Moving On: How my Past Has Shaped me

My First Girlfriend

I started dating Madeleine in seventh grade. I should have noticed all of the red flags before things got too serious, but I was blinded by my emotions and mental health. 

The first red flag: we were both very emotionally unstable. So much so, that when we started dating, we grew extremely attached to one another. We would say things like, "I would die without you". And to us, that was a very serious thing, being as we were both suicidal. We both constantly worried that we would wake up and find the other person dead. But at the same time, we wanted to be good enough to make the other person better instantly. When one of us would say "I'm sorry, I self harmed again", the other person would get almost personally offended. "What do you mean? Don't I make you happy? Why would you want to do something like that? Now I want to hurt myself, because I'm so upset that you would do that to yourself and I'm not good enough". We both constantly needed attention, not just to validate that we were still in love, but to make sure the other person wasn't dead. We had a rule. "If one of us doesn't reply within twenty minutes then something might have happened". I got almost no sleep some nights because I had to console her and convince her not to hurt herself. We sent literally hundreds, maybe thousands of texts every single day. 

Another red flag: we were the only lesbians we knew. Sometimes I look back on this relationship and think that if there were other gay kids at my school, we would never have dated. This seems to be common for a lot of people, though. Nobody ever wants to admit that they are only dating somebody because they have no other option. For me at least, my relationship with her meant a lot to me from the very beginning because I had never dated anybody before, and I wanted it to be special and mean something. I was never the person to date somebody for a week or two and then move onto someone else. I was mature, so I wanted the full adult relationship. 

Our relationship lasted nearly three years. We started dating in January of 2013. My parents were very unhappy with the relationship, not because I was dating a girl, but because I stopped obeying their rules and they had to hear the backlash from the community. Every day after school I was supposed to walk straight home. But instead, I would walk across town to walk Madeleine to her house, then I would walk home. It got so bad that my mom had a tracker on my phone and knew when I went across town. I was not allowed to go to her house, and my mom seemed to regularly drive by her house to make sure I wasn't there. The town quickly caught on to the fact that there were gay teenagers in their tiny town and the response was terrible. The other people my age asked a lot of questions and spread rumors, but they weren't even the worst of it. When the kids would go and tell their parents, their parents would make things up to tell my mom. 

I remember sitting in my room one day when my mom came in and asked me, "why were you kissing that girl on the sidewalk in front of her house?" I was instantly outraged, because I hadn't kissed her yet at all, and my mom said she heard that from a "reliable source". She didn't know what to do, because she had to choose between believing her child, or believing all of these adults who decided they wanted to get in on the rumors and drama. For years after this incident I still told her randomly that I was still upset about that and that I really hadn't kissed her that day. I think she believes me now.

When my relationship started, it was based on so, so, so many lies. I would lie about so much stuff, huge stuff and little white lies. I was definitely a compulsive liar and I didn't want to change it because I saw it as an asset, to be able to come up with believable stories on the fly to get out of trouble. I told her my parents were physically abusive, which they weren't. I told her I had bone cancer and had to get a part of my rib surgically removed, which wasn't true at all. I told her I had friends in another town that I would hang out with all the time, and then I pretended one of them committed suicide. The whole story was a lie and none of the people were real. I didn't really know why I would lie about so much, especially about big things like cancer and my household life. I guess I wanted her to think I had a sad, dramatic, storybook life. I wanted her to think my depression was valid, and maybe even worse than hers. I wanted to outdo her sadness so that I could get more attention. It was terrible of me to do, and I still feel horrible for even saying those things to anybody. Today I can't wrap my head around why anybody would lie about stuff like that, even though I did it myself. After I had been dating her for quite a few months, I decided I had to confess everything. So I came clean, completely. I told her everything that wasn't true and apologized for everything. And it turned out that she had some lies of her own. Once we passed that, we finished out the year pretty strong.