Hey everyone, I’m new to this place. Heads up, this is a long one, but you might find it to be an interesting story. Thanks.
I’m a quiet and reserved person that likes to do my own thing. It’s extremely rare for me to meet someone I really connect with, and when it happens, that person is always out of my reach, in one way or another. Love has always been an elusive thing for me, but it’s funny how the thing you want most in life is the thing that’s the hardest to find.
During the summer two years ago I believed that I fell in love with an incredible and beautiful girl I go to college with. We are good friends and we have the same major, so I see her a lot at school. The way it happened was weird. She had gone home for the summer, and one day her name just popped into my head and stayed there. I spent that entire summer unable to think about anything else but her, and I was excited to see her at school again. By the end of the summer I was crazy about her. We both like to make things, so I decided to make a special lamp for her birthday that fall, and I decided I would finally ask her out when I gave it to her. I spent two months making it, and it’s still the best thing I’ve ever made. To my great joy, our classes were next door to each other (the classrooms have no walls between them). She was in my direct line of sight from my desk all term, I could see her on the other side of the room.
We are both in an incredibly demanding program, we are at school working 60-80 hours a week normally. I work a part time job on top of this. Being so close to her, and being able to see her every day for 10 weeks while dealing with the stress of work and school was really hard, almost unbearable. I still had to wait almost two months for her birthday to give the lamp to her and ask her out.
5 weeks in, a mutual friend of ours stopped by her desk to say hi, and I overheard them talk about a new relationship. She is a strong-willed and independent person, so I was surprised to hear she started a new relationship, especially when I thought that we were slowly moving in that direction. My heart dropped to the floor, and I was sick to my stomach for two days. I had thought that my dreams were coming true, but it seems I was wrong. I still gave her the lamp, and we talked about our relationship. She said it’s best if we stay friends. I spent the rest of that term in a great deal of pain and sadness. I was still forced to see her every day for at least 12 hours a week because of school.
About that same time, I learned that my cat that I’ve had for 15 years and adore has cancer and won’t last much longer. She was gone in less than two weeks. I didn’t sleep at all the last few days of her life, I was afraid I would wake up in the morning and find her dead.
What started with me being crazy about an amazing girl ended with me burying my cat with a broken heart.
That term was over, and it was the worst experience of my life, but it wasn’t done yet. The only thing I hoped for was that none of this would carry over to the next term. I was still grieving my cat when the next term started, and I learned that my class was next door to her again, but this time, our desks were side by side, and on top of that, my school project was the biggest one i’ve ever had to do, too big for me to be doing alone. When I wasn’t at school or at my part time job, all of my waking hours were spent working on my project. I have never felt pain or sorrow as strong as what I felt for those long 10 weeks, and it broke me very quickly. Spending at least 12 hours a week next to her, I could physically feel myself being stabbed in the heart just by hearing her footsteps go down the hall. I started having weekly nightmares about school, developed a twitch in my left eye, and began losing weight. I was breaking in every way, but I had no time to stop or rest, or take time to process what was happening. I had to keep working on my project or risk failing. For 10 weeks I had no choice but to push all that to the side and pretend it wasn’t happening while I was barely alive due to stress, extreme exhaustion and sleep deprivation, and the pain I couldn’t escape from.
It took 6 months for the nightmares, eye twitches, and sleeplessness to end, and I now weigh 35 pounds less. I went way beyond just being broken. When I finally had the chance to stop and process everything, so much time had passed that I wasn’t able to anymore. It was like a bad dream that felt like it would never end. You can only take so much pain for so long, what do you do when you go past your limit? I had been praying for comfort, guidance and direction the entire time, but I only got silence.
My reaction to all this has been to disconnect myself from everything. I put my heart out there, and got burned, bad. I told myself I would never get hung up on something like this again. I want nothing to do with school or my friends that I have there, they are all associated with the nightmares and the pain I felt. I try to avoid being at school at all costs. And I have a lot of anger about my school experience overall, since none of it has been good.
I survived through all that with nothing to show for it, and most of my heart died in the process. I can’t help but keep my faith at arms’s length from me, it’s brought me nothing but heartache, but I know that the only way to heal is to take it back to God, but after all this time I still don’t know how I can do that. I can barely trust anyone with my heart.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for listening. I’m reluctant to post this. It’s been two years now since it started, I feel like I should be over this, but it cut me to my core, and it cut deep. I’m not asking for help, but I would like to get some different perspectives on this. Thank you.
