(brief summary)
I went to Lollapalooza last summer with a friend, and had a bad experience in the OutKast concert. I had already gotten tickets for another concert that September but had such bad anxiety from my Lollapalooza experience that I gave the tickets away. My parents were pissed (I’m 16 now, and was 15 during the Lolla festival). Now I want to go to a Foo Fighters concert this summer. I have two problems: getting over my anxiety and convincing my parents to let me go. As of now, they have no idea anything happened at Lolla.
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(whole story)
I have not mentioned any of this since it happened. I have a very hard time talking about bad things that happened to me.
Anyways, I had a great time on Friday. I talked to some amazing people, and I went to an amazing Arctic Monkeys concert til late. When I got home, I forgot to take my OCD medication because I was so tired. The next day, I was a little on edge because of that.
Despite not knowing anything about them, my friend (who bought the tickets) dragged me to an Outkast concert. It was crowded, sweaty, and overbearing. We moved til we got to a decent spot, but I had bad moments of anxiety when we were pushing through the crowd and having no room to breathe. I didn’t tell that to my friend. Before the concert started, the guy behind me tried to take a leak, and “accidentally” peed on me and some other dude. He apologized and offered me drugs or beer, which I declined. (I was a little tempted to take some beer though because I was so rattled). He then poured water on my legs and wiped it with a cloth. But I didn’t ask him to touch my legs or anything like that, so it was still frightening. The rest of the crowd was very kind about it, and yelled at the guy and gave me extra water and space.
The concert started, and it was fine. I was still a little shaky from what had happened, but I was still dancing with my friend. I accidentally bumped into a guy, and I smiled at him to try to indicate that I didn’t mean to bump into him. Well I guess his pot-addled brain didn’t take it that way because as I was continuing dancing he slipped his hand around my waist and pulled me in front of him. It was even worse to me because I was wearing a crop top with high waisted shorts, and had a little sliver of skin showing. His hand had gone on that skin part and started to go up the back of my shirt. As soon as I could, I shoved him off and said “No.”. He backed off. But I was still scared. I told my friend what happened, and we tried to move elsewhere. Moving between the crowds made me feel like all air left me, and that the people were surrounding me and crushing me like a cave. I said thank you and good-bye to these two guys that were really nice to me during the first incident, and my friend and I left the concert area. I was crying and it was terrible. We couldn’t even leave the festival because my friend’s mom was picking us up at a destined time. Her mom is abusive, which made us scared to call her early and explain what happened. We were worried my friend’s mom would blame her (my friend) for what happened.
We went to Lolla on Sunday (we did not want my friend’s asshole mother to feel like we wasted the money she spent on three day passes), but snuck out and walked around downtown. It was nice, but we were scared of getting caught the whole time. I really appreciate that my friend took that kind of risk for me.
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Months before all of this, I was really into the Black Keys and bought some tickets for an upcoming concert in September (which is after all of this). I was still badly shaken up about Lolla, so I drove my parents crazy by being ambivalent about going to the concert and ultimately giving up the tickets. I also had a lot of guilt for not wanting to go to a concert I was pumped to go to months before.
Now I am really into the Foo Fighters, and they are having a concert in walking distance of my house. I really want to go but there are a lot of issues:
1) My lingering anxiety of what had happened
2) The fact that I could suddenly not want to go to the concert like before
3) My parents, who now don’t want to buy tickets because I bailed on the Black Keys concert (which on makes sense on their part, but still is annoying haha)