Megamind

Last summer, June 6th to be exact, I had just moved into my grandparent’s house here in Maine. I had come all the way from Jacksonville, Florida, a place I hope to never go back to. Despite hating every moment of living there, I did make some pretty great friends over 5 years. It was especially hard to leave some of my old roommates and some of the kids I got into trouble with in high school. I won’t deny crying on my last day in Hell, I miss those idiots a lot. But I’m horrible at communication and keeping in touch with them over the phone is far more difficult for me than it should be.

Needless to say, the summer of 2019 was a lonely one. I do scroll through

Instagram quite a bit, and I’ve had some of the same internet mutuals for as long as 6 years. These aren’t people I’d talk to everyday or anything, but we’d bond over random things, mostly music, and we’d become used to seeing each other’s posts. To me, it’s like those family members you never really get to see, except for at the big family reunions.

I have this one friend I call Brando. We bonded over Slipknot, hence the nickname. We’d typically send each other nu Metal music or memes. One day he sent me this private account called ‘Megamind_fanpage_69’. I followed it because, why not? It was just a bunch of pictures from the movie Megamind, and I thought it was pretty funny. The captions were random things like, “I hate my summer school” and “My cat looked very cute this morning”. I kind of liked how the captions and the images had no correlation. But I constantly saw this person complain about math homework.

I literally had nothing else to do, so I commented on this person’s post and said something along the lines of “What kind of math is it?”. I get a message back from her and she explains to me that it’s some sort of linear equations in algebra one. Math is something that’s always come naturally to me so I tell her I could probably help her with some of it. We end up chatting about math and about her summer school. We talk about my friend Brando and Slipknot. Her name was Andre and she was going to be a senior next year like me. She was very easy to talk to and she always had weird Megamind pictures to send me. She didn’t have many friends, and I didn’t have anyone to talk to, so we started talking every week.

I did a lot of algebra one for her. I initially started trying to teach her different ways to solve equations, but some people just can’t grasp the concept of numbers. She was thriving in her English classes in summer school which was awesome, but she really struggled with math. It worked out well for the both of us though, I got her work done for her so she could get decent grades, and I got the satisfaction of getting good grades without actually being in school. It was a nice way for me to get back in the loop of things after not being in high school for a year.

If I hadn’t reached out to help her, I wouldn’t have been able to help her, and I wouldn’t have made a friend. Since Brando was the reason I followed that account, Andre and I talked about Brando a lot. It was nice because I had wanted to get closer to him, since we’d been following each other since middle school. And Andre was able to help me come out of my shell a little bit too. She’d make group chats with people and we’d have group calls. I was able to get back in the loop of making friends, since I really hadn’t done that since my freshman year of high school.

Making new friends is incredibly hard for me. I hate small talk, and I hate conversations that go, “how are you?” and “what are you up to?”. Andre really helped me to start conversations with more interesting topics. Learning about people while simultaneously teaching them about yourself is so hard. But I had a nice group of friends that I could talk to online during the rest of the summer.

And as the regular school year started for all of us, there was nothing but support and encouragement from everybody. Most of the people I ended up becoming decent online friends with had already taken an extra year of high school. It made me feel less like a failure in a sense. Everyone struggled with school in one way or another, and sometimes a little encouragement from people who actually understood my frustration helped me get through things.

I don’t talk to everyone in that group as much as I did over the summer, but we are all in understanding of moving on with our lives. I keep in touch with Brando and Andre more than anyone else. Whenever I find Megamind memes, I automatically send them to Andre and we’ll laugh about it and catch up. And, Brando, and I plan on meeting up this summer before we go to college. Although I enjoy being on my own, it’s nice to know that someone who lives a few states away cares a little bit about me.

Overall, I’m glad that I was able to help Andre with her summer math class. I helped her get through the most frustrating thing for her, and I was able to make a friend from it. If Brando hadn’t sent me her account, I wouldn’t have reached out to her so I owe it to him too. And although I probably spend more time looking at my phone screen in order to talk to them, I figure it’s pretty worth it. I also owe it to Andre for teaching me how to be better at social interaction and starting new conversations. I one hundred percent would not have made any friends at school if she hadn’t taught me how to keep the conversation interesting.

Photo by Franco Mathson on Foter.com / CC BY-NC