First Heartbreak

I feel like the older I get the more I'm reflecting on random parts of my life. I've been thinking about middle school a lot. I had a really good experience. I was at a small school with people I had grown up with. We were sheltered enough that we had retained our innocence (and stories we heard appalled us).

It's amazing to me that that was literally half a lifetime ago. Today I was drinking my coffee and looking at my Timehop app and saw that Monster's Inc. came out 13 years ago. And then I remembered: Yesterday marked the day that I got my first broken heart, half a lifetime ago.

It wasn't my first boyfriend. I had ended my first "relationship" and broke his heart. But this was the boy next door. A boy I had grown up with. He was 2 years older. We walked to the movies with our siblings and held hands. He burned CDs for me of bands that he liked (mainly A Newfound Glory and Blink 182). We watched movies in the garage with our siblings. I rode on the back of his BMX bike. We hugged. We played Sardines at night in the neighborhood. We wrote notes and handed them off to each other. It was cute. It was so innocent. It lasted for a summer and then was abruptly over. I got dumped by his sister. I found out he hadn't like me for a couple weeks and his whole family had known. I felt humiliated. I was broken. He didn't want to be friends. He said we only hung out because we liked each other. And that was that. We all pretty much stopped hanging out. I vowed to myself to never let that happen again.

It took me 2 years to move on. And I have no idea why. I have analyzed what it was about that relationship and the best answer I can come up was that it was just because it was the first heartbreak. And things like that can scar you. I hadn't loved him. I didn't even really know him. We didn't really have a friendship. He was right in that we only hung out because we liked each other. And he was right in ending it. I don't know what I was expecting. Maybe I was just a hopeless romantic that finally had a guy interested (I was never a pretty girl in my classes), and the rejection hurt. Maybe the fairy tale, Cory and Topanga, boy-next-door story was shaped what I thought relationships should look like.

That experience shaped me though. I became the heartbreaker. I didn't let anyone get close. I ended relationships after a few months. My longest relationship before Doug was 4 months. A big part of that was because I'd figure out that I didn't want to be with the guy a lot faster. So why waste my time? Why get invested and open my heart up to be broken again when I knew it wasn't going anywhere? (Something I knew and ignored with the boy next door). In some ways I'm glad I did this, because most of the guys in high school weren't worth the investment.

A lot of experiences in my life have caused me to try to protect myself. To put up walls and not be vulnerable, because I only saw vulnerability as an opportunity to be hurt. This was one of the first experiences to contribute, but not the most profound. But living that way is so pointless. Yes, there are situations and people to protect yourself from. But to limit your vulnerability, to limit your capacity for pain, is to limit your capacity for joy. And if I want to live my life with joy, I need to be able to be vulnerable. Not letting people in because they might hurt you will keep people out of your life that could lift you up and be a lifelong friend. We learn from pain and joy. Embrace life. Don't cower.

My heart mended and I moved on. It was cracked and broken again a couple times over the years but that's because I was able to open my heart to others. And Doug got to keep my heart. And I his. Both have scars but they're what makes us uniquely us. Without those scars I wouldn't be who I am today. So I can look back with a smile on that first sweet, simple, puppy-love relationship. And be thankful for how it contributed to my future relationships.

It'll be fun in 26 years when I can reminisce about this time in my life, and how much will have happened in the next half of my lifetime.