When I was in seventh grade, I developed a GIANT crush on a boy with ice blue eyes. This boy had an eighth-grader girlfriend, which made him a Big Deal in the junior high political arena.

I was undeterred.

I wrote poems in a colorfully striped spiral-bound journal about how my heart beat only for him, how I dreamed about seeing the moon in his eyes, how he held the key to my heart. I was nothing short of obsessed. You see, I was not your average middle schooler writing love poems, because normally you’d keep those to yourself, or only share them with your BFFs. I, however, took it upon myself to transcribe these poems, all one hundred and thirty-three, into emails, which I courageously sent to him. At one point, I enlisted one of my vocally-talented friends to put one of my poems to music, and had her sing it to him in a classroom after school, while I watched, his head resting on the table. How embarrassing, babe!

I went to a small school, so my crush was no secret, and I wasn’t exactly subtle about my feelings. I’m not sure I’ve been subtle about anything in my life. When I love, I love BIG. I remember feeling ashamed of how much I loved him, with no help from my teasing classmates. Nevertheless, I remained persistent in my pursuit. After we held hands on a moonlit van ride back from a youth group sixflags trip, I told him he had to choose between his girlfriend and me. He told me my love for him was flattering.

He did not love me back. My first heartbreak.

This story used to make me cringe (it still does a bit), but looking back, it’s just so me! I’m quite fond of that big-hearted, verbose twelve-year-old. I love out loud and up front. And I always will! Now, I imagine my current self going back in time, sitting on our bedroom floor, excitedly indulging her every fantasy. Our imagination is a life-saving and world-building asset.

I’ve always loved my friends Big too … also, I’m super Gay, and I’m still not sure if that’s a coincidence or not. In fifth grade, I had a best friend named Krista. We lived in the same neighborhood and would walk home together through the woods, holding hands. There was a tree we’d pass along the way, which we designated our Friendship Tree. I still think about her. I still remember what the tree looked like.

At fifteen, I went on a mission trip to Puerto Rico. Megan and I connected via the team’s facebook group in April. By the time we finally met in person in June, everyone asked us if we already knew each other. She lived in Mississippi, and I lived in Rhode Island, but the distance was a moot point. We became each other’s lifelines amidst an otherwise often lonely junior and senior year. I went off to college, and Megan took an international gap year. For ten years we were long-distance besties, through graduations, a wedding, multiple moves, identity shifts, and worldview swaps. Naturally, we stayed parallel enough to remain close. Then, two summers ago, I moved to her city, Minneapolis, and the miraculous and meant-to-be happened: she stayed and I stayed. For the first time in our nearly thirteen years of friendship, we live in the same place: our friendship’s homecoming. It’s powerful to have been consistently close with someone over such transformative years. We witnessed each other grow up, become the wonderful people we are today, and there’s still so much for us to look forward to. Anytime I see two old ladies out and about, I immediately think of Megan, because if there is anything I could be certain of, it’s that she’ll be there.

Due to patriarchy a lá conservative christianity, my young search for love was channeled towards male attention and restricted within the confines of purity culture. I was incredibly preoccupied by how the boys and men in my life perceived me, and often uncomfortable when their attention found me, even though I felt as if I didn’t perform for that attention, I might disappear. I wish my younger self was less strangled by shame I didn’t know I had, shame that wasn’t even mine.

I spent the summer after freshman year of college interning in NYC at a lobby org to the United Nations. During a dry General Assembly meeting I spotted a cutie sitting at the Guatemalan delegation seat. Once we recessed, I followed him out of the building and up the street into a sandwich shop, where, once in line, I introduced myself with “Are you an intern, too?” He removed his earbuds and I repeated my question. We ate our sandwiches together in a park, and I’m pretty sure we fell in love with each other then and there. I was only in NYC for a few more weeks, but in that time, I lived my very own whirlwind NYC romcom.

We still hadn’t kissed when my time in the city came to an end. At the ripe age of eighteen, I had never been kissed before, and because I had yet to undo my christian brainwashing, I did not let him kiss me goodbye then. Nor when he came to visit me in Rhode Island the next month, nor when he came to visit me three years later at college. It was ten years ago when we said goodbye on the sidewalk outside my sublet, not knowing if we’d ever see each other again, knowing we had stumbled upon something precious never to be replicated, hugging tightly, tension and a warm breeze in the air, and I DID NOT KISS THIS BOY. I am twenty-eight now, and I don’t regret anything in my life more than passing up this perfect first-kiss opportunity with my first Big Love.

I missed out on so much for so long, especially myself, for all the wrong reasons. Maybe you’d call me a late bloomer, but once I started expanding, I couldn’t stop. I don’t think I ever will. I tore down one rigid worldview and created a new one from scratch, one that leaves space to change my mind. I found my agency, and I’ll never let it go. I found my people. I found my love could reach wider than I ever knew. I found out that just because I was a girl didn’t mean I had to grow up into a woman–what a relief that’s been. I dated people who could relate to an embodied experience of growing up under misogyny and the male gaze, and it helped set me free.

I discovered that everything I was conditioned to believe about relationships was socially constructed, which meant there were new worlds to create, alongside my people, beyond old arbitrary lines. I now subscribe to relationship anarchy, so the divide between the platonic and the romantic often feels blurry to me. A relationship is an inherently collaborative act. At the very least, those are the only kind I want to be in. I desire reciprocity, exchange, mutuality, and curiosity. I don’t tend to stick around in relationships with folks who don’t desire the same or compatible. Rewriting relational scripts has been a liberating process, and it’s come with grief. It’s spotlighted dynamics I endured for years that I would never tolerate with anyone new. I haven’t been able to keep everyone close.

When I was twenty I studied abroad in Chile and met August, the love of my life, in a  poetry class. We were “just friends” then, and remained that way, long distance, for two and half years after we returned to the States. Over facetime in December of 2020 I asked him if he was curious if there was “more” between us; he giggled yes. I visited him the day after christmas and we spent the whole day outside in freezing Boston. He lived there, and I lived in Tennessee, but we decided it was worth giving it a shot. Less than a month later he brought up moving in together– we did that summer. We’re going on six years now. Loving each other hasn’t always been easy, but choosing each other over and over again has.

August is my softest place to land, like trust-falling into a mossy glade. Not the love I used to imagine for myself, but exactly the love I need. A safe love, where the truth is always spoken and conflict always gets repaired, one where we both have agency, and we trust our choices. We freely choose to be together, over and over again. That kind of commitment and vulnerability is easier to experience and express in romantic partnerships, but I absolutely have friends that I will keep choosing forever if they keep choosing me too.

I’m told I came out of the womb with something to say. I yearn to share myself with others. To be seen, to be understood, to discover yet another thread that connects me to everyone else. On the Not Enough to Too Much spectrum of core human insecurities I lean HARD to the Too Much side. Listen, I am a lot. I know this, because I exhaust myself with the intensity of feeling, amount of thought, and acute sensation I experience on the daily. I know that my people interact with this muchness. For a long time I thought I had to shrink, minimize, contort, conform, bite my tongue, bow my head, be a quiet pretty little thing (read: rageful). I don’t do that shit anymore. Don’t get me wrong, the Too Much monster rears its head plenty, and I get the urge to cower, I’m just better at redirecting that urge. And I have people that hold me, fondly, in my muchness. Now, I share with openness, reminding myself that my friends want to hear what I have to share just as much as I want to hear everything they want to share with me. I’m practicing asking better questions, pausing before I respond, and listening more closely. Take space, make space baby!