By Erin Engelson
Someone once told me, “Surround yourself only with people who are going to lift you higher.”
Not a bad way to live your life. Too bad I don’t follow it.
As far as toxic relationships go, I have the worst. And I’ve been in it for a good chunk of my life.
My toxic relationship is with the Red Sox.
The Sox make me absolutely miserable most, if not all of the time. Being a diehard member of “The Nation” has symptoms that most people just don’t understand. Take, for instance, last year’s October debacle. Most people were sad for a little while, but then went on with their daily lives. I, on the other hand, was sick for like, the rest of the month of October and part of November. I didn’t go to class; I just moped around like a sad little puppy. I really think I was clinically depressed.
And last week, during Game 3 of the Anaheim series, my roommates were completely dumbfounded and a little bit disgusted when I paced around the apartment ranting. I nearly threw up several times. Then, after they won the game, I collapsed onto my bed like I had just run the marathon.
Well, this week has made me sicker than anything.
Maybe it’s the fact that one of the most offensively successful teams over the course of the regular season couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn during the ALCS, when it really matters. Maybe it’s the fact that the starting pitching, which I believe absolutely has to take us to at least the sixth inning for us to succeed, has failed to perform.
No, it’s neither of those things. Well, on the surface, it is. But ultimately, it’s about betrayal. Ever since my dad took me to my first Sox game in 1994 (Frank Rodriguez started for the Sox, they lost to the Royals), I have defended my team when others made fun of them. I haven’t given up on them through the hard times, and I’ve celebrated with them through the good, like winning the division in 1995. (The last time they accomplished that, by the way.) Through all my loyalty, like refusing to talk to my younger sister for an entire week after she wore a Yankees T-shirt, my beloved Sox just keep hurting me, summer after summer, autumn after autumn, year after year.
And its not just little hurts, like calling someone a fatty, or forgetting someone’s birthday. When it hurts, it hurts wicked bad.
If any friend had treated me this shabbily over the course of a lifetime, I would have kicked them to the curb a long time ago. But no, I just keep coming back like a fool. Thinking maybe this time it’ll be different. But it never is. They get me high all summer long, then rip my heart out and drop it on the tracks of the green line. It gets run over repeatedly somewhere between Kenmore Square and Blandford Street.
But I scrape up what’s left of it and put it back in, hoping, wishing, praying that they won’t let me down again. They couldn’t! I couldn’t suffer like this for this long. There has to be a light at the end of the tunnel.
If there is, maybe I just don’t see it.
I have a tattoo of the Sox emblem on my hip. This past week I’ve wanted to take a piece of sandpaper and scratch it off. The pain of a do-it-yourself tattoo removal would be far, far less than the emotional and physical pain the Sox have put me through.
At the beginning of September, I predicted the boys of summer would ruin my October and November, just like they have before. My roommate looked surprised and asked, “They’re going to ruin your October and November?” with a look in her eyes that was a little bit of disgust but mostly pity. She just didn’t get it.
Being a true Sox fan is a test of emotional fortitude. Take my father, for instance. He’s been there for 1967, 1975, 1986, 1995, 1999, last year and now. Look at all the time he’s wasted being miserable.
My mom said that in 1986, after Game 6, he went out wandering around the neighborhood, dazed and confused, “at whatever ungodly hour of the night the game ended.” That was, of course, after he watched the entire last inning through the window; he was standing outside on the porch. He just didn’t know what to do. His world was crumbling in his hands just as it had the year before, and the year before that and every year since he had become a Sox fan.
But he keeps going back. And I will, too.
— Erin Engelson is a sophomore journalism major.
