How can you figure out what you’re made of if it's always easy?

There are moments in your life that don’t seem like a big deal as they’re happening, just the trivial passage of life and new experiences. Then when you take a moment to look back you realize how much that seemingly meaningless event altered your life. How did you not realize the impact of something that transformed the world you knew into the vastly different world you now know? When I look back I can identify my day that changed everything, and it really was just another ordinary day. ..

Dance Festival 2008 was one of the best experiences in my life up to that point. Dancing, singing, funny friends, and a boy who followed me around like a puppy. He had these big shinning blue eyes and this way of making me laugh whenever he was around. I kind of started to like him… but only kind of haha I guess what I mean by that is that it wasn’t love at first sight. haha  After  Dance Festival we talked on the phone, he was quirky and easy to talk to. Another church dance reunited us and we went for a walk together outside. While holding my hand he asked me what the date was, I can still see the little smirk on his face when he said “What’s the date today? Is it the 6^th, or the 7^th?” My response was hesitant but I answered “…no it’s the 8^th.” His face broke out into a big grin at that point followed by “That’s right. Breanna will you be my girlfriend on 8/8/08?” My favorite number was 8, always has been and always will be. So on the best day of the year I went ahead and said “yes” to my first boyfriend at 16 years old.

At 16 I had never kissed a boy and as an independent individual I was lost about relationships. He was really eccentric and open, I received many messages with his feelings and emotions towards me and while they were super nice it was a little too much for me to believe at the time. It also took me a while to get used to having a boys arm around me, not going to lie I was really uncomfortable and out of my element with even holding hands in the beginning haha I remember the first time he tried to make out with me… long story short, I ended up spitting out the window when I drove away haha and vowed never to do that again because someone else’s tongue in my mouth was just disgusting. Needless to say I got over that one…… 

                

I wasn’t the best girlfriend…. Not even close. It took longer for me than most to go from being independent Breanna to independent Breanna with a boyfriend. For the time I was getting used to having a boyfriend I was untrusting and probably a little resentful for the fact that I had to do it all (because in my mind I did). About a month into our relationship I found out he had kissed another girl. I was embarrassed and upset, yet really glad that I hadn’t let this boy in enough to break my heart. The only problem with that one fact is that it left me wondering, what if I had been more? What if I had acted and done what girlfriends are supposed to do? My curiosity got the better of me and even though everyone told me “once a cheater always a cheater” I let that boy back in, still untrusting and still holding my heart back, but with a resolve to be a better girlfriend.

With each phone call and hang out we grew closer. We became  best friends. We spent usually around 2 hours a night in separate towns, in our own beds, with phones pressed against our ears talking long past the time we knew we’d regret it in the morning. He was silly, great at listening; he was never short for words or things to say. He was serious and thoughtful when I told him things about my past and my wondering philosophical questions haha, he was witty and quick every time he spoke, always with some funny remark that would leave me giggling, the laugh he loved. We had a lot in common and I went to bed most nights with a smile on my face, left wondering why someone would care enough to know how every bit of my day went and what goes on in this crazy head of mine. He was sweet and had the nicest things to say and hearing his feelings for me left me in awe:(message from him) "When i just imagine you smiling, it will make my whole day better. that is just imagining. but when i do actually see you smile it is like a blessing to me and im thinking "whew, i dont know if i can handle another" lol. i love making you smile more than i have for anyone i know. you are very very very beautiful. your everything i wanted in a girl.  your smart, your mormon, you luagh at my stupid jokes, your gorgeous, you have the brightest eyes i have ever seen, the brightest smile i have ever seen, a very hot voice...i could go on and on all day, but what i feel for you feels like im going down steep hill in the car when i was little where my parents would go a little bit faster and say "whooo" and my stomach would feel funny. and when i talk to you my adrenaline goes through the roof where i am like shaking and my voice quivers that little bit. lol thats like my feelings breanna in a nutshell. now you get the jist of it. i feel awesome talking to you, like i wanna tell you everything cuz im comfortable" May 8^th 2009 I told him I loved him for the first time. He had told me a while before then that he loved me but my always careful self said “I’m not going to tell you I love you until I know I mean it”. So on May 8^th I told him I loved him, and while I did love him I was still guarded.

Our relationship was never easy. He lived 30 minutes away with no car, both of us in high school with sports and other activities. If there is one thing I know for sure it’s that we had to work at it every day we were together, it wasn’t a relationship of convenience. Due to that there were many ups and downs, more than probably normal. Our biggest hang up and source for most fights was his line “You don’t love me enough, you don’t want me the same way I want you”. This boy was experienced…. And to him “doing stuff” was associated with love. While we both had the same religion the paths we took in that faith were different. Staying with what I know to be true was a no brainer, yet that ever present sentence “You don’t love me enough, you don’t want me the same way I want you” orbited my brain on a daily bases “You don’t love me enough, you don’t want me the same way I want you”. I can’t tell you why or how exactly all I know for sure is that a year into our relationship a line was crossed. Now regular teens today would laugh at my innocence and brush it off as not a big deal, because in truth it wasn’t something that big or horrible, but it brought me to tears. I made a mistake and that fact angered me and filled me with guilt and resentment. I put an end to anything of that manner and he understood. He wanted to reach the faith I had. We had talks about him wanting to change and go on a mission, about how I made him want to be better. He told me I was the only person in his life that believed in him enough and who pushed him to be a better person. So my belief that I could help him change was born. He would still be upset when I pulled away from making out that got too intense but he continued to work on improving, and my hopes soared. That disappointed look would always appear on his face but I did everything in my power to show him I loved him the best way I knew how. There were messages, notes left on his bed, trips to bring him lunch, money for fun activities, exciting plans, and many gallons of gasoline spent. Our different ideas of love clashed and while I wasn’t willing to budge he continued to say he was working on being different.

Going into my senior year of high school was one of the most exciting times of life. Activities, sports events, great friends, parties and hangouts made it an unforgettable year. Him and I grew incredibly close through the school year as well. It seemed that I was most happy when he was around. I laugh and have a good time with everything, yet having him there took things to a whole new plane of happy that was only noticeable to me. He knows me better than anyone on this earth, and could sometimes state my reaction even before I could. He was the first person I ran to with good news or bad news. The only one who appreciated my dumb little stories and he was the person that made me feel beautiful:(message from him) "Tonight i was thinking about you and how cute you are and how you keep me in line! :)  I was sitting there watching a movie and all I could think of was this really wierd blonde girl that also happens to be very cute! As you can see, that girl had such a great affect on me that I am currently sending her a message at 1:30 in the AM. What in the world is going on in my head you ask? well, the answer to that is Breanna Ashley Rushton, yes, the girl of my dreams. My other half. My dream come true. The one and only. The thief of my heart. I just thought that you should know that your amazing and i will always love you. even at 1:30 in the AM at a friends house. Seeing your cute smile and those gorgeous hazel/green/blue eyes makes me go completely giddy inside! :) I love you with all my heart and I know that your the only one who can understand this nonsense...and I like that...a lot! ;P  meeting you was like winning the lottery times a freaking billion".  


We hit a rough spot toward the end of the school year and while sitting in his car listening to him say “I don’t want to make you cry anymore. I’m not the best for you, and I hate being the one to make you cry” our relationship almost ended right there. But I looked at him and said “You are the one that makes me happy…” As I sat there looking at those deep blue eyes, I jumped. The girl that thinks through everything, the girl that has logical examples, who does pro and con lists finally let her walls down. I figured with my last summer before college almost here I didn’t want any regrets. I didn’t want to be left wondering in college if we would have made it in the long run if I had gotten out of my own way. So it happened. I graduated, and then had the most amazing summer of my young life. Every day I spent with him was my new favorite day. We had a list of fun, crazy things and then spent our summer crossing off our silly ideas such as quarter driving, walking on the beach at midnight and going to the zoo. I had the most magical night of my life on July 4^th 2010 and I laughed more that summer than I thought possible. More than anything though that boy became a vital part of my life, he was where I felt most comfortable. Where I felt most like myself, I allowed myself to be vulnerable to him. I don’t like people to see me weak, but I let him become the best shoulder to cry on and the best person to vent to. I let go of my mindset that it was Breanna against the world and it became him and I against the world. I trusted him, and even let myself slip and I planned and hoped for a future with him.

It’s a long story of how I found out but the end of July brought proof that he had cheated on me around the time of my graduation. It was more than a kiss this time, to say the least. I don’t have words to describe all of the feelings that passed through my mind…. Despite all of my better judgment and logic I had jumped and completely let that boy in, only to have my assumptions proven correct. It was probably the lowest I have ever felt. It was humiliating and unbelievable. Every moment I felt like curling up and just crying out everything in me, sometimes I did. I hated him, I felt played, I felt like a joke, I felt like everything was crashing down around me and sometimes it all hurt so bad I couldn’t breathe. Then there were the times I wished I didn’t have to breathe anymore... One thing you have to understand is that my brain has a constant stream of positive thoughts going through it and every bad emotion I felt I knew the opposite positive side too. Yet it hurt with such intensity that positive Breanna doubted her ability to continue and make it out.

This is where the story should have ended. This is the point where the strong independent Breanna should have returned and that resilient girl should have forgotten that loser boy that broke every promise he made. Yet I have always had this irrational thought that you should remain friends with your first love. This absurd notion that if we didn’t remain friends it discredited any real feelings that were ever there because as dumb as it sounds I knew that boy better than anyone and speaking to him I knew he was sorry. I know his faults and I know how badly he wants to get better… and my addiction to helping people kicked in. I felt that if I could be his friend then I could still help him somehow, everyone always gave up on him, I didn’t want to be added to that list. Looking back on it now it even sounds stupid to me. I can’t explain it right because even I don’t know all of the emotions whirling around in my head.

So I tried. I remained his friend. The hopeful side of me thought that we could stay friends and help each other with problems like we always had, the emotional side of me wanted to punch him in the face repeatedly and pluck every hair off of his body one at a time and the rational side of me knew that by trying to make all of these different sides work the only person I was hurting more was myself. Yet I still tried. We saw each other before I left for college, we texted, and saw each other Thanksgiving and Christmas break. There is no logical explanation I can string together in my head of why I let myself get dragged deeper and deeper into the hole that was this boy. Maybe it was to prove to him that I was better than this random girl he didn’t have feelings for, maybe it was to prove it to myself, maybe I was curious, maybe it was that still present statement “You don’t love me enough, you don’t want me the same way I want you”. At that point in my life I had really stopped caring. I felt hard, I felt that the things I had grasped to so hard and knew to be true prevented me from having the most important thing in my life at that time. More mistakes were made with that boy… and the more I developed into a self-hating, resentful shell of the blissful girl I once was.

Tough love and self-reflection brought me to the point where I knew that this boy was poison to my life. I took the steps to finally cut him out and am beginning the healing process. Looking at it all now there are still many emotions swirling around in this crazy head of mine, some days it all makes me sad and I miss those comfy arms, that wide soft chest and those loving blue eyes. Other days, well most days if I’m being truthful, I am angry. I am irritated that he ruined the fun and innocence of first love, infuriated by how selfish he was and how he took advantage of me and my caring thoughts to stay his friend. He made my notion that sometimes people surprise you and they do change, harder to believe. He took almost 2 and ½ years of my life, made me self-conscious and self-doubting, he made me untrusting with every pinky promise he broke and with every lie he told. At times I find myself wishing I had never met him.

There was a time that I thought that I was on the losing end. That I was the one that got the short end of the stick, that I came out on bottom. Now I see that that will never be the case. I did not mess up that relationship. I did everything I could and at every moment I made the choice that best made sense in my head. That boy is the one that ultimately lost. He forfeited the girl that believed in him the most, the one that took his weaknesses with his strengths and loved him anyway. Absent is his best friend and as he stated “the best girl he could ever get, the girl he wanted to marry, and the girl who’s place was impossible to fill”.

Sometimes I ask myself if I would ever go back and do it all over again knowing the outcome now…. And my answer to that would have to be yes. This has been one of the toughest moments and lowest times my life has seen, but as the cliché saying goes “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”. By taking me to my weakest I am more capable of understanding myself and how I act and react. I can recognize how much I can handle and I better comprehend the person I am. I caught a glimpse of what it means to love someone and even though it brought me to my knees in heart ache I refuse to let it ruin me. I know how strong I am and I know that with my positive outlook and still firm faith in my religion I will reach the high point at the end. Someday I will drive around my home town and not see memories every direction I look of the boy that taught me what it means to need someone, that it is okay to be vulnerable, and the boy that took and broke a piece of my heart I will never get back. I know that my life is still full of beauty, and that sometimes things and people can surprise you. I win because I will never let him take away my knowledge that as hard and scary as life is it full of magical moments that make it all worth it. I win because I can look at myself in the mirror and he will never have the power to take away the huge grin on my face and the light in my eyes. I have taken every mistake and difficult issue and turned them in to valuable lessons learned. I believe that I am actually a better person today because of the events that took place and I can’t answer those questions the same for him.

Yes some days are still hard and yes I will carry this lesson and hurt around forever. I will be cautious and the warning I am trying to teach my sisters now is the same lesson I will preach to my own daughters some day: Never let a boy weaken you, stay true to who you are and above all else stay positive. The church is true, and always hold fast to its teachings. Heavenly Father will never leave you uncomforted and forgiveness is there for EVERYONE. Remember that each day is a new day and that no matter what happens life will always be a thrilling place full of magic and beauty.