Big Girls Do Cry, And That’s Okay.
By: Emily Orsini
Tags: Teenagers, Friendships And Lessons, Underage Drinking, Courage To Change

Hi, my name is Emily Orsini. I’m not different than you, your family, or your friends. I’m not special, every sixteen-year-old girl experiences the same things, and the fact that I set myself to a different standard than everyone else because I think everything I’ve gone through had been extremely challenging and exhausting is immature and childish, but I do anyways. There are people with things much worse than I have experienced, and this is most definitely a, “Kim, there are people that are dying,” moment, but I feel the sudden urge to share everything that I am feeling and get it out into the universe, even though I’m aware I live a good, stable life. I live in this little bubble that makes all my problems seem like the worst in the world, when in reality I know that people are living in far worse conditions and have struggles that I never have, and hopefully never will, experience in my life.

I’ve always been a strong, independent person. I can hold my ground, share what I think is right, and stand up for myself and others when need be. This attitude I’ve adopted has been a great way to allow myself to seem as if I can control everything and anything that happens in my life, which allows adults and my peers to feel respect and admiration for me. This is really out of character for me to brag about myself and show this sort of cocky persona, but self love is found in many colors, shapes, sizes, quantities, and qualities. This strength and independence I expose to the world is great for my reputation and appearance, but it leaves me alone at times, and scared even more.

Living life by your morals and what you believe is right is easier said than done, and most of the time, once completed, leaves you feeling empty and alone. You would think that the people surrounding you would feel great appreciation and look at you in a more respectable light, when in reality the people that agree with you are a significantly smaller percentage than the people that disagree with you. Once you see one negative response, you start to see all the negative responses, and end up completely disregarding anyone that believes what you believe.

As a kid, your teachers, parents, and guidance counselors always tell you to go to a trusted adult when you feel uncomfortable, when something happening around you isn’t right or, in my case, legal, and when you feel pressured into doing something that you don’t want to do. When you do this, there are two responses: one being that you are brave and posses a lot of courage, and the other being that you are a snitch, a tattle tale, and other adjectives that describe, “telling on someone.” When looking at the way people respond to the situations I just described, from my own personal research, a majority of adults respond in the first way, and a majority of teenagers, kids, and adults in their early twenties, respond in the second way. With me being sixteen years old, I have had more experience with the second party of people and am surrounded by them most of the time, which surrounds me with negative feedback and opinions. Of course, there are teenagers, kids, and adults in their early twenties who have agreed with me, and know that I did the right thing, but the majority of that group disagrees with me and my actions.

I’ve been so incredibly vague and lengthy at describing basic knowledge that everyone is most likely all aware of, but it leads me to the perfect build up of the situations I’ve encountered and have struggled with in the past year of my life. Let me just rip off the band-aid and share what these said-experiences specifically are: my best friend became involved in drinking alcohol and doing drugs. Some may say that this is normal, and that every teenager experiments with these sort of things, but I don’t think they should be normalized. I understand our world is becoming more and more progressive everyday, and I do agree with the idea on how it’s ridiculous that you can purchase a firearm when you’re 18 but not drink, but law’s are laws for a reason.

I’ve always been a good girl and a rule follower, along with my best friend, making this sudden change to, “live life more dangerously,” and, “let loose and have more fun,” really surprising, and quite frankly, alarming to me. When my big group of friends had first brought up the idea of drinking, my best friend an I had been against it, and had talked frequently about how we have goals and dreams we want to achieve and experience, and drinking and doing drugs at age fifteen was not the way to do so. I had never seen her or myself as people to get involved with the wrong crowd, making the idea of not drinking and not smoking pot easy to picture.

Everything sort of went down hill in August of 2020, where my friends and I had all decided it would be fun to go out to dinner in Media, a small city-like area in Delaware County, PA. I sat with my best friend and a few other girls, and the other table held the other members of our friend group that attended. The conversation of drinking had come up multiple times, where they asked me if I would be interested. I responded with a vague, “I’m not sure, I don’t think so.” I was afraid of losing them as friends, and being asked to sit at the other table, so I gave them the modified version of, “no”. Once we had finished dinner, we went back to my best friends house, where we casually hung out and talked. Three girls, my best friend included, had gone into the closet in her room, taking shots of vodka out of a plastic disposable water bottle. I was in the closet with them, and in the moment, I felt fine. I was enjoying their company, and ignored the fact that they were drinking. As soon as we left the closet, I was immediately wracked with an unsettling feeling and didn’t know what to do. I texted my boyfriend at the time, asking him what he thinks the next action I take should be. He is also not interested in drinking or drugs, so he advised that I get picked up by my parents and go home. He offered to take me home if my parents couldn’t pick me up, since he was out with his friends who were much older than him. I called my parents and they brought me home, where I sat in the car in silence. I slowly started to cry, but tried my best to hide it from my mom. She, of course, picked up on it, and asked me the next day what had happened. I hate lying to my parents, so I told them what had happened. Since the drinking was taking place in my best friends house and my parents had grown very close to her parents, my mom and dad made the decision to tell my best friend’s dad. This is when everything had started going downhill.

My father and her father had a very long conversation, which concluded with a surprised, and confused, reaction. I never said any names of who was doing what, but based off of how upset I was, my parents figured out my best friend had been participating in these activities. Since my friend’s dad has always been a very open to learning from experiences, he decided it would be best to hold a meeting where he’d invite all the members of our friend group, those who were there and not there, along with some other mutual friends, to talk about peer pressure and making good decisions. I sat in the middle room, with my mom and dad on either side of me, with eyes burning into my head from all sides. I was a target, and everyone had known that I was the one who caved and told my parents. I received various threatening and rude messages from my best friend and those who agreed with her, which caused me to enter into a depressive state. I had lost almost all of my friends in a matter of three days, just because I decided to do the right thing. I could have lied to my mom and say that nothing had happened, but I chose not to. I care about my friends too much to watch them hurt themselves or their peers because of a stupid mistake they made in high school, just because they wanted to fit in.

I’ve heard from various sources that the girls I once considered to be my friends had started picking up other bad habits, such as getting blackout drunk, smoking marijuana, playing drinking games, and going into the woods to drink. Some have lost motivation for the things they used to love to do, had their grades drop, and started picking up unhealthy coping mechanisms. To this day, nearly four months after this whole situation took place, I am left with only four out of the original twenty friends I once had, but don’t regret anything I said or did. I still receive subtle jabs about how I’m not nice, a snitch, and a lot of other inappropriate names that I don’t feel comfortable with sharing.

My boyfriend at the time and I ended up breaking up, but I can wholeheartedly say that he had helped me get through the rough period I had just described. Him and his friend group had welcomed me, and for the period of time when I was completely alone, they were there for me. I appreciate him and all of his friends, and am extremely grateful to had been so graciously invited into their small friend group. And for my ex boyfriend, David, if you’re somehow reading this, thank you for sticking by me for the period time you could. Although it was short lived and heartbreaking for the both of us, I appreciate you and all you did for me, even though it caused you a significant amount of pain. I will always be grateful for you, whether we cross paths in life again or not.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story, and I hope it wasn’t to much of a waste of time. If anyone you know, or yourself, is struggling with the same things I struggled with, don’t hesitate to contact me. And if you’re in the same position my best friend was in, choose kindness, because you never know how much your words may effect someone until something permanent, extreme, or unfortunate happens.