Taylor Swift wisely wrote, “In your life you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team.”
When I was actually 15, I thought this was a load of crap. In high school l had always found myself pining after mediocre “hometown boys,” and my friends and family back home can attest to this statement. I’m not sure what the appeal was, because when I look at the boy I thought I had loved, I realize that not only did he treat me terribly, but his high school experience was the height of his life.
Call me delusional, but when I was 16, I couldn’t imagine a future in which I had moved on from this boy. I wanted him more than anything else and my whole world would revolve around his affection. I would also find myself pondering fears and thoughts surrounding this boy: “I’m so scared that I will never get over him, and for the rest of my life, I will be stuck loving him.” If I could say one thing to my 16 year-old-self, I would tell her that Taylor Swift was, despite my thoughts, actually right.
When you are confined to the invisible walls of your hometown, it’s so hard to imagine a world outside of that, but there is. There are experiences and people and places waiting for you. Regardless of how stuck or entrapped you might feel, there remains more to life than what you are experiencing right now. There are in fact greater things to life than a boy from your hometown, and there are certainly greater things to life than what your hometown has to offer.
Looking at it in retrospect, it’s crazy to think that a single boy from my hometown in Wisconsin would hold that much power over my life. But when you are 16, your hometown in Wisconsin is your entire life. It might seem like at that moment, that is your whole world, but then you realize that you haven’t even seen a portion of the world.
You can’t beat yourself up for acting and thinking the way you did, because given what you knew then, you reacted in a way that seemed right. Obviously now, it’s easier to understand and navigate situations like this: because you lived through it, and you learned and grew.
When you grow up, you begin to understand that life is so much bigger than those moments in time when you believed that “the boy on the football team” was the most important thing to have. And then that one boy you once feared you would spend your whole life missing is suddenly just another person.