Happy One Year To Me

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Like any other classroom on a college campus around this time, class is filled with jabberings of spring break plans. Someone asked me what I had done last year for spring break and with an outer laugh and inner heebie-jeebies (okay, more like inner sobs), I replied “not much.” Which is true. I didn’t do much besides lay in bed, lose fifteen pounds, and cry a whole lot. On March 20th of last year, pointless arguing turned into my fiancée leaving me.

He was/is the love of my life. We were going to have the perfect life together. Me getting into a physician assistant program near him while he finished up medical school, us graduating at the same time, and moving wherever he got a residency. We were going to have a beautiful hippie wedding with our corgi (my choice) and golden retriever (his choice) and then make even more beautiful children. Maybe even work at the same hospital and eat lunch in the cafeteria together. We had a relationship I would have envied so disgustingly as an outsider. He knew everything about me, every crazy thing about me, and still so completely adored me. Up until medical school and the engagement came. With them came the arguments. Fighting about nothing of worth. The break up was the worst event of my Anglo-Saxon, upper middle-class female life. The rest of the semester was filled with downwards spiraling grades and calling my mom every hour of every day and night in a sobbing panic attack. I lived my life from hour to hour, just trying to get by.

And then I realized how much the people around me loved me. How awesome they are. How much I needed to appreciate them still being in my life. They let me cry and bitch for hours on end over someone they began to despise. It’s taken me therapists, medicines, enough tears to potentially fill the Indian Ocean (that’s the smallest one, right?), and constant love from those around me to get to a point of happiness with my life. I learned to appreciate the struggles of being a young adult searching for independence. I reevaluated my career goals and am able to be selfish with my life decisions. I have rediscovered aspects of myself I love, and aspects that I know I need to change. I am ME, and that is the most freeing feeling in the world.

I miss him with every ounce of my being every second of every day, but sometimes you have to realize that maybe you’re not the one’s one.*

I say that while stalking the perfect, beautiful med school girlfriend he’s got…