i feel blessed to have had the experiences i've had this year. i have grown so much in the last 365 days, i have witnessed so much kindness, so much love, so much hate, so much disdain, so much human; and i love it.
this year i fell in love for the first time.
10 months ago (as of four days ago) i was hired on at my new job. my coworkers were a funky mix of characters, and my boss was the same one i had worked under at my previous (and first) job. There was only one member of our team that was transferring over to our new store from our training location and he remained a mystery to me for a number of days before i finally got to meet him. He was a charming young guy, 20 years old, and totally my type. I spent just about every night thinking about the way I needed to act around my coworkers, I had come up with this insatiable goal to be likable by (mostly) everyone.
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It has been near the hardest year of my life; I do not say hardest because I know nothing will ever dethrone the year of the deepest, darkest, depression that I experienced when I was just thirteen.
These years were hard for different reasons, both of which occasionally caused me to want to end my life, but that's only a fraction of the story.
When I was thirteen, life was hard because I was lonely, drowning in a sea of no one. When I was eighteen, life was hard because I was lonely, drowning in a sea full of people. I truly had no one as a preteen, and as a young adult, I had so many people in my daily life, but none of them had seemed to really care about me, not in a way that mattered.
When I was thirteen, I carved zigged lines into my thigh because I thought nothing mattered anymore, and that I couldn't die before I had any scars. When I was eighteen, I crafted strategically placed tears into my arms because I felt I hadn't done a good enough job of being likable.
When I was thirteen, I liked the idea of a boy cat calling me. When I was eighteen, I would squirm every time my 38 year old coworker would make passes at me at work.
I taught myself to be independent when i was thirteen;
I taught myself to be strong when i was eighteen.
10 months ago, I met my soulmate. I met the other half of me. And no matter how much of my type he was, we were destined to be best friends.
I leave for college in four days. I leave my home store at work, for one located two-plus hours north. I leave my family and friends. leave my soulmate. I leave my best friend.
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I also leave the first boy to steal my heart.
No, my soulmate was never greedy enough to steal anything, but boy No1, was. He spun me into his trap and ripped it from me. He was unexpected. He was the first human I had ever kissed sober. He was the first boy that didn't leave me with PTSD after we hooked up. He felt like everything I had missed my whole teenage life.
Well, he broke my heart. Told me I was "lucky that [he had] broken [my] heart because others won't be so nice" and that we could never be together anyway because I was 18 and he was on the cusp of 22.
Now I'm gone.
It's been hard being gone, but now I've met a new boy. He smells like vanilla and nicotine, and is warm in every way. He's a nerd, but he's funny and sociable.
