April Awakening: Day Three 🌧️🌧️🌧️
When I was sixteen and had my first boyfriend, I could barely keep it to myself. His dad owned a website that was kind of like LiveJournal, so I used that for my online outpourings of love. I wrote about him all the time and how much I absolutely adored him. One day shortly after we became official, I got a comment on one of my entries from a girl he briefly dated before me. “I know you’re excited about this new relationship but you’re going to put him off the more you talk like this. Cool your jets, girlie.”
I remember feeling really bad about it, and going to my boyfriend to talk about it. “She’s just jealous of you,” was his reply. It made me feel better, but somewhere deep down I knew that wasn’t the only reason the comment came. I certainly was gushing. It was my first relationship and I was excited to finally be on the team. The whole world needed to know and I was making it my mission to tell everyone about it.
We lasted six months. Two weeks before we broke up, I wrote him a long love note during my one and only In School Suspension. I felt how ill-received it was, but he played nice, even though his thoughts were clearly elsewhere. I guess somewhere deep down in my psyche I knew I was losing him, and was grasping at the only acts of desperation I knew to keep this relationship afloat.
That was over two decades ago. I’ve come a long way since then. I’ve wised up (I hope) and have far more emotional depth than that. But a lot of insecurity still clings to me in these stages of newness and renewal.
I’ve only recently gotten back in contact with someone from my past who I’ve known since we were both six-years-old. We’ve struck something up here, something I want to talk about all the time with everyone I know. It’s nice. I feel heard, seen, respected, appreciated, truly cared for; Something so sorely lacking in all my previous relationships. But I still feel lingering anxiety from them, even as this new pairing could finally be putting that all to rest.
For one, I know I’m always going to get a text back. Maybe not right away, as everyone has an independent life, but that aspect of not knowing how long I’ll have someone seems to have flown out the window. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m going to overly gush about how much I care, putting them off me and what we’ve already built. There’s a feeling like if I tell my friends or co-workers how happy I am, I’m going to mess things up. I’ve been walking on shaky ground for so long that I can’t even entertain the possibility that things may be smooth the further down I go.
I’m working on it, Truly I am. I feel like I can say anything to this person, share with them any thought I have with no fear of judgment or retaliation. I can even talk to them about my insecurity, my fears, my hang-ups, all that. So maybe getting it out there here is just one more step in finally getting past what I need to get past, and put an end to this troubled swell of emotions. I hope I get to keep writing about this budding new buddyship, this time with no worries attached.
Plus, he’s tall. Very tall. Hard to feel insecure when you feel so tiny and protected.