“The next few years will be some of the hardest of your life. You will be bullied, hurt, disappointed, persecuted and left behind by some of your closest friends. You will feel lonely, lost, abandoned, confused and resentful. Your life will leave the path you always envisioned it taking. You will weigh the pros and cons of this life and wonder if you’d be better off just checking out for good.
You will come to cherish the old friends, mainly the guys in your life, who will stick by you, support you, and comfort you. Those close relationships will cause even more problems with the former female friends who have turned against you. They will misinterpret those friendships. They will be jealous and vengeful.
Already a loner, you will turn even more inward. You’ll spend hours alone in your room listening to music, which soothes your hurting soul. You will write, and write, and write … poems, journal entries, short stories, lists … and the writing will serve as your therapy. You’ll tell your diary things you think, but would never say out loud.
Depression and anxiety will creep in like a fog spreading into every corner of your life. For the first time you will acknowledge that “IF” is at the center of LIFE and you will obsess about every bad scenario your tortured mind can come up with for you to worry about. You will become the Queen of Catastrophizing, a trait that will follow you into adulthood.
You’ll see light at the end of the tunnel when one of your closest friends ends up accidentally introducing you to your first love. Getting swept up in that relationship, your first longterm one, will refocus your life. All-consuming, you will think about him all the time and live for the hours you spend on the phone every night and the limited time you get to actually spend together. Two years older than you, he will not respect your age or your values and will want more than you are willing to give. After nine months together, he will break your heart and move on to someone who will give him what he wants.
After months of pining, you will move on to focus on one of his friends, who is the epitome of bad choices. He is jaded, obviously hurt, closed off, and actually hates females. Hurt people hurt people, so he will be flirtatious, then distant; reeling you in, then cutting you off at the knees. He will show the most interest after you’ve given up and moved on. Thankfully, you will be smart enough to leave him in your rearview mirror. Even so, you will think about him for decades … whenever you watch true crime shows about sociopaths.
At sixteen you will fall in love with your best friend. While that sounds like a good thing, it will be the most tumultuous relationship in your life. Too much alike in some ways and too different in very important ones, the pairing will have more ups and downs than your favorite rollercoaster, Thunder Road, and will bring you equal amounts of joy and pain, so that you will have to leave the relationship and the friendship temporarily behind to hold onto your sanity.
The end of that initial relationship will turn out to lead directly to the most important event in your life. While trying to make him jealous, you will end up meeting your destiny, your future husband. For nearly two years, you will be the happiest you’ve maybe ever been, sharing weekend dates, school day morning meet ups, family trips, prom, and graduation together.
The minute you graduate from high school, you will be overcome with anxiety and fear. You’ll experience your first panic attack, which will cripple you. And then another. And another. And another. You’ll lose twenty pounds in about six weeks, weight you didn’t need to lose at the time. You will be unable to eat or to keep anything down when you do; unable to go out and enjoy the things that used to give you such joy. That summer will be the darkest time of your life.
In the throes of so much turmoil, you will reconnect with your former best friend/boyfriend who will know all the right things to say to comfort you. That ability to calm your fears will reignite old feelings and steer you along an entirely different path than you envisioned just a month before. After several months of stress, anxiety and conflicting feelings, you will turn away from your high school sweetheart of two years … and break his heart.
Finally, the summer will both creep and fly by. In August, you will literally force yourself to leave home, to attend Appalachian State University, with both your new/old boyfriend and your high school sweetheart along for the ride. August to December will be filled with more ups and downs than the Swiss Alps. New friends, new freedoms, new experiences will be a mixed bag of good and not so good. Emotional overload will threaten your sanity and your life. In November, a day shy of the transfer deadline, you will call your Mom and tell her you are coming home, transferring to UNCC. She will agree with your plan and the release of pressure will feel like someone has lifted the relief jigger valve on the pressure cooker of your life.
Being home will be a comfort and a crisis. As soon as you are away, the cat will play. The guy you thought would save you will betray you. Just when you have made him your everything, he will lie, he will cheat, he will break your trust.
And then you will have the biggest revelation of your life! YOU SCREWED UP! And all you can think about is how you wouldn’t be feeling this way if you hadn’t left your high school sweetheart, THE ONE, behind. You will feel like a fool for trusting your heart to someone who had already shown you what kind of person he was years before, the first time around. You will feel stupid for being snake charmed into trusting him again. And you will feel deep remorse for hurting the guy who really did put you before all others, who loved you, who you could trust …. who you wanted in your life.
Seeing, in contrast, the kind of man you are with you will write the most sincere Dear John letter and mail it off to Appalachian. There will be no such thing as call block then, but you’ll pretend there is, and be well and truthfully done with the relationship for which you’d lost everything. You’ll issue yourself a no contact order of the first degree. (Still, years later, he will have the power to break your heart all over again when you’ve long been happily married. News imparted in passing by a friend who doesn’t know your history will crush you, rock your world, and make you the saddest you’ve ever been in life when you learn that he has repeated the sins committed against him as a child.)
With no guarantees, but with a hope and a prayer, you will reconnect with your high school sweetheart. You’ll be the luckiest girl in the world when he is receptive. In three months you will be engaged and in a little over a year, married. It will be the best thing that has ever or will ever happen to you.
You’ll grow a marriage and a business together for at least forty years.”
That’s where I find my fifty-nine-year-old self now, celebrating both forty years at CRC Printing and thirty-nine years of marriage in June and hoping for many more years with Darryl. Those tough years from age fourteen to twenty made me who I am today. Though my husband would, I would not change a thing. I believe the mistakes led to growth that was essential for us to go through. Sometimes you need to miss something or someone to know their value. Losing someone can really make you appreciate and cherish what you have. I’m not at all sure that we would have made it through some of life’s challenges together if I had not known how empty my life was without him and how much it was worth the struggles.
I hear people say they wish they could go back and relive their school days. While adulting is challenging sometimes, I don’t pine for those years when I was a lost teenager, trying to figure everything out. I’m grateful she made it. I don’t want to be her ever again.
Robin's Eggs 