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When I was in middle and high school, I didn't have friends.

Often when people say this they are on some level exaggerating, but I truly mean it. I was always distant and disconnected from the friends I did have in middle school, not knowing how to talk in groupchats or open up in person. I was perpetually trapped in my own brain and by the end of eighth grade, when the friend group i did manage to hold onto dissolved due to boys and moving and different classes and stupid fights I couldn't understand, I was left alone. I spent all of high school distanced ... from the world, my brain a fog of discomfort, regret and fear that kept me from communicating in the way I wished that I could. I had no one to text, no one to hang out with. I would go to school, go to my extracurricular where I would separate myself from the groups formed and quietly do whatever the club or class or show needed from me, or I would go home.

In June of 2020, I got my first guitar.

At this point I had started to connect with people again. I started getting medicated for depression, ADHD, and a panic disorder at the end of 2018, and had made my first real friend in years, Eddie, while taking a summer film program soon after. Eventually I met Eddie's friends, and slowly some of them became my sort-of-friends. I even met my first girlfriend and we started going out. we had our second official date in march of 2020. It was at my house, though we were planning to go to the theaters that weekend to see Birds of Prey. I was almost deliriously happy that day, and even got bold enough to kiss her, officially having my first ever kiss. It was amazing, and I couldnt wait to see her again. After this 2 week lockdown thing ended we could spend as much time together as we wanted. Unfortunately, that 2 weeks turned into months. I had to break up with her over the phone a state away because my family was quarantining in New Hampshire. I never kissed her again after that.

Soon after that breakup i turned 19 and got Carrie, my blood red beginner squire complete with a small amp and a month of fender classes. I had a number of false starts with Carrie and with guitar in general, playing every day for a month before getting distracted and putting her down until I moved into my empty, single person, quarantined college dorm, and suddenly I was alone again. Carrie came back to me then, as I made simple one-string-at-a-time riffs for soundcloud to pass the time and try to stay sane. After 3 months I dropped out of college, along with the single other girl I knew on campus, and I moved home. I started 2021 with one of my worst ever depressive spirals, and Carrie got put to the side again. I shaved my head and failed to find a real job as I dogsitted and watched youtube and wondered why I wasn’t dead yet. I had also begun taking guitar lessons from a local woman named Lori.

Suddenly, after a few weeks of clumsily missing chords and strumming very, very slowly, Carrie and the world of guitar suddenly started opening up to me. I could feel it in my soul and my fingertips as it took me less and less time to learn songs, my hands started jumping to chords automatically. I could strum like a cowboy or to a backbeat or do quick and dirty downstrumming. I learned overcomplicated barre chords that my hands are almost too small to even properly play. My skills developed. Along with this, I dragged myself upwards. As the world slowly (but perhaps too quickly) opened up from covid, I opened along with it. I went back to college, taking community college classes at a pace I could keep up with. I found work, miserable retail work, but still my own money. I talked to people more, I bought tickets to go farther than I’ve ever been alone so I could meet the dear friends I had made online in real life and go see The Greatest Band Of All Time (MCR) Live at a festival. I got a better job. I got horribly ill with covid after going to said festival. And, most recently, I finally moved out of my childhood home (at least for now) to go live with friends of friends who I suppose I can now simply call friends.

And then. A show came out in the 2022 fall season, in one of the most packed seasons of anime in years, this show is deceptively simple. It’s about a lonely girl, hungry for connection, who finds it in music. More specifically, she finds it in Nijika, a far more extroverted girl who panic-recruits her as a fill-in guitarist for the first ever liveshow of her and her friend Ryou’s band, Kessoku. Through this band, she peels slowly (and reluctantly) out of her shell, learns how to connect with others and meet people who meet her where she is, who think she’s “cool”. And with their help, she pushes upwards and outwards, doing things she formerly thought were impossible for her due to her own brain, and finding levels of joy she never knew existed in connection with her bandmates as well as the other musicians and music lovers she meets along the way.

There will always be a disconnect. You can only spend so much time alone before it leaves a permanent mark on your soul. From start to end, Bocchi (or Hitori, though she prefers the nickname due to her never having one before) is terrified of others. The meer implication of opening up emotionally or interacting casually or making eye contact is enough for her overactive imagination to start eating at her from the inside. It traps her in worse case scenarios, mashed with the chaos of a high budget 70s genre art film or a shoddily put together youtube poop meme compilation (whichever is more your speed). She melts into puddles and hides in trash cans. She can’t physically force herself to play onstage at first without hiding in a large box that formerly homed mangoes. And while we watch her grow and change and connect, by the twelfth and final episode she still panics and runs away from guitar shop employees and throws herself offstage rather than try and say something funny to a crowd. Even as she grows and changes, she will forever be Bocchi.

But this isn’t a flaw, not inherently. People like Bocchi, they see her strange quirks and quiet attitude and odd moments of impulsiveness and really genuinely like her. They work to include her when she’s unsure of how to include herself, they try to accommodate her anxieties when talking so that she can stay involved, growing to understand her anxieties and abstractions thereof, and only finding more to love within it all

Now, as a 21 year old, I would say I relate more to Ryou, an introvert by choice, but part of me will always be Bocchi. And judging by the critical and fan reaction behind the show, I think there are far more Bocchi’s than I ever thought as a teen who truly believed I was alone in my feelings of fear and friendlessness. Perhaps this outpouring of love and recognition, this outpouring of Bocchi’s finally seeing themselves as more than the butt of the joke, but as a figure worthy of love will bring new connection between the isolated and the quiet. Maybe it’ll give someone the nerve to talk to that one nice girl who tries to keep them in the loop during conversations despite us rarely if ever saying anything. Maybe it’ll inspire a closet guitarist to go and print out a poster asking if there’s anyone around interested in starting a band. Or perhaps we’ll all just stay on our corners, our forums and discord servers and blogs, we’ll stay quiet. But that quiet is lighter now, a weight off the shoulders knowing love is possible and far closer than you could possibly imagine. Maybe those servers and forums and blogs can be those true connections and bonds of love.

Maybe we can all be alone, together.

Anyway, 9/10. Can’t wait for season 2.