Winging It

Last night, after I had made the post on drugs, I was about to go to bed when I started to do a head count of how many guys at my hostel that I know for sure that don't smoke or abuse drugs. And while I was making my count, I had stopped at my close friend who at one time used to be my roommate.

The reason why I had stopped was due to a conversation we had some few days ago. You see, we were seated with another guy who was smoking beside us, and the guy had passed the weed to me, kinda like asking me to smoke from it. A gesture like that is a joke smokers around here always do to the non-smokers, so they pretend to pass it to you, knowing fully well that you wouldn't take it from them and everyone just laughs about it.

But when he passed it to me and I refused, he didn't just stopped there, he had passed it over to my friend and in a bid to try and continue the joke, I had made a comment, asking him to take it from him, to which he had replied that if I was willing to take a drag from the weed first, he was going to do the same.

Now I know that when all of this was said, it was intended as a joke, but what made that particular comment stand out for me was because this wasn't exactly the first time he was making such a comment for a lot of other stuff that has nothing to do with smoking. And whenever I do go ahead to do that stuff, he does it too.

I began to notice that to my friend, I was his tolerance level when it comes to trying out new things. By "tolerance level" I mean that due to the fact that we both hate and like almost the same things, and probably due to how responsible he feels I am, he now uses me as a measurement tool for new stuff he should or shouldn't try.

So if we both haven't been to the club before and I do decide that I want to go to the club, he too would want to try it out because now in my books, going to the club is no longer seen as a bad thing.

To cut the long story short and to exaggerate a little bit, he basically sees me as his role model and doesn't try new stuff (not all the time anyway) unless we've both agreed to do it together or I go ahead and do it first.

Now I don't know if that is a good way to live your life, but today's post isn't about him but about me, because if I'm his mentor and I don't have a mentor, who do I look up to, to ensure that I make the right decisions in order for my friend who's also looking up to me, to make the right decisions too.

Because the moment you realize that someone is basically making most of their decisions based off of your own decision that you just make from your head, you start to feel a little bit of pressure here and there because you start to second-guess your every decision.

Anyways, while it might feel nice to know that someone out there sees me as a role model, it's not exactly always the best feeling, especially when you're just winging it and not exactly following a textbook or anything like that. Because the problem with that is when you wing it, you would make mistakes, but this time, it's not just you making those mistakes... It's you and everyone else looking up to you.

_{photo by Carolina}