Backstory

I had been an extremely sheltered little girl from a Christian family (to give you an example, I was only allowed to watch G and select PG rated movies, PBS Kids, Playhouse Disney, and Nick Junior until I was in 6th grade. I was just a little behind my peers, I think...), and suddenly we were going through divorce, my mom, sister and brother moved somewhere, I stayed at the house with my much-hated father to watch over the house while we had some newly acquired house mates just to try to keep the house afloat for as long as possible. Luckily, my father is a fire fighter, so he was not home very often.

So began my months of freedom.

I had already graduated high school, and hadn't started college yet, so my weeks were completely free. I worked weekends at a Japanese restaurant with people I considered family, went to Disneyland with my two best friends all the time with our annual passes, had friends over at my large house to make use of our large theater system (yeah, you know, the thing that caused all this trouble to begin with! My father never should have spent all that money on a bonus room, pool, and bbq...), went to church, and just generally had loads of fun. It was a particularly warm summer, and we enjoyed staying up all night to go on "night hikes" on the horse trails behind my house, hanging out at Denny's, and having Disney movie marathons.

Then my world expanded when one of my best friends started dating someone. He was included in our movie marathons and we were invited to Denny's with his group of friends. Our circle now had quite a few people in it, so we were more alive than ever. Still innocent, we never touched drugs or alcohol, but had fun in our own way -- fangirling over disney and anime.

I viewed my friend's boyfriend as an older brother. He helped me out the many times my father was an asshole and kicked me out of the car when he'd offered to take me to work instead of taking the bus, leaving me with no option but to take the bus and be hours late to work (The bus system where I live is TERRIBLE). That is, he helped me out those time when my father didn't take my cell phone as well. (Yes, my father would actually kick me out of the car, leaving me hours late for work with no way to call and let them know I was going to be late. And before you ask, he kicked me out because I was arguing over something he was blaming me for that my brother was sitting in the back seat going "Sorry, I did it, it was me." Yet my father was still yelling at me for it to the point of kicking me out of the car. Isn't that lovely?) He helped me move into my friend's house for a month to escape my bastard of a father, and then move back out when her parents didn't want me living there anymore.

But then things started to change. My best friend and her boyfriend were always fighting, and he'd complain to me about it, saying things like "I should just take you and leave her and all my friends because you understand," making me feel special and wanted and accepted. In my naive mind, I still thought that he only viewed me as a close friend, but my feelings started growing for him. It was quite a love-hate relationship, though. I went between feeling cared for and wanted and feeling tossed to the side, hating how much of a little girl he could be when he didn't get his way (which was all the time).

This turned into a cycle of mental abuse to the point where I though to myself that I wouldn't mind so much even being a second girlfriend, and I could understand how people could have more than one wife. It was bad. Summer came and we would go to the pool with my other best friend and her boyfriend while the first best friend was at work. He would totally flirt with me and tease me and tickle me and hold me in his lap, and then she would join us after work, and I wouldn't exist (except to blame his relationship problems on me and call me a bitch). She ended up finding out that I liked him, but not about the flirting. It became a huge elephant in the room.

The summer was drawing to an end, and I was beginning to realize that this foreclosure thing was going to happen soon, and I needed to get another job. My first best friend got me a job working with her at a women's clothing store, and I began training there the week that she went across the country with her family to look at houses to move into later in the year. I felt like I was in another dimension. I was working at her job without her. The store played modern secular music, which I had previously made it a point to avoid. I was getting all these sexual messages played to me all day long, and then I was seeing him and his friends and going swimming with them at night.

Twice that week, we ended up alone at my house, watching movies, and I didn't let him go all the way, but... I  really just wanted him to hold me, and I thought that that would achieve that.

My best friend returned, and things were normal for a little while. One night, we were on our way back home from Denny's or somewhere, and the song "Watcha Say" by Jason Derulo came on the radio. I sang along loudly, and when we got back to my house, I pulled her aside and told her. It wasn't right that she didn't know, and I knew that I needed to get myself out of that situation.

She talked to him about it, of course, and that manipulative asshole actually got her close to believing that it didn't happen, and I was just making it all up. We spent days going back and forth, and finally she decided that she did believe me, but that she was still going to give him a chance.

We stopped talking for a while. Luckily we had different shifts at work. I felt awful. Nothing like this had ever happened to me. I hung out with an acquaintance most nights, sometimes seeing the boyfriend's group of friends. They had all seen what had been going on, and they supported me, but they weren't close friends. I was totally lost.

My friend and I started hanging out with these two guys- one I knew from high school, and the other was his best friend who I'd seen a couple of times in the many Denny's outings. He'd actually made me die of laughter one night talking about how The Asshole (as I will be calling my best friend's boyfriend from now on) was probably jacking off in the bushes when he'd stormed off after not getting his way, and saying that he needed to put in a tampon.

These guys took us on "real" night hikes, even giving us each some pocket knives and stuff. One night, my boots got stickers all in them, and they were stabbing into my legs, so he ended up carrying me back to the car, and pulling out all the stickers, much to my friend's (and his friend's) jealousy.

I ended up deciding to move in to an apartment with some acquaintances, knowing that the foreclosure was coming very soon. I ended up moving in two days early because my disgusting room mates had gone so far that there were maggots crawling all over the kitchen and the living room. I left that night.

And that night, I texted him, and he told me that his dad was drunk and being abusive, so I begged my friend I was moving in with (a guy who had a crush on me), to drive me over to see him. He came back to the apartment with us, and was being very cute and flirty and fell asleep on my lap. At that moment, I decided, he would be my boyfriend.

We spent the next week hanging out, and I finally told him that I like him, and that I was pretty sure he liked me, too. He played coy and said he'd have to think about it. That month, my nights were spent with him. He would bike over to my apartment and help me get unpacked, and we'd stay up into the night, walking down to the 7-11, talking and getting to know each other. He was everything I'd ever hoped for, but didn't think I could actually find in one single person. Everything was perfect.

And then everything came crashing down on me at once. Apparently my bank account was still connected to my mom's, so when the IRS levied her accounts, they took all of my money, too. That would have been just a minor set-back, but then, the guy I was sharing a room with moved out two days before the end of the month, and I was going to have to pay twice the rent I was expecting to. And my new job gave me my two weeks notice (They are an extremely unprofessional company, and the manager is notorious for firing people and hiring new ones on a whim. She fired all four of the new girls that had come on at the same time as me).

I moved in with my other best friend's family for a month or two, but then her father screamed at me one day, and I moved out. My boyfriend and I had been together for three months now, and I ended up having to move in with his family. Talk about awkward! I didn't know what to do. I'm a very reclusive person, and having to live with his family like that was just too much. I felt really embarrassed that I was being a burden like this, and I pretended not to exist as much as possible- staying in his room when I wasn't at work.

This continued for months, and I was thrown into a deep depression. I was paying rent on a place that my friend had helped me find to move into, but I had no means of getting to work from there, so I stayed at his family's place.

I gave him my virginity, and we kept accidentally calling each other husband and wife instead of boyfriend and girlfriend. It was cute, and one of the few things that kept me somewhat happy in this bad time.

I was trying to get a license, but I had no car. My boyfriend got his license, and my dad gave us his truck that was completely unsafe to drive since he had let it fall apart because it was technically supposed to be repossessed. My boyfriend spent days fixing the car himself, and then he helped me to get my license. I failed the test once and had to take it again, but I was finally driving, and could stay down in the canyon where I was paying rent.

He ended up staying there with me, and my work gave me a ton more hours! I finally had a tiny bit of money to just buy myself actual food so that I wasn't living on quesadillas (gluten-free food is really expensive- well, food in general is expensive when you have no money to speak of). He got a second job working at a nursery, and he loves plants and was working hard and doing all this extra stuff and getting a lot of respect from his coworkers. He was really really happy! Things were really looking up!

But my hours were really starting to wear on me. I was working lunch and dinner with the restaurant closed for a couple hours in between, so I was essentially getting up, going to work, taking a break where I couldn't really do much of anything, working again, and then going to sleep. We rescued a kitten who was abandoned by her mother at his nursery, and I've always wanted a cat, but my mother never let me. So I was still a bit happier than I had been, and things looked like they were improving!

But then my boyfriend's married, pregnant manager decided that she was going to fire him because he hadn't flirted back when she'd come on to him. After all he'd done for them, she just fired him. They were a new business, and were going to throw out a bunch of stuff from the nursery that had been there before, and he had convinced them to give him a few days to try to sell it, and had made them a ton of money! He'd taken over duties of others that hadn't been doing such a good job, and he had even redesigned the logo for them! And then she just fired him for a reason like that.

It hurt me to see my love go from being so amazingly happy, to feeling so miserable so fast. Out of that huge pile of stuff he'd been selling, he'd bought some cute garden decorations for me to put outside my little cottage, and kept them in his mom's garage. The day we'd put them in the trunk of the crappy van I'd been driving (my dad traded me for a crappy van as soon as my boyfriend fixed up the truck all nicely), I was on my break from work, driving back to his mom's house to see him. I was sitting at a red light, with at least 30 other cars, when some asshole driving a truck must have been on his cell phone because he didn't see it was a red light and rear-ended me, pushing me into the truck in front of me. The trunk door was smashed all the way up to the back seat. The gifts were demolished, and the van was totaled.

So now I really had no free time. I had to go to the chiropractor on my breaks now, to try to fix my aching back. Sex was extremely painful, and I didn't even dream of going to Disneyland. I had no car to drive, so my boyfriend had to borrow his mom's car, and even when I wasn't driving, I was having major PTSD. I still have it all the time, just very minor. So that was how my summer was spent. I did not go to the pool even once, and I visited the beach for two hours one day because our friends were there. My other best friend had ended up getting pregnant at the beginning of the year, so I'd barely heard from her, and this was when we were going to say goodbye to her boyfriend because he was going to the Marines.

Going to the Marines has been my boyfriend's dream since he was two years old. His grandfather was a high-ranking official in the marines, and he wants to do that, too. But they keep tugging him along, making up excuses as to why he couldn't enlist, but saying that  he had to do this or that first. He did all these different things for months, before they finally said that he just couldn't go. He tried to get into the army, and they were much more helpful. He took all the tests and scored extremely high, and he was supposed to go, but then they told him he didn't make it because of some medicine his mother had put him on when he was in high school. They said that he'd been off of it long enough, but now they were saying that he had to take two years of college first, taking a "full load" of classes, which apparently means more than "full-time." Apparently, he's supposed to take like 3 classes a day, 5 days a week. How is that even possible to do while working?? Doesn't "full-time" mean "full-time??" How can they expect anyone to be able to do more than that? It's called "full-time" for a reason!

And so his dreams were crushed again. He was now a manager at the fast food restaurant he works at, but it was still not a good situation money-wise.

I got offered my full-time office job by some regular customers at my restaurant, who turned out to be the president and vice president of the company! But right before I started working here, the family I'd been renting a room from decided they were going to move suddenly, giving me less than 30 day notice. At the same time, I found out that my dad might get his truck repossessed at any minute.

I struggled to find somewhere to move that I could afford, get to work from with the bus, would allow my cat, and I could have my boyfriend over. I got lucky and found a place right by the college where all the busses ran with some 30-year-old stoners. It worked great at first because I wasn't sure if I'd even have a car for long (my father had ended up getting me a tiny little plastic car that I swear to god I'd die in if anyone hit me). But then they got comfortable and their true nature was revealed. They left nasty disgusting dishes and food all over the kitchen. They didn't believe in using pesticide, so we had cockroaches all over the kitchen. And, worst of all, they ate my food. A lot. My expensive gluten-free food.

One day I had gotten myself some delicious gluten-free pizza (one tiny little pie for $20), and I'd left it in the fridge for the next day, MY BIRTHDAY, and I woke up to find they'd eaten it. So I spent my birthday this year PISSED. Such a nice state to have your birthday in.

But I was getting settled, and decorating my room and finally learning to cook and such. And I began registering for classes at the nearby community college!

Then that couple got pregnant, so they're going to have the girl's mom come live with them, so they gave me 30 day notice. So I had to move again. I thought I found the perfect room mate and it looked like it was all going to go perfect to move in with her and my best friend from junior high, so I moved in with my dad and his  girlfriend for a little bit until we could get the details worked out. It turns out that I can't move with them, though, so I had to find another place. At my dad's girlfriend's house, I was sharing a room with my brother who snores SO loudly, I only got 3 hours of sleep the first night I was there. So from then on, I've had my stuff over there, and I've just been sleeping at my boyfriend's family's house again.

It feels like the cycle is starting all over again! Luckily not, though, because the people my mom was renting a room from decided that they just don't feel like having her rent from them anymore (they are the most fake, hypocritical "christians" you will ever meet), so this weekend, I'm moving into an apartment with my mom!

My other best friend's husband got shipped out to North Carolina, and she moved out there with him. I've been kind of hanging out with some girls from high school and my best friend from junior high, so that's been nice.

And, as I said in my first post, I'm just trying to get back to being myself after this long depression, helping my boyfriend through his depression, and just trying to figure out this whole life thing! Things are slowly getting better, and I know that very soon I will actually consider my life somewhat normal again!

It's been a bumpy ride, but I hope you all will enjoy coming along with me!