My parents would tell me, "You're going to study hard to get good grades...
So you can go to a good college...
Find a job so you can make enough money
And live comfortably."
After a while I stopped trying to convince them that I was gonna be the next Lizzie Maguire. That was in 5th grade. But shit, Lizzie was my girl.
Everything had to make sense. Everything had to calculated.
I guess once I got older, that whole concept of success in my parents eyes, got a little boring. I couldn't really doodle in my notebook during class and put hearts around "college" written in bubble letters all over the page. I think somewhere along the line I realized that I could care more about people, because you couldn't generalize them, and that past a certain point you couldn't understand them, you just had to trust them.
I still don't really know a god now, but back then it was like meeting faith for the first time.
Maybe it was the unpredictability of relationships. Knowing that wearing these earrings and telling those kinds of jokes didn't always mean you were going to impress that guy (even though I had hoped it would have worked out that way many-a-times).
Having relationships and interacting with other people was the one thing that I wasn't being told to do. And now I finally realize why for so much of my life, I've been such a hopeless romantic.
Why, I still put myself out there when every other time I've tried I was smacked in the face with a big "nice knowin ya, have a good life now"!
Why! Even after I've been let down, embarrassed, and stripped away of any self-esteem I had somehow conjured up for myself moments before, I still found a way to fall for it all over again.
Why I'm still not afraid to find someone
You know, just so I can hold their hand every once in a while. hehe. (Not in public.
...Too often.
But definitely not at school, like, in the halls. Haail no. It makes me so unbelievably uncomfortable to see couples walk down the hall and awkwardly maneuver themselves around traffic while trying to keep their hand holding still in tact. Just....no. Don't do it.)
Maybe I'd rather get knocked down just to get back up again thinking that the next guy will be different because it's better than generalizing them the way I was taught to generalize everything else in life.
A couple weeks ago, I watched No Strings Attached and afterwards, all I wanted to do was be like Natalie Portman's character. A girl who's afraid of commitment and letting someone get close to her. You know, naturally hard to get because she's so cynical.
I thought to myself, that is sooo cool! Man, I'm such a lam-o. I care so much it's disgusting. Why can't I just be cool and have sex with guys for fun too?*
But then I realized that that wasn't me. No matter how much I wished I was condescending and indifferent about relationships, I'm not. No matter how much I hate it, I love...well, love.
So after briefly losing sight of that, I found it again. One, because I really am too much of a lam-0 and I couldn't be like Natalie Portman's character for more than 3 hours if I tried, and two, because it's something I've always valued:
Trusting people.
The idea that not everyone's the same. Not everyone's going to hurt you. And that, yeah, maybe putting yourself out there will give you less hits than misses, but at least you're giving people in general a chance. And one of these days, all those chances you're giving away will actually turn into something freaking great.
And that might be romantic but it's also statistical.
So booyah to your momma.
*joke
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