Fell in Love With A Boy.

It’s been hard to write the past three months, because I’ve been in the nascent stages of a relationship with a guy I really liked. I hadn’t liked a guy this much in a decade. And he consumed my summer, but he asked that I not blog about him. So every time I came to my blog, giddy with how he made me feel, I had to compartmentalize and write about something I wasn’t entirely passionate about. It was hard.

But last night, the dreaded conversation occurred, and quite frankly, I no longer care that he asked me not to blog about him. Or as my friend Ashley said, once he ended it, he surrendered all rights to ask anything of me. I will not share any identifying details about him, and I’m still too hurt to share any of the nice things he did (though I do kinda want to publish his emails for the public to read and decide if I was way off-base in thinking we had a serious relationship…but I won’t do that).

Here’s what I have learned about writing, ever since I was a little girl: it helps. It helps me make sense of loss, it helps me deal with anger and bitterness, it helps me find humor in humorless places. And when I’m feeling the way I am right now, writing helps me crystallize my feelings, rather than allowing the pain and hurt to create an irrational monster. Because while I am angry and sad and devastated, I don’t want to vilify him. So even though I might write sentences expressing my anger, I revise, because my depth of caring for him outweighs the anger.

I can’t say that I loved him, but I was definitely falling in love with him–something that is hard for me to admit. I will share one prescient exchange we had about a month ago. He shared a concern with me and as we talked through it he said, “I think God has a plan for you and me. I think for me, it’s to show me that good and kind people still exist. But I think His plan for you is to not settle for less than you deserve.”

I’m still not convinced that he would have been less than I deserve. But I guess I get to find out.