I still remember our first kiss. It was messily, awkwardly, imperfectly perfect. It was the very first kiss for both of us, we were just kids then. As I sighed into him, I could smell the fall breeze as it wrapped around us, and for once I knew what pure, innocent bliss felt like. Thankfully, that feeling followed me through the first several months of our relationship. Neither of us had ever been in one, let alone been in love, so when we started to realize just what we got ourselves into it was terrifying. Terrifying to open yourself up so much to someone who could leave you at any moment. I had to trust in a way that I never had before, and once I did, I fell in love. As a depressed teenager, I’d forgotten I could feel so much emotion, so much peace, so much love. So then why would I still spend my nights crying myself to sleep?
We all know that the rom coms we watched growing up lied to us in some way or another. Prince charming doesn’t always come in on a white horse, he won’t come running through the rain to confess his love or hold a boom box up outside the window, unfortunately, John Hughes did not write the story my life. But one of the biggest misconceptions portrayed in these movies is not about how they get together, but in how they stay together. I don’t know if I can blame these movies, the love songs, or simply my own wishful thinking, but I believed that being in a relationship would solve my problems.
As a girl who spent her high school years isolated in homeschool, I was convinced that the solution to my loneliness, low self-esteem, and depression was a boyfriend. If I could just get someone to love me then everything would be okay. If they could see me as perfect, then I could see myself the same way. This seemed like a logical progression to me. As he held my face in his hands after he kissed me and smiled at me in a way that made me feel it in every inch of my body, I would have sworn in that moment that I couldn’t possibly be wrong. That he, and us, couldn’t possibly be wrong. That’s what I tried to tell myself weeks later when I was in tears after my new bikini didn’t fit. That he thought I was beautiful, and therefore I should think I am too. What is wrong with me that I couldn’t see what he saw? I asked myself. It’s just because he’s only trying to be nice. I mean look at you, how could he love someone so ugly? So worthless? And just like that, I had slipped back into my harmful thoughts that I was so sure I had left behind for good.
One second we were talking on the phone and my smile had never been so big, but the next I would find myself completely forgetting about him and anything else that weren’t the thoughts in my head. I would lay awake at night thinking about him, wishing he was there with me, holding me so close the way he had so many times before. My tiny twin bed had never felt so big. But the next second I was convincing myself that he would never want to be in that bed with me. What was this emotional rollercoaster that I couldn’t seem to get off of?
Through all the bliss of our relationship and all the heartbreak of breaking up, I learned so many important lessons about life, and about myself. I learned that it is not always true that you can’t fully love someone else before you love yourself, but if you do, you must continue to work on loving yourself. Being in a relationship will not clear your skin, cure your depression, or fix your life. I’ll admit it, I cherished the feeling of having someone who I could fall back on if I had a rough day mentally and emotionally, someone who knew I wasn’t in my best place, but that did not mean that I could just stop trying to get better. When I was in a good enough place to trust him and finally tell him exactly what had been going on with me, he was my cheerleader, my supporter, and my friend. One of the most intimate and raw moments of my life came when I was choking back sobs as I told him for the first time the deepest darkest parts of what I had been struggling with, and he just looked at me so softly, with so much care in his eyes, and told me he loved me for the first time. Saying it back never felt so right. But his love for me, however great, was no substitution for the love I lacked for myself.
When we broke up months later, I questioned how someone who could have seen the worst parts of me and loved me anyway, could be the same person who left me so abruptly. Every day for months I had to push relentlessly to not blame myself for the circumstances, to not let my self-hate fester in this ideal opportunity. A few years and a few boyfriends later, I still think about him as the boy who taught me the ever-important lesson that someone else loving me is not a substitution for loving myself. My feelings fluctuate wildly while I’m in a relationship, and some days I can almost forget the bad thoughts altogether, but I have to remember how important it is to not push self-care to the back burner, on good days or bad. Moving forward with my emotional journey required me to continue to work on myself while being in love and move past the idea that someone else seeing value in me was enough; that someone else’s love was enough. I had to continue to try and love myself.
