Feelings Don't Expire

It was one of those late nights where I couldn’t go to sleep last night, so I decided that I would go onto Tumblr and see what all there was on my dashboard. In case you aren’t familiar with Tumblr, it’s a blogging site where you can reblog photos, text posts, audio posts, etc. Basically, it’s the same thing as sharing a picture on Facebook, and the scrolling goes on forever because it’s one of those never-ending scroll websites. It can make it pretty difficult to find a stopping point. Anyway, I was reblogging posts and happened upon a text post with a picture, and it said something like, “I’m sitting at a restaurant and just witnessed a break-up between two 13-year-olds. This was the aftermath.” Following that text post was a picture of the boy with his head buried in his arms on the table.

Underneath was another text someone had added saying “Poor little fuck,” and it just struck a chord with me. You know how as young adults, we’re always putting younger kids down? “Oh, they aren’t really in love. They’re too young to know what love is,” or, “They’re too young to be dating.” Well… I’m not so sure we’re entirely right about that.

I read a response from John Green on his The Fault in Our Stars Q&A page to a question about love, and he said, “I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.” At first, I used to be one of those people who said teenagers don’t know what love is, and that they were too young to know. But I read his answer and really thought about it for a while because I didn’t know what to think of it, as open-minded as I am. And then I saw that picture on Tumblr and felt this pang of sorrow for such a young boy, and I realized that it was because I could completely relate to him. When I was thirteen, I had one of my classmates constantly asking me out over AIM. And even though I was very young and didn’t have my feelings figured out yet, I still felt horrible every time I told him no. I always thought it was a joke, because that’s what the guys did back when we were in grade school. God forbid you fall victim to the awful rules of ZAP, or worse, to a dare. I felt like half the time, I was usually the punch line of those ask-out jokes, and I had gotten so used to saying no that it became an automatic response. Although I had not become romantically involved with anyone, I still feel like I have some say in how miserable of a time it was.

When you’re that young, you don’t really understand why you feel the ways you do. With my AIM experience and being around him at school, I felt more scared than anything. Scared and confused, because I didn’t understand. My emotions were mixed up. I don’t think I had ever really acknowledged how I personally felt until he caused me to face them. And it didn’t help that my depression had started up that year. It was a roller coaster for me, and the one time I did say yes to him, I chickened out and changed my response to no. To this day, I still feel bad for the younger him and the younger me, him because he might have really actually liked me and had to hear me say no a hundred times. For me, I had to worry about my self-esteem and my confidence in myself. When I was that young, being rejected gave me enough of an emotional meltdown. If I would have let him crush me for the sake of fulfilling yet another joke, I don’t know how I would have handled the humiliation of thinking someone actually cared for me when they didn't. 

So in a lot of ways, seeing the picture of that young boy with his head buried in his arms reminded me of how frustrating it was to try and make sense of this concept we call love. But at such a young age, confusion of emotion is probably the best confusion there is. You don’t have to worry about distance or social status or looks or money or any of that stuff. You’re at an age where your relationship is based solely upon feeling, and feeling alone. It’s wonderful to experience it, because you’re taking in so many different emotions at once. It gives you a rush, and you’re blushing and stuttering and feeling anxious and you just can’t understand why you’re such a mess over something that adults make look so simple. I know this young boy is going to figure it all out one day. Being rejected by a girl you really like has to be the worst, and I’m sorry to the boy who I was too scared to say yes to. I still don’t know if it was a joke or not, but it’s something that I don’t think I’ll ever get an answer to, and I’ll just have to trust that the feelings were real, no matter how doubtful things may have been.

I hope that one day, I have the courage to say yes to someone that I really care about and who I would like to try and be with. There are still a lot of commitment issues that I need to sort out and rationalize with, but the emotions were and are still existent, and they are real. Like John Green said, “I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.” Feelings don’t really go away, and they don’t change or become fictional. We still have the same emotions that we did when we were young teenagers who thought we could take on the world. Our priorities just changed. We grew up and became wiser, more grounded by humility, braver through fear, and more confident in ourselves and in our paths through our own mistakes and/or limitations. But love, fear, confusion, the thirst to live, those things all still exist. I feel them every day. I face them every day, and that boy who sat at that table faced them that day. It won’t change for him. It won’t change for any of us. These feelings are real, and I think that young teenagers have a better understanding of what love is than any of us adults ever will.

So, to the young boy who looks absolutely devastated, keep fighting through it, but never doubt your understanding of what love feels like, because I think you’re feeling it. You just don’t understand it yet.