The worst heartbreak of my life was like ego death

TLDR: Had a summer fling with my old childhood crush that broke my heart so completely that I am a different person now.

I fell in love with him in second grade. Little kid in love I guess. I’ll call him Evan. He sat next to me in class. Back then, I was bullied a lot for my appearance. The cool girls said I was the ugliest girl in class but I was a nice person and so was he. Everybody liked him though. From second to eighth grade, I crushed on him. We used to pass notes in class and I would keep them in my diary. I knew he’d never like a girl like me. But he was a sweet kid and treated me with kindness when nobody else did. As we got older, we became better friends. We had grown up together. By the time eighth grade came he’d lay his head in my lap at during recess while I made flower crowns. He had a nickname for me, he called me C (fake nickname). We’d pull pranks together and get sent to the principals office. When I started to wear bras, he would sneak up behind me and snap the straps. The first time I wore makeup to school (just mascara) he told me I looked pretty. On school field trips he’d sleep on my shoulder on car rides, and I’d sit on his lap when there weren’t seats. I was crazy about him, and when we graduated from middle school I missed him terribly.

Throughout high school, I only saw him a couple times at middle school reunions or occasional events, but each time I’d feel my face get warm, and try not to laugh too hard at his jokes. He was still the same kid I remembered, funny sweet and slightly awkward. Years passed, I graduated high school and went to college and in that time I had a major glow up. People didn’t think of me as an ugly girl anymore, in fact I was getting a lot of attention for the first time. I felt vindicated, thinking of how I was bullied growing up. At the next middle school reunion I could tell Evan was caught off guard. I hadn’t seen Evan in years, other than on social media, but when I came through the door I could hear him asking about me to my former classmates in the other room. When my new boyfriend (I’ll call him Will) came to pick me up, Evan seemed caught off guard. Even after so many years, it was easy for me to read Evan. Like reading a member of my own family.

Will was my first real boyfriend. He taught me so much about relationships. We were together for two and a half years and even moved in together in our early 20s. But eventually, that relationship came to an end. We ended things amicably (the most painful way) and I did my best to be okay even though it felt impossible.

This is when Evan reappeared into my life. It was summer and suddenly he was messaging me. We met at a rave, and he kissed me for the first time under a bridge overlooking the river, then laid his head in my lap as we sat on the little stone wall and said “I can’t believe you’re really hear after all this time C. I can’t believe it’s really you”He was living in a big city an hour out from me. He came down to see me on his motorcycle and took me to all the places we had been kids in together.

During one particular day, we had some extreme weather while driving to his mom’s place and ended up having to take shelter in our old middle school (his mom taught there and still had the keys). We roamed around the building reminiscing, drew on the chalkboards and rang the recess bell. It felt like something out of a telenovela. He kissed me in our old classroom, where our heights with our names over the course of our childhood were still marked on the doorframe in sharpie.

It didn’t last long. We spent that summer walking together on the beach, along the river, through markets and thrift stores. And somewhere I felt him disappear. He was acting strange and I knew it would be over soon. He took me to the beach with his family, some of whom remembered me as a little kid from our youth. That night we finally slept together and as soon as we did he changed. He asked my body count and when I told him 2 he freaked out. Not long after that, he told me he had only been looking for something casual, and that we shouldn’t see each other. I was destroyed. Completely. I called him a player and said he never should have brought me around his family, or taken me on dates if that’s all he wanted. In response, he was cold and detached, and disappeared forever.

I lost my appetite, lost my will to do anything and began to lose weight quickly. I found my old diaries from middle school with the notes he passed me when we were kids and I felt like my entire world, everything I had known up until that point had been a lie.my worldview had been totally shattered in an instant. I saw how naive and stupid I was and that he had never liked me like that or felt what I felt, and how dumb I was to think he’d ever see me as anything but that ugly little girl. The heartbreak I felt was not just for him, i was grieving the person I used to be. I was grieving my childhood. Everything had been stripped away from me, I was a blank canvas. I didn’t know how to be happy again or how to be alive again. I lost so much weight that I lost my hair, so much that my family tried to intervene. I never saw him again. Not even on social media. That heartbreak was extremely humbling. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so humiliated, used, and completely stupid in my life.

It took a year for me to be okay again. I didn’t think much or do much during that time other than party and starve. Like I was purging myself of the person I had been before him. I had always been this very earnest and naive lover girl, I approached relationships with my heart totally exposed, without fear or hesitation. I felt in my life like a character in a fairytale. That was over. I would probably never be that person again. Maybe it was normal, I thought, to discover that life isn’t a fairytale and lose your sanity for a while. I will definitely never be the person I was before, but I am happy now. I am in a new relationship and what I feel for my new boyfriend is softer and more real I think. We may be moving slower, and I feel like I am still guarded in some ways but the old me is dead and gone and I have built myself a new life. I don’t think of Evan often. When I do, I feel nothing at all. It’s like picturing a face you saw once on a missing poster. He seems like nothing but a faraway and abstract concept. Writing this post I had to think hard to piece together the order of events, and there’s blank spots in the middle. And remembering everything we did together, I felt absolutely nothing.

I guess all that to say I have come out the other side and so will you. You will find love again. And again and again. And in a way all that pain shook me into being totally and fully present. Made me strive harder and really face myself as a person. It took a lot of work but I am better than I was before, and he will never ever know this version of me. It’s entirely mine. If you read all that, I hope it made sense. If anyone has experienced something like this I’d love to hear it. I know it’s a very human thing but man is it painful when it’s happening.