Heartbreak is a universal feeling.

Not everyone feels pain the same way, but most still experience this specific emotion. Heartbreak can occur when someone you love passes, when you lose someone you care about, when you lose a pet, or even when you lose a friend. The common theme in a heartbreak? Loss. Regardless of whether or not the loss was physical or emotional, it will always hurt.

I experienced my first heartbreak at age 14, and then several more times until age 18.

When I was a freshman in high school I fell head over heels for a boy that my friend knew. I didn't know exactly why I fell for him but I knew that I couldn't stop thinking about him. He was sweet, kind, thoughtful, and was always ready to listen if something was wrong. At least, he was at first.

Freshman year of high school was a turning point for me. I'd spent most of my academic life up until then with the same friends I'd met in elementary school. Those friends were all I had, and I thought we'd be friends for life, like most seven-year-olds do. But as high school came around, I drifted away from them and found myself not liking a lot of the things they said or did. This isn't to say they were horrible people, and they weren't, but it only made me realize that I couldn't cling onto familiarity just because I was afraid of being alone.

Through a long string of events, wherein I ended up with an entirely new group of friends, I ended up dating this boy. We were happy for a time, but there was a darker side to him, one I never expected to become so prominent as our friendship and relationship progressed.

We were together on and off for about three and a half years, and in that time he broke my heart over and over again. The darkness that I suspected to lie within him from the beginning began to seep out as we grew older. He was less kind, less happy, and he had absolutely no problem showing me just how unimportant I was to him.

Starting a relationship so young, you sometimes feel like you have to fight to keep the love strong, even if it means sacrificing little bits of yourself along the way. I'm no longer the same person I was when I was 14 years old, as is the case with most others, however, the result of who I became was highly influenced by how much I was hurt by this one toxic relationship.

I have always been one that looked to try and fix people. It's a bad habit, and not something I recommend. Changing people to fit your perception of perfect or "fixed" will not many a friend make you. As I grow older and look back on my years in high school, which weren't that long ago, I realize what I saw in certain people and what drew me to them. For this boy, the first boy I ever loved, and the first boy to ever break my heart, I saw something very specific: a single soul that needed to be loved, needed to be valued, and craved validation from those around him. Seeing how wounded he was, and how much he was always hurting? That's what initially drew me in.

The ones who are wounded are also the ones most capable of hurting you. They've seen that pain, they've been affected by it, and sometimes they can do the same exact thing to others without even trying.

There are many reasons a relationship won't work out: lack of trust, infidelity, a need for control. Those three things are exactly what tore us apart. I want to preface this by saying that I wasn't perfect in this relationship. I was closed off, moody, and sometimes very hard to talk to. I'm still that way, although I'm trying to improve on those fronts.

I wish I could count how many times he cheated on me, if only to make this story as accurate as possible. There were so many inexcusable circumstances that I just accepted because I didn't want to lose this boy. I excused one action after another, leaving myself a shell of who I could have been.

Throughout our entire relationship, I was belittled, given backhanded compliments, made to believe that everything that happened was my fault, and lied to more times than I can recall. If a boy talked to me, I was convinced I was a terrible person because my boyfriend didn't like me talking to guys. A double standard really, when I think about how 90 percent of his friends were girls.

I wasn't allowed to wear makeup, talk to boys, and I always had to keep my calendar open on the off chance that he wanted to hang out with me. This isolated me from my friends, my family, and left me with little drive to do anything but sit around and wait for him.

Most would wonder why I didn't leave, especially as I grew older and more aware of how badly I was being treated. The answer? I felt stuck. I felt almost as if I was failing myself if I gave up on this relationship. I was so emotionally attached to this person who ridiculed and humiliated me, and I had been conditioned for almost four years to think that everything was my fault. Thinking I was the cause of all the misery I'd been experiencing made me want to fight that much harder to fix everything. But nothing can be fixed if both parties are not working toward a mutually beneficial goal.

I write this cautionary tale today, as I'm sitting on the couch surrounded by people I love and that love me back. I've come to realize how easy love can be, when you love the right people and they love you back. No mind games, no manipulation, no lies. Just the pure and simple care we have for each other.

A singer I greatly admire once wrote, "Everyone who's ever loved has struggled letting go." I identify so much with that statement because once I love someone, platonically or romantically, it takes a hell of a lot for me to ever let them go. I've finally made my peace with what I endured during that past relationship, and I've finally let go. I am not writing this to dwell on what happened, but if stories go untold for fear of being judged, then no stories would be told at all.

I love who I am now, and I do attribute some of who I have become to the first boy I ever loved. That being said, I've always been my own person, but it would be naive of me to say that I am not somehow shaped by the world around me.