You Can't Hurry Love

At the age of 18, I was a freshman at NYU in the Tisch School of performing arts. At age 18, your brain is still a baby, still growing. It is so easy to be influenced by other people. I had a goal of saving myself until marriage, but that did not happen. I met someone, and my first time being intimate, I became pregnant. What a horror! How could something so horrific happen to me? Obviously I knew that could happen, but was mortified. I was 18, my life so ahead of me, what do I do now? I told my parents, they told me to keep the child. I told the man, he told me not to. A decision so tricky.

All these republican rich men who are pro-life that have never been a woman, make women feel so guilty and disgusting for making the choice of terminating a pregnancy. I always stood out with amazing grades. I was 13th highest GPA in my high school and I finished 2.981 at NYU. I tried so hard to deal with my emotions, but how do you do that? Between 18-22, those college years, it is so hard to address your emotions. Our brains are not fully developed until age 25. I spent years and years questioning my worth. I thought I was damaged goods—that no man would want a woman like that. It took me six years to forgive myself and that man for the decision I made. I dated a lot, but nothing ever really lasted because I did not love me. I moved to my parents' house in Florida in 2010 to get emotional support. Same thing, attracting monsters of men; Relationships with insecure men who never trusted me, relationships with men who just wanted me for the physical. I was so torn, I do not want to live in this misery of all this trying. Nothing happened for me because I did not see my worth.

The summer of 2014, I woke up and said, "I am not living like this one more DAMN day. I can't hate myself anymore for my past." I found a yoga studio, found a church I like, and spent a whole year not dating anyone. Come 2015, my dad got diagnosed with cancer. Thank God I was in a stronger emotional place. 20 months of chemo, radiation, and torture of his body, watching him deteriorate. A month before his passing, I met a man that is just like my dad.

The whole point in life is to heal. If you are not whole inside, you should not be dating. I am engaged now and things are falling into place, because I took the time to work on myself. I hope this story inspires a woman to talk about these tough issues. Loss and pain are a part of life, and if you don't address your pain, you will be drowning in it forever and never have a happy life.