Why Am I Like This? And What Am I Doing?

My parents always ask me, “Why are you like this?” 

That question always brings me back to my roots. 

If it’s not painfully obvious from the amount of times I’ve tweeted about it, I grew up as a competitive dancer and I guess you can say that was the cause for a lot of psychological damage I encountered from age 9 to age 18. School from 8-3, dance from 4-9:30? No time for boys, parties, school dances, sports games? Sounds like absolute hell for a girl like me. 

But you wanna know what was worse than being a competitive dancer? Being a good competitive dancer. The only time I felt joy was when I was receiving attention, awards, compliments, or trophies because of how talented I was. But when I was 17 and I saw the look of disappointment on my parent’s faces when they found out I had been sneaking out to go drink with the guys on my dad’s basketball team, I knew I had found my calling. 

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The look I got that night was the same look I got three weeks later when we finally visited the University of Alabama. I remember it like it was yesterday. We were driving down University Blvd. and we passed a darty on Pi Kapp’s front lawn. My dad looked at me and said, “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?” Little did we both know, less than two years later, one of the guys on that same exact front lawn would pee the bed with me in it. It really is crazy how fate brings two people together. 

And here I go, turning a nice introduction into a story about a guy. Which is how I got here. Once I got to the University of Alabama, it was like letting a caged animal run free. After a year and a half, I started tweeting about my experiences with all the guys on my roster. I remember one of my (ex) best friends asked why I would portray myself the way I do. Thanks Angelina, but we can’t all be neuroscience majors. 

I’m a woman for the people and someone needed to say the things every other college girl was thinking, but was too scared to say themselves. Unfortunately for girls everywhere, my tweets were insanely relatable and I was able to accumulate a following of 116,000 people in less than a year. I’d say about a third of those are creepy men who DM me perverted things, but we’ll talk about that another time. 

When I got a DM asking what I was doing this summer as far as internships go, I had absolutely no idea. I had applied and heard back from a few in NYC, but were any of those other internships going to give me the attention and validation I absolutely need to survive? No, they were not. 

I took the trip to HQ about a month later and it was love at first sight. I had been following Barstool ever since my ex boyfriend introduced me to them years ago. He was a HUGE fan, but when I talked to him last week he said I “ruined the Barstool franchise” for him and “the only hot thing about me is my internship.” So that’s pretty cool I guess. 

I don’t really know exactly what I’m going to be doing here, and I’ve been told I can basically do anything, which is really nice (I had a job at a shitty pizza place in Alabama and being told what to do at all times and getting no attention or validation whatsoever really sucked). 

I’m going into my senior year of college and apparently I need to focus on responsibilities other than getting invited to fraternity formals and making sure I pace myself enough during darties so I can make it to the bar that night. 

So yeah. My name’s Alyssa, I’m 20 years old, I’m a hot mess, and I’m so excited to see what I’m going to make of all this.