I’m actually in the middle of my senior year right now. And thank you for not coming across as an adult that treats everything they went through as a child as insignificant – it seems difficult to try and find adults willing to help instead of demean my emotions. I agree – my future is bright. What I cannot wait for is for the feelings I feel now just to be a distant memory.

This past relationship wasn’t necessarily bad, but it wasn’t exactly all that I could ask for, either. We got together my freshman year, and I was busy doing my own thing with my friends and BAM! Suddenly I was in a relationship and falling in love for the first time. Things were great until a year into it when I started having anxiety and panic attacks. That made dealing with my ex day to day nearly unbearable (he was my biggest trigger), although it wasn’t necessarily his fault. I gave a lot – and possibly too much – of myself to this one person. It even got to the point where I started criticizing my best friend only because he had problems with her and didn’t care for the way she acted. Now I have never felt more sorry for the things I said about her that I never really meant. The motivation was acceptance – and it was a terrible approach. I abandoned a lot while in that relationship. But I also changed a lot. High school is a really confusing experience. He didn’t know who he was when we started dating and I had no idea what was in store for me along the way. Other than the fact I still look like an 8th grader, I’m unrecognizable compared to myself as a freshman.

There were a lot of experiences I shared with him. First kiss, first real dinner date, first real relationship, and a lot of other firsts. We so often want the first to be our only that we hang on until we can’t possibly do it anymore, even if it means sacrificing ourselves and our own happiness. But what is a good relationship where you become a shell of yourself? Not a relationship at all.

I have to be around people so often that once I get home, that’s really all I want to do is be by myself. I’ll communicate otherwise, but I don’t talk to very many people outside of school. And I’m fortunate to have people that understand me and how I’m feeling that know I just want to be alone to let my negative and uncomfortable feelings go. As we speak, I’m just taking time for myself with the expectation that people be annoyed with my current emotions or not, but I don’t care. I’m taking care of myself and that’s all that matters.

Back when I was still with my ex, I made a conscious decision to change the way my life was headed. So, really, I have been working on myself. It was just harder with such a difficult relationship taking place. Yes, I’m not a perfect human being. I make mistakes and I make misjudgements. But I also do a lot of good. I see in myself that I am in tune with my emotions constantly and I’m always taking an opportunity to learn something about my life or someone elses. I don’t like to talk about it, but I feel like I understand things a lot of people my age just don’t get. I’ve taught myself to see from different emotional perspectives and taught myself how to act and how to react and it has made the world of difference in the relationships I share with my family, who are the primary people in my life. The idea that people need another person to be happy is so…dumb. We are in control of our happiness. We are always born whole. Having people and relationships in our lives just add to the wholeness we already have. My current boyfriend just so happened to be there. We just so happened to share a lot of similar interests. I am, however, pressing full down on the brakes if I ever feel the need to. We have no rush to get into things. And the wonderful thing is that he understands why and has been very supportive.

I’ll have days where I come to school feeling embarrassed because I’ll feel depressed and on the verge of tears because grief just comes back and hits me like a ton of bricks. I can tell him that I’m just having one of my days (I explained that these will be a recurring thing for a while) and he doesn’t have any issue with it. Which actually freaked me out at first; I’m not used to the patience.

As for friendships, I can honestly say I probably won’t ever want to come to my high school reunions (that’s the verdict as of now, at least). But I will say that if someone does something that makes me laugh, I feel the freedom to laugh. It doesn’t matter who this person is considered to be by the school. Usually, if someone made a joke about something stupid that happened, I would turn my nose up and ignore them. But I realized that I don’t have to take things so seriously. I’m learning to reach out of the shell I was so used to being inside of, and now people are opening up to me as well…and it’s people I never would have expected to communicate with!

Thank you for the kind words, Singh. Reading this reply put me to tears. I am thankful for your understanding and your response. Reaching out to strangers has seemed to be the best therapy for me so far. So again, thank you. 😀

-Megan