Unwritten

I have spent the majority of my post-high school years single or in some type of awkward relationship that I wasn't allowed to put on Facebook or call them my boyfriend. While that probably sounds pretty depressing, it has taught me a lot. I've been an onlooker as friends and family have fallen in love, had their hearts broken, gotten married, gotten divorced, or as they continued on their own single-person journey with varying degrees of grace. For me, it started as it does with so many young women, with an idealistic picture of the perfect man and the perfect relationship. He would say and do certain things, he would spoil me, he would protect me, we would never fight or disagree. Every weekend would be rose petals and picnics and kissing under the stars. There were times I thought I had found something like that, only to realize that they were actually just very good manipulators who were skilled at preying on naive girls like me. They would say and do the sweetest things ...

People often complain about my generation because we all grew up with everyone getting a trophy and somehow this has made us believe we are entitled to get whatever we want just for showing up, that because of that participation trophy, we do not know the meaning of hard work and disappointment. Honestly, I didn't play a lot of sports growing up, but those participation awards I did receive didn't mean anything to me, and I think most people of my generation will agree they hardly remember receiving them. I do, however, remember winning the science fair, a very tough English teacher praising my writing and telling me it was college-level, winning cheerleading competitions, having my poetry published, and landing speaking roles and solos in plays, musicals, and choir performances. Perhaps more poignant than the successes, though, are the memories of the heart-breaking disappointment of failing. It is perhaps ironic that the area where I "failed" the most was also the...

For the majority of my life, I can remember feeling like the lesser friend. It didn't matter which group of friends I was with or how many of us there were. I just always felt like I was the one who was just kind of there, that I was never anyone's best friend, no one ever talked about me being inseparable from someone. The earliest I remember this was with my younger cousin. I remember being so jealous of the friendship she had with a girl about my age who lived in her neighborhood. I would feel so left out, even though my cousin and I were still close and had a lot in common. I was basically in the same class with the same group of kids from third through eighth grade, and even then, I only got that "best friend" feeling for brief periods of time with different people at different times. In high school, my group of friends changed from year to year, maybe even trimester to trimester. (No, I wasn't pregnant. My school had trimesters.) Maybe that is normal, I don...