Counting back four years, people who know me will know that I’ve never had a relationship lasting that long. It would be improbable considering I’m only nineteen years old. I’m not meaning four steady years of someone continually slapping me in the pride and making me feel small. I don’t mean four years of me not accomplishing anything because I wasn’t worthy of it. I’m talking about four years of obsession with perfection, of obsession with doing more, accomplishing more, being larger than life and still wanting more than that. Four years of never being big enough, strong enough, smart enough, to appease the voice in the back of my head saying that I wasn’t good enough for you. When the fact of the matter is that you weren’t good enough for me.

You found me when I was fifteen. I was vulnerable and you knew that. I was obsessed with everything wrong with the world and you told me everything wrong with your world. You knew I’d be hooked on fixing that. You strung me along and kept me working for it with statements about me not understanding anything. I was selfish but I was “just a pretty face.” I would never be broken enough for you- despite the fact that my heart broke every day for things that I didn’t understand and the fact that I didn’t know how to relate to you though I desperately wanted to. For a beat I even thought I was the manipulator. High on that kind of strength I tried and tried again to quit you. I’d think that the relationships I pursued throughout those years were pursued out of strength. That I was finally strong enough to stick it to you, but when I realized that I was too selfish to accept the love they were trying to give me and I would go my own way, how did you always know? There was always a message though there was no way for you to know, you didn’t live here, who were you asking? Who were you talking to? Why didn’t you let me go?

I finally, after four years, met someone who celebrated my strength and independence. We had much in common and our lives were headed in similar directions. It didn’t work out. In that almost-relationship, though, I realized that I’m strong enough to quit you. And I did. I made the move toward quitting you forever, and you haven’t spoken to me since.

Was it your plan to make me selfish? Was it your plan to make every relationship I’ve pursued since I was fifteen unhealthy and one-sided? I don’t need anybody. I’m quick to cut people off without a moments’ notice and I’m on my way back to being soft again despite every fiber of my being telling me that soft means weak and that I’m young for feeling so much. After four years of inconsistently hearing that someday the world would make me hard and not believing it, and after four years of inconsistently trying to be everything opposite of who you groomed me to be, I’m realizing that it was you. You made me hard. You made me feel guilty for feeling sad or for being proud of myself. I guess I should thank you for all that I’ve amounted to in spite of you, though you never showed a semblance of admiration toward the accomplishments I worked so hard for.

I wonder if you saw it coming, if you knew that one day I would wake up and look back on all I’d done and look at you and realize that you weren’t worth it. I was never going to fix you and you were only going to break me. I don’t want to carry the team and you weren’t ever going to score enough points to match me. I was going to wake up one day tired of being afraid of you and all the willingness to gain some respect from you was gone, because your respect was nothing compared to the respect of all of the people who loved me before I was good at anything. Those people mean the world to me, and I’m going to work harder for myself and give them the satisfaction of knowing that I’m happy where I’m at and I’m doing what I can to be happier.