in this moment, I thought about just how happy thirteen-year-old me would be to have found people who love her so much for who she is, to have friends like the women who surrounded me at that dinner table, in my room afterward, and on the dance floor in an unnamed fraternity house.
To the average person, this may seem like an overly emotional, dramatic, alcohol-fueled depiction of a very mundane event. But, quite honestly, this is how a lot of my happiest, scariest, saddest, and most exciting moments exist in my memories–defined by an abnormal amount of emotion. I have always been more intuitive with this side of myself in all forms and manifestations. Whether that be my tendency to cry at the worst of times, my deeper interpretations of literature and film, my ability to communicate my feelings, my romanticizing behaviors, and just my overall sensitivity (for better or for worse). To some, this may seem like a nightmare character trait to be hyperconscious of. After all, life is a lot easier when you can think logically and take everything less seriously. Yet, thankfully, my friends have never made me feel this way, and after years of being called a crybaby and navigating how to use this trait to my advantage, I am grateful for the fact that I feel things deeper than most. Because, in hindsight, I get to experience everything to a greater capacity, and find enjoyment and importance in the stereotypically “mundane” or “unserious” events. Feeling deeply is a blessing, and I would take a million “crybaby” or “keyboard warrior” jokes just to continue being able to appreciate small things like birthday cakes to the extent that I do.
