In a conversation with my mother, as I had just turned 20 in February, I recall her telling me that I should feel lucky I did not have a significant other during my time in middle school and in high school. If you even want to call the kid you held hands with and shared lunch with in middle school a significant other, I suppose.

Throughout the beginning of 20th year in existence, I feel as though I am on top of the world. I have always loved the idea of being in my twenties (preferably 21-25) because it meant my life was finally starting. From the time I was 16, I knew that I wanted to be something great in life and those four long years of waiting for my turn at the upper-hand at what we consider to be adulthood has long last come upon me.

I was never the “it” girl nor was I ever popular within the food chain of high school. I was, and still am, a band kid. Yes, I was one of those kids who marched around on the football field with an instrument, making weird shapes while doing odd things with my body like rolling my steps, walking backwards on my toes and platform but never my heel, etc. I spent every waking hour of every week of every month for four years in the band room, with other band students. Now, I am not saying that there is no such thing as a band-related relationship. Trust me, they are very common. I just did not have the opportunity to experience them.

One day during seventh grade, my best friend told me she received her first kiss. Of course I was ecstatic for her and I wanted to know all about it, but I could not overcome the feeling of pure insecurity that had washed up over me. I told my mom that day when she picked me up from school that I was ready for my first boyfriend. My own first kiss would come five years later during the summer after I graduated high school. To this day, I still regret it.

During my eleventh grade year of high school, I met a boy on Tumblr who had messaged me with words of advice for a problem I had been going through at the time. He was incredibly sweet, very helpful, and we became friends. Some weeks went on and I found myself in a long distance, online relationship from the months of March to May. Although we had never met in person during that time and we video-chatted every single day, I ended up falling in love with him. It took me one solid month to pick myself up after it had ended.

Throughout my college life thus far I cannot honestly say that I haven't had much luck with finding dates (most of which have happened this last semester alone). Sure, I’ve still been hurt and have had, well, bad luck with certain people. But it has come to my attention most recently that maybe this bad luck is happening for a reason other than “he’s not the one.”

During that conversation with my mother, she told me that I should feel lucky that I kind of skipped over the drama and immaturity phase when it came to a typical high school romance with rumors and all the lot, but I cannot shake the fact that maybe that’s a bad thing after all. I have caught myself going through progressions you would go through as a 16-year-old when you were sure that he was cheating on you or maybe after one date, it did not work out between the two of you. I find myself to be somewhat paranoid over small, trivial things; sometimes I completely lose myself to the fact that somebody is even taking time out of their day to talk to me and I fall under the “oh no, I’ve been texting them too often and I’m clearly annoying them” fear; or even, and most often, when it does not work out with a guy I had been talking to, I try to think of every way possible to save my ship from sinking, thinking to myself, 'The good times are worth dealing with the bad times' or 'It’s just another storm to soon pass.' But mainly I have yet to grow out of the boy-crazy phase you go through as a tween like, you know, the “oh my gosh, he is so cute. I will probably talk about him all day” phase. And I am now paying for that as I enter adult world and should be paying more attention to the things that do matter such as school and a job and, most importantly, myself and my wellbeing as a young woman.

Let me just say that I am not preaching to the choir about how I’m so mature because I’m no longer a teenager. In a way, I am very thankful I surpassed that time in my life because of the bullets I had dodged (thinking about the guys I had been infatuated with, oh yes, they were major dodged bullets). However, if I could go back in time to redo high school again, I would do it differently.