I have been a perfectionist since birth. In third grade, I corrected my teacher's cursive writing on the blackboard. We got in an argument about how to write the letter "k." In fourth grade, I burst into tears and hid in the library when, god forbid, I got my first 'pink slip' for not completing a homework assignment. In fifth grade, I was reading John Grisham novels and The Hobbit. The last thing my Grade 5 teacher (one of my favorite teacher's of all time) told me was to always "remember to stop and smell the roses."
I have always been a little clueless and all over the place when it came to staying with the times and acting my age. By the time I discovered my intense love for the Spice Girls, they were already old news. In grade 6, I found it oddly intriguing how I could pull the froggy-print strap of my training bra out of my t-shirt and have girls scrunch up their faces and look at me with disgust, even though they were wearing training bras too. (I never really understood their problem.) If someone dared me to go up to the 'gross' girl in the class and kiss her on the cheek, I would without hesitation. I would also ditch the girls and their jump-ropes and play soccer with the boys every recess. And sometimes beat them up too. That is if I wasn't running around playing my invented tag-like game of "Humperdink." (Don't ask.) If you're making the assumption by this point that I was kind of an awkward child, you would be absolutely right.
My first crush wasn't until Grade 9... there had been a rumor going on that I was a lesbian before that. Of course, I played it up because I thought it was hilarious. I also sprouted some boobs out of nowhere, swapped my nerdy glasses for contact lenses, and started to care about how I looked. It was also in Grade 9 that I met (well, saw) my second crush for the first time. I guess you could say it was one of those love-at-first-sight sort of things. Incidentally, I was very practical at that age and I thought relationships in junior high were stupid and pointless. But I couldn't deny the intense connection I felt with the boy working at the bowling alley. After a year of eye contact with each other, we finally talked. Then he took me out on our (and my very first ever) first date. Two weeks later, I got my first kiss. Two weeks after that, he told me he loved me. One long rollercoaster ride later (4 years to be exact) we broke up. After five years of being intensely in love--and I mean the kind of love that most people think only exists in movies (an all-consuming, completely trusting and mutual, never-wavering, best friend, still-in-the-honeymoon-stage-after-4-years kind of love)--it disappeared for me. I lost the feeling. We were cuddling on the couch, his head burrowed into my neck, while I was staring at the ceiling wondering where it went. Wondering why I wanted to go home and watch TV and do homework. Of course, we didn't have the perfect relationship and there are a ton of countless other factors that came into the reason for why I then broke up with him, but that's really all that matters at the end of the day, isn't it? I broke his heart right after Christmas of 2009, and started 2010 as a single lady for the first time.
The problem was, I had never really been single before. It was like being reborn into a new world... one with a LOT of men in it. Men that I hadn't noticed before. HOT men. (Did I blush and mumble when talking to that suddenly dreamy guy last semester?!) I was in the middle of my second year of University and knew absolutely nothing about the rules of dating and flirting.
And so, with the dating experience of a today's typical 13 year old girl, I embarked on a scary path. And being the awkward perfectionist that I am (I was born like that, I swear!), it was definitely going to be a rocky one...
