Live and learn

In response to the letter I wrote to my younger, stupider 18 year old self, Jessica left me a comment about how she wouldn't warn her younger self not to date a guy that would ultimately end up breaking her heart. She explained her reason so well I feel obligated to quote her directly:

I feel as though the lessons I learned from every single one of those heartaches allowed me to appreciate what a wonderful, caring, responsible, remarkable person my boyfriend is now. Without having had my heart broken once, twice, (ok like seven times) I might have taken him and everything he has to offer for granted.

So for that, I think the advice I would give my younger, more naive self, is to keep her chin up because the tears will dry, the pain will subside and I will become a better person because of every experience I allowed myself to walk into blindly.

So true. As much as I'd like the 18 year old me to have been smart enough to avoid that loser boyfriend, it was a learning experience. I developed remarkably good loser radar after that. And it's all good anyway because every chick I know seems to have her own story about some loser boyfriend. You know. The guy you'd be kinda embarrassed to admit you dated if you ran into him in the Walgreen's parking lot.

Maybe he stone cold dumped you. Maybe he cheated on you. Or, like this girl I once knew, maybe your husband took your life savings and disappeared with it instead of paying your college tuition. And maybe you didn't find out until you tried to have lunch in the university dining hall but your student ID stopped working because you'd been dropped from classes for failure to pay. Um. Wait. My husband said he wrote a check for that. Here I'll just call him and find out what's going on. Oh. Huh. He's not answering the phone. Oh. Hey. There's no furniture in our house anymore. Wow, did it suck to be her.

And she didn't tell anybody for three days. She just kept going to class and acting like nothing was wrong. I think she was hoping he'd turn up and it would turn out to be a big mistake. I remember seeing her in the hall and she seemed okay. She stopped by to give me something the day she moved home to live with her parents and told me the whole story. And then I got on a bullhorn and told everyone within a fifty foot radius because, dude, what the hell.

I don't think I'll ever forget how crazy it felt to realize that she had been going through that three doors down from me. I try to remember that feeling whenever someone's a little crabby. I try to let it roll off my back and just figure they're having a bad day. Well, unless you're one of the evil hags on America's Next Top Model making fun of the girl with Asperger's who's name is Heather which I know because I was kinda sorta rooting for until last night when they showed her talking about the other girls behind their backs. Because it's hard to hold it against the other girls when they talk about Heather if Heather's doing the same thing. I'm now officially pro-Chantal. And Saleisha. And I don't understand why Jenah's hair always looks like a rat's nest. The end.