I have always been the girl to have a crush on someone. I remember the first time I had a crush. I was in kindergarten, and I was talking with my family one night as they were reading me a bedtime story. We were all sitting in my living room, and I remember saying, “I think I have a crush on Marco.” I remember my parents bursting out in laughter and subtly making fun of me. I remember them saying they were going to tell his mom and that I was very cute for having a crush on him. I didn’t know how to handle this reaction or the feeling of having a crush, but I did know that it was very real.
As I went through the rest of my K-12 career, I almost always had somebody I was crushing on. In the 3rd grade, there was a boy named Jeremiah; I remember everyone had a crush on this boy. I recall talking with him and enjoying that he was very nice to me, and how he treated me like one of his friends. I was obsessed with him. I thought about him all the time, I talked about him all the time. I look back and try to understand why I had crushes like this, and why it was such a big part of my life.
I brought this up in a therapy session, that exact question. What my therapist told me completely changed the way I handled liking someone and the way I looked at myself. She said, “Sophie, I want you to think about the mental state you are in when you have a crush, what is going on in your life? What challenges are you facing? What is your internal dialogue like? Having a crush is one of the many ways people try to cope and distract themselves from what’s really going on in their lives. It could be school, friend problems, anything. You are feeling insecure with your life, therefore, you are distracting yourself with this person that you don’t even know. You think about them all the time, and talk about them all the time. They are your distraction.”
When she said this to me, it felt like a light bulb went off in my head. Everything made more sense. This became even clearer at the end of my senior year of high school. I had finally created a solid group of friends that I trusted completely. I was doing well in school, and I felt very grounded in myself and my hobbies. For the first time in my life, there was nobody I was pining after. No one I thought about in the dark when I should be sleeping. I imagine how nice it would be to hear them call me beautiful or kiss me after an amazing dinner.
Unfortunately, it also created a lot of negative thought patterns, though. When I would find somebody attractive after this conversation, I’d find myself thinking about them. I’d immediately be hard on myself. Start over analyzing my emotions, “Why do I like this person? I must be feeling insecure. Get a grip, girl, you don’t have time to have a crush on someone!” I started to not allow myself to experience very human emotions like attraction and yearning. I had set a lot of walls in my head, not allowing me to accept or receive affection. I became detached from that side of myself.
This manifested in a lot of ways, especially starting my freshman year of college. I began having my first sexual encounters. I would only allow them to happen, though, when I was under the influence. I would hook up with people and never talk to them again. I wouldn’t have any feeling for them after, and it worked for a while, but very soon began to feel empty and boring.
I started to believe I could not have crushes anymore. I had spent so long pushing my feelings down and not allowing myself to feel. I genuinely believed I had forgotten how to allow myself to feel these things. Something I used to know so well, that was second nature. Until a couple of weeks ago. I am currently in a group project — It’s a mess. Half the people in the group don’t put in any work, so it has left the one other person in my group and me to put in all the work for this project. This has unintentionally caused us to spend a lot of time together and also bond over the shared trauma of how hard this class and these projects have been.
I started to notice feeling kind of nervous around him, and ignoring it, slowly though, it has been harder to ignore. He started popping into my head when I heard certain songs or talked about certain things. I started to think about when the next time I would see him and think about the things we might talk about next.
At first, I was mad at myself for feeling these things.. I would say things in my head like, “You are so immature for crushing on this guy. You are distracting yourself from your life.” But this time I talked it out with my therapist, and she said this: “I know why you are saying those things to yourself, but you can’t control who you are attracted to. You can control how you talk to yourself, though. Allow yourself to feel, allow yourself to have fun with this. It’s ok and will be ok.”
Unlearning negative thought patterns is very hard, and changing the way you see yourself is even harder. At the end of the day, I am just a Freshman in college learning so many things academically and socially. Allowing myself to feel and breathe is all part of that process.