Love, 16

Growing up sheltered makes life hard. You miss out on opportunities to grow and make mistakes that other kids have. Especially when you grew up like me. My parents were strict Mormons and raised me as such. I wasn't allowed to watch TV, I wasn't allowed a phone, I wasn't allowed to hang out with friends outside of school or church and I went to church two times a week. Add this to my crippling social anxiety and you get a recipe for disaster and a girl with barely any friends. And definitely a girl with little to no experience with boys. This is the story of one of my first real encounters with dating, love, embarrassment, and heartbreak.

My junior year shortly after I turned 16 I transferred schools. I was an average student at best however I excelled in English and enjoyed my dance class. I also managed to make a small group of friends although I feel that they probably took pity on me and that's why they took me in. My home life wasn't great so I clung to these friends as closely as I could. At home I felt like I was always doing something wrong. I could never live up to my siblings or my parents expectations and every night was a barrage of everything I was doing incorrectly. But at school my friends made me feel loved, they made me feel accepted, they gave me confidence that I hadn't had before. One such friend was a boy called Riker. We had debate together and we ate lunch in the group almost every day. He seemed to get me and to understand my troubles and after a time we grew closer. I'll admit I had a crush on him for a really long time but I never thought he would like me back. I had never really had a boyfriend except for one boy at my last school and that ended badly and this was the first time that I really got a chance to flirt. But one day to my surprise Riker admitted he liked me back.

Around the same time my parents decided to send me to a therapy group for my anxiety. I generally enjoyed the group and felt they gave genuinely good advice. The group also gave me the chance to interact with even more kids Around my age. I found some more friends that I felt understood me. Like me, most of the kids had anxiety or depression or both and really understood my day-to-day struggles. One such friend is a boy called Jay. Jay was cute and was able to sympathize with my nervous disposition and my frequent panic attacks. Although I had a crush on Riker, I found myself also crushing on Jay. This was confusing because I didn't know how to feel as I had never been able to interact and have a crush with one boy let alone two. And to make matters worse it became more complicated when Jay admitted he also had a crush on me.

Because I wasn't allowed to use a cell phone, communicating with the two boys was difficult. It involved me stealing my home phone in the middle of the night and secretly making calls to them to talk to the early hours of the morning. And because there were two of them it involved me switching back and forth between them without telling the other one that there was someone else. This led to some very embarrassing mix ups because my phone didn't have caller ID and I really just had to go off the sound of their voices to figure out who was who. For a couple months I juggled the two of them trying to figure out which one I liked best and which I had to let down. It took me a little bit but finally I realized Riker was the one for me. I came to this realization because the more time I spent with Jay the more manipulative and controlling he became. He started making statements like if I ever left him he would become so depressed he wouldn't know how to go on. So on the night I decided to break up with Jay I got a call. It was Riker and he said he loved me. Naturally I was ecstatic because he was the one I had chosen so I said I loved him back. Then he went on talking and I realized my mistake. I was not in fact talking to Riker, I was talking to Jay. Who I was supposed to break up with and who I had just told I love you. What happened next will always be imprinted on my mind as one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. As he was going on about how happy he was that I loved him I had to tell him that I thought he was someone else and that I was not in fact in love with him and that I didn't want to see him anymore. I was filled with shame and I made a promise to myself to never juggle two guys again. To make matters worse I ended up so anxious over the whole thing that when Riker called I had a panic attack and confessed that there had been another guy for all the months we'd been talking. Which then led to Riker breaking up with me and telling all of our friends. I was teased about it for months and it was a terrible time. But I learned some very valuable lessons. And that was probably the most embarrassing moment I have in all of high school.