On Mountain Dew

Through most of my 20s, I wasn't really much of a pop drinker. Most of the time, I was a water drinker. In fact, the rough days at work that I spent thinking "I'm going to have an adult beverage when I get home," I arrived home to say "You know what sounds way better than an adult beverage? Water." There were a few exceptions to this rule. Iced tea is my favorite but required that there be enough room in the all-too-small apartment freezer for a bag of ice. And pop is my caffeine of choice (because most coffee dehydrates me so quickly that my whole body turns into a giant cramp).

The problem with being a water drinker is that when you're at a restaurant the water is free. I've often felt like a cheapskate for telling a server that all I want is water with my meal because I know it means less revenue for the restaurant and a lower tip for the server. But really, I often just want water with the exception of the occasions when I really need the caffeine or the occasions when a restaurant is the only place I can get another of my favorite beverages (like when Baja Blast Mountain Dew was exclusive to Taco Bell or when Raspberry Coke Zero was available anywhere that had what I refer to as a "Magic Coke Machine"). But most days I order water and try to not feel guilty about simply getting my preferred beverage. Where this becomes problematic is when I go to a restaurant and intend to get just a beverage and not food. I'm not going to show up somewhere and only order something that I can get for free, so I try to find a beverage that I actually have to pay for, and it is here that the real story begins.

In each of the last few springs of my teaching career, I was involved in a variety show that raises college scholarship money for local graduating seniors. After each night's show, members of the cast gathered at a local eatery to spend time socializing. One of the last years I was involved, I was feeling unusually social and decided to go out on some weeknights as well as the weekend. Being adults, most people who went out after the shows would order a beer. Personally, I'm not a fan, though I've attempted and failed to acquire the taste for beer on more than one occasion. Even then, I generally tended toward avoiding alcoholic beverages on school nights. Planning to get only a beverage, free water was out of the question, so I asked what brand of pop was available. Pepsi. There are very few Pepsi products that I find drinkable, and only one of them is consistently available in restaurants. I ordered a Mountain Dew. I had no clue what I was in for.

I got a little flack that first night. I was reminded how horrible Mountain Dew is for me (or people in general) with its crazy-high sugar content. I promised I'd order my mixed drink of choice the following night, a Friday. But it was the weekend of the April Snowpocalypse of 2018, and on Friday night the roads were awful. Not knowing how long I'd stay given the tough road conditions, I opted away from alcoholic beverages again. I ordered another Mountain Dew. I got more grief for it that night, though as I desperately tried to explain my decision, one supportive new friend declared "You do you, Heidi!" effectively ending the disagreement over the Mountain Dew I'd ordered. Two nights out in a row. Two Mountain Dews. I never imagined anything would come of it. It was probably a mistake, then, to post something on Facebook a few days later when I found the Baja Blast variety of Mountain Dew in a store for the first time in two years; after two years of only ever getting it on trips to Taco Bell, I was ecstatic. The response I got from my cast friend who most vocally opposed my two Mountain Dew orders? A brief comment on the status: "Noooooooo!"

A few nights later I went out for dinner with a few of my new show friends before we went to a volunteer event that evening, meeting at the same location where our post-show cast gatherings had taken place. Knowing that I was going to be ordering food that night, I fully planned on ordering water to go with it. When our server came to take drink orders, I couldn't even get a breath in to ask for water before that same friend who'd commented on my Facebook status days before jumped in.

"Just, please. Anything but Mountain Dew!" she pleaded.

"I'll have a water," I said to the server matter-of-factly, without a moment of hesitation.

"Just ignore her. If you want a Mountain Dew, order a Mountain Dew," a less outspoken member of our dining party assured me.

"No, really, I just want water," I insisted, standing my ground.

"She'll have a Mountain Dew, put it on our bill," he told the server, and I decided to let it go at that point, not wanting to argue any further. It was another evening, another Mountain Dew.

Fast forward to the end of the week at our cast banquet when I was definitely sticking to just water because caffeine would not have been helpful to the extreme anxiety I was feeling that evening, and I also try to avoid adult beverages when I'm having a rough mental health day (though there may have been one later that night because peer pressure is a thing). I was sitting at the table post-major panic attack (which only one person at our table knew about) with my cup of water trying to feel like I wasn't an intruder sitting at a table with a pre-established group of friends who I'd really only just started to get to know, when the friend sitting next to me pointed to my cup.

"I can't help but notice that this isn't Mountain Dew," she commented. Post-panic attack me had had it. (To be fair, I'm fairly certain that the friend who made the comment was unaware that less than an hour before I'd had a panic attack so bad that I'd sequestered myself in a bathroom stall and taken over a half hour to reemerge).

"I am never going to live that one down!" I despaired.

"Nope!" she replied. "It's who we are, and that's what we do!" It was then that I realized it. This group of people who I desperately wanted to find friendship with were the kind who occasionally (okay, more than occasionally) razzed each other for the little things, but always from a place of love and trust that together they could laugh at their mistakes and flaws and be okay with their own and each other's imperfections. And to be fair, I'd doled out some crap of my own during show week a couple of weeks before. And the first time I did it, the response I got was, "Oh, you've learned to speak my language!" On that banquet night, I admit that I questioned if my anxiety levels could handle being a part of that group. And though the following year in that performing group I came to dole out as much as I received back, another major mental health crisis later in which I lost trust in most every friendship I'd developed in the teaching world, and I retreated from the love language of sass and snark once more.

The use of sass, snark, and sarcasm as a love language has never come naturally to me. I mean, I had plenty of sass growing up, but it was sass born out of a struggle to identify and communicate big feelings at best and out of malice at worst. I was all-too-familiar with the taste of soap as a young child, and when that common consequence failed to have any effect, my parents had to graduate me to tabasco sauce. And in the face of a world that made no sense or felt like it was spinning out of control, snark has often been the only coping mechanism that kept me functional. But to use those in a way that lovingly and lightheartedly held my friends accountable or kept them humble? Even when I tried, I'd often fail. And the me who has through my entire life regularly taken things far more literally than they're supposed to be interpreted continues to feel the pains of rejection far more often than I generally care to admit when snark and sass are thrown my way, even when I'm well aware that it's meant to be in love and not malice. Yet somewhere through adulthood I've developed a knack for building my deepest friendships with people for whom snark, sass, and sarcasm are their native tongue. It's a skill I've had to develop to keep up with them, but outside of that relatively brief time with my show friends, it's one that I've rarely felt comfortable with.

You see, I originally wrote much of this post over five years ago and for reasons that I can't recall, I never actually published it at that time even though it read as a fully completed post. There have been times that I've occasionally returned and appreciated the craft of what I'd written back then, but each time I found myself resigned to leaving it in the drafts, knowing that the hope and peace with which I'd first written it lay shattered in millions of pieces that seemed impossible to repair.

And yet.

One day this winter while sitting at lunch with my work family, there ensued a discussion on our waning snark filters in the midst of stress. One friend non-seriously pondered if an alcoholic beverage might be the solution to dull the levels of snark that seemed inevitable to making it through the rest of the day. I took pause, reflecting on an evening this fall with a different group of friends when a more-tipsy-than-usual me fully unintentionally dropped my filter when provoked by one of the friends present that night. Mind you, I would have felt equally comfortable dropping said filter with that particular friend without the evening's adult beverages. I've always struggled to get mental health professionals to understand that when I say I only drink socially, it's not in order to feel more comfortable around people but because I feel comfortable around those people in the first place. In fact, I only drink around people whom I fully trust and feel safe with so that I don't have to worry about how people react when alcohol removes my filter whether I'd want to have one or not - because they'd likely hear the same thing on nights that I choose other beverages. So the idea of alcohol as a tool to hold in snark felt laughable in my case.

"Nope. Alcohol wouldn't be helpful. That's how the snark starts to pop out," I piped in during that lunch conversation at work.

"I'm sorry, start?" the most blunt of our group retorted, eyebrows raised in her signature lovingly accusatory look.

And suddenly I realized that she was right. Because after years of questioning exchanges of snark, I'd somehow regained a comfort level. After job after job where work relationships had gone sideways the moment I unmasked, I'd found a place where I could use snark as a coping mechanism once more, and though there were times that I'd been understandably lovingly and graciously corrected, the rejection and judgment I'd often faced elsewhere never followed. Even more surprisingly, my once-nearing fluency in the love language of snark, sass, and sarcasm had begun to reemerge. It was only a week or two earlier during another day's lunch at work that the other often-literally-minded member of our group had needed to tell us that while he understood that the rest of us have relationships in which we comfortably throw snarky jabs at each other, he needed to not be a part of it that particular day. A day that I'd spent the verbal sparring session comfortably holding my own against the rest of the snark participants. So those at my lunch table were plenty familiar with my snark.

"Fair. The snark would start to pop out places that it shouldn't. You get one of the most unfiltered versions of me," I responded to the friend who'd made the candid accusation.

Because the fact of the matter is - I can really only handle the exchanges of snark and sass and sarcasm in my innermost circles of friends. The ones who have proven that they'll stick around despite the flaws they lovingly - but bluntly - point out. The ones who handle my failed attempts at sarcasm with grace. The ones who have repeatedly walked alongside me without judgement on my more unnecessarily opinionated days. I mean, I can certainly dole it out elsewhere given the opportunity, and there are times of notable or continual distress when it accidentally seeps out in unintended places - like the evening this fall at dance class that I gained the label "Spicy Heidi" after the week's work stress used up the entirety of my filter energy, leaving my nonverbals fully unguarded, after which I found myself steeped in feelings of guilt and anxiety despite the fact that there was truly no malice behind my response. And the ability to take sass and snark lovingly directed my way? It still often comes with heaps of anxiety and feelings of rejection. Half the reason I try to hold in my own snark is because I know I can't handle someone sending the same vibe back at me.

But my work family? They've seen nearly all the worst of me over the past year, and for whatever bafflingly inexplicable reason, they still stand by me. There are a lot of days that I struggle to trust their steadfastness - through recent months in particular. Countless days where I wonder if their tolerance of my presence is wearing thin. If the only reason I'm still welcome is out of the forced proximity of working together. And yet there are the funny meme text exchanges on evenings and weekends. The suggestion of setting regular times to get together outside of work far more frequently than I dared ask. And countless verbal sparring matches that never once made me question our friendship - even gradually teaching me how to lovingly laugh at myself for quite possibly the first time in my life.

Socks recently purchased on account of they made me think of conversations with the work friend most responsible for me learning to laugh at my own ridiculousness. (And I only later realized that they color coordinate well with both the regular and Baja Blast varieties of Mountain Dew)

I may no longer be in close touch with those whose friendships were to me in many ways defined by a few nights of Mountain Dew, but I've never been able to look at a can of Mountain Dew the same since that series of evenings. At the time it represented a point of growth in how I handled anxiety. And for a lot of years since then, it represented a pleasant memory wrapped in the sorrow of what I had lost. But today it serves as a reminder that when you find a group of people with whom you can exchange comments on each other's flaws with the perfect balance of accusation and compassion and humor, it's okay to let your walls down and trust that your friendship is going to be okay.