When I was in college, I was obsessed with this one guy. OB-SESSED. He had a girlfriend, but he was just so dreamy, and I had concocted this fantasy that he would break up with her and be with me. (Shut up. I was 18.) I was messed up in the head over this fool for the longest time, convinced he would fall in love with me if he just knew me well enough.
That did not happen.
What did happen was that I used to walk past the retail store where he worked just so I could catch a momentary glimpse of him and then scuttle away like a cockroach. My friends yelled at me for doing this. I was in a miserable and unhealthy place in my life: many, many years away from getting control of the anxiety and depression that shredded up my late teens and early 20s. I was in no place to realize — as I later would — that if a man doesn’t want you, he doesn’t want you. Keep reading »
