I had the pleasure of speaking with a friend who I met during college through our mutual friends. This interview was a while ago, and I am bringing it back as the first new installment of the top sheet series! I think her answers are perfect to jump back into everything, and so relevant and refreshing, even though this interview is from April. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed chatting with her. Special thanks to my pal for partaking in this series <3
This interviewee does use a top sheet, as she doesn’t like the feel of a comforter on her legs. A top sheet serves as an added layer that “suctions” her! Her top sheet is from Amazon and will suction you, too! She starts the night with a top sheet, but says it always falls off.
When asked what she was passionate about, she talked about her upcoming job as assistant director at the summer camp she works at every year. She is now the boss of many people, working 40 hours per week doing insane stuff. She has loved planning every moment of summer camp, including time for snacks and putting on sunscreen. She also talks about loving being outdoors right now, and doing things alone. She tells me about her Sundays, where she has breakfast alone and then goes to a little cafe to study. She goes thrifting, and to her favorite bookstore, listening to good music along the way. As far as music, she is currently enjoying Labyrinth, Lana Del Ray, and Phoebe Bridgers. “Being alone, you don’t have to worry about what other people are thinking. I’m an empath, so when I’m around other people I shift my mood to fit theirs. If other people are happy and I’m feeling sad, I’ll fake being happy. But Sundays are my days, and the routine is set.” Unfortunately, her routine got slightly messed up by a creepy man, and we then spoke about extinguishing all of these.
Currently, she is into apple chips and banana chips. She shares her apple chips with me as we chat.
I asked for a rant next, and we began our chat about father-daughter relationships. “Fathers. Majority of the time, as a young girl, your father is either absent or very much there. My personal experience is that fathers are obsessed with you as a little child, they like to play with you and run around with you, my dad even bought me clothes. The father-daughter relationship ebbs and flows in a very specific way. When I was a little girl, my dad and I were really close. When I hit thirteen, I was a bitch and I didn’t want to depend on my dad. Don’t drive me to school, I want to walk with my friends! Fathers seem to resent their daughters at this age, and my dad just dished it all over to my mom. From age thirteen to seventeen, my dad and I were not close.”
Slight interruption as my friend comes over and invites me to yoga. Unfortunately, I do not think I attended. Boooooo
She talks about bonding with her mom during her teenage years, but her father not knowing how to handle any of her emotions, and instead just moving them to the side. “Once, I was having a huge mental breakdown- hyperventilating, crying, all of it. My dad just said ‘breathe.’ He said I was a ‘big girl’ which made me want to punch him. I started laughing in the middle of my mental breakdown, and told him he was never allowed to say that again”. We agreed that this is something fathers should not be allowed to say. When she was seventeen and had outgrown most of her teenage rage, she bonded with her dad again, like how they were when she was a young girl. Their interests started to meld, and they bonded over reading and coffee. When eighteen came around, everything went back to shit, starting when she left for college. She calls him once a week, and thinks of the things she could tell her father, saying that maybe one out of sixteen are appropriate to say to him. She doesn’t tell her father the same things she tells her mom. She asks about his girlfriend, and he asks how her brunch was, and if she has any homework. The conversations are very surface level when compared to her phone calls with her mom. Another aspect of father-daughter relationships, she says, is the father’s relationship with the mother. She talks about her parents’ divorce, and taking her mother’s side when hearing it was her father’s fault. They have been divorced for thirteen years. Her father has dated many women, and she hasn’t liked a single one of them, especially the woman he is with now. She speaks about the importance of a little father-daughter bullying, in a silly way, as essential to their relationship. However, his partner tends to tell her to be nicer to her father. “I want to say, he used to change my diapers, babe. Know your place”. She calls her dad all the time, to remind his girlfriend she came first. “I saw they were on a bike ride the other day and I said, Facetime! He picked up while riding his bike, I have a picture. She needs to know that I come first, and he will pick up the phone at fancy dinners and stuff too. I’ll get out of this phase eventually, but I’m in my petty era right now”. The father-daughter relationship is better in person, she says, as her father is a terrible texter. A highlight of their relationship thus far, though, was him coming to visit. They went to the beach at Seaside and drank hot chocolate while swinging on a swing set. Wonderful!
As far as advice for her younger self, it would be that things don’t last forever. Even though you’re having a hard time at the moment, it will pass. Don’t let boys determine your mood for the day, or anything for that matter. Things move, things change, you can’t have good days without bad ones. Do it for the plot and just be yourself! If people don’t like you, they’re not worth your time or your energy. Put your energy into people who care.
When I asked her if she had any regrets, she said yes right away. But took it back, saying that she thought of regrets in a very specific way. She regrets a lot of things, but without them, knows she would not have gotten here. One of her biggest regrets is letting go of a childhood best friend who she thinks she should have held on to. She says she let go for a silly reason, but maybe it was meant to be. “I’m a big believer in the universe, so even though I can think of a lot of things I regret, I wouldn’t be who I am today without those experiences.”
She says she is also proud of herself for a lot of things, mostly being on her own, especially since she had such a hard time socializing in high school. She struggled with anxiety, and couldn’t leave the house for a while after the pandemic because she was so scared of the world, and what it had in store. She went back and forth from her mom’s to her dad’s and to therapy, and that was all. Her whole life, she never thought she would be more than five minutes away from her mom, and didn’t think she could be far from her. During her senior year of high school, she decided she wanted to move to Oregon. My mom was surprised at how far I wanted to go, since we’re from Colorado and it’s an eighteen hour drive. “I decided to leave everyone and everything I knew to move to Oregon and do it all on my own, and I have. I truly feel like an adult, and I have done so many things for myself I know I couldn’t have done two years ago.” She speaks of her father raising her to take care of herself, even if that was avoidant. She has, in a sense, been taking care of herself since she was eight. She is ready to be an adult, to sit down and do taxes, pay housing deposit, fill out forms that her mom won’t remind her to. She was terrified of doing it all on her own, because high school to college is such a huge jump. It is major, and every single thing changes. You go from living at home to having to do everything on your own. It’s insane, she says, being in an area where 2,000 other people are essentially going through the same thing. It’s a small school, but there’s a lot of support in the air. “I was not prepared for the transition and kind of got thrown into it, but we’re here. I ask people how they are and they tell me they’re alive, and that’s good for now. We’re here, in this moment, and that is all we can wish for. Sometimes, you just have to take a step back and not be so worried about the future. Give yourself a sec to be in the moment.”
Thank you for reading! Have a lovely weekend and I will see you soon (maybe Sunday but also maybe not but definitely soon)
xoxo,
