Emily

As I sit here bawling, I feel like I have a severe case of PTSD, and I don't know if I can do it again.

Tyler told me from the beginning that he is "best friends" with a girl named Emily. I was cool with it, BUT then he told me that he had had a crush on her from grade school to high school and that "we could get married tomorrow and we would be happy forever". Even saying that I would probably hate hanging out with them, because I would be bugged by the way they acted. Best friends? Bullshit. That sounds like the girl who got away...the one that you want above all, but could not have so you settled for best friend. So what does that make me? Second choice? A poor man's Emily? This hurts me beyond words. Crushes my heart, because he says he loves me more than he has ever loved anyone yet the only reason he is not with Emily is because she did not want to be. I am demoralized beyond compare, because this is not the first time this has happened.

At the end of my relationship with Austin, he became "best friends" with a girl named Brittany. I was incredibly troubled by it, but Austin insisted that it was nothing. And what happened? Five days after we broke up, they were cuddling on the Marching Band bus. I spent the rest of that summer watching that heart wrenching relationship play out first hand as the Marching Band season went on. Words do not express what it is like to watch your first-love, ex boyfriend of over a year relationship move on to another girl in front of your eyes without batting a lash. All the while, trying desperately to win him back. Whatever it took- 3 hour work outs, religious calorie counting, 500 calories a day, no meat,twice a day workouts, alienating friends, six months of no period. Anything to get him back but failing. Now, you might say "boo-who get over it", but feeling the need to compete with Brittany for Austin's attention was the original reason that I began struggling with eating disorders. THAT situation was the grain that tipped the scale and thrusted me into a five year battle to regain the control I had once had. That is a wound that hits a nerve and always will, because eating disorders have controlled my life so throughly and has taken so long to recover from. I finally feel like I am completely okay with myself, but I am starting to feel like it is all being undone. Seeing this situation with Tyler, takes me right back to being that love-struck sixteen year-old girl clinging to anything to make Austin stay. It is hands down the most desperate feeling in the whole world. Loving someone but watching them and listening to them and seeing that they are in love with someone else in spite of the fact that they swear it is to the contrary. It literally gives me physical pain in my chest. I am so scared, because I feel compelled to do the same now as I did then: to compete. But I'm afraid it won't matter, because just as with Austin, I will not win. I will only get my heart broken.

Its kind of ridiculous for me to be as upset as I am, but I love Ty and I have been starting to let myself believe that he may FINALLY be the guy to love me right. After so much relationship drama and hurt, I am just ready to be happy. I do not know how much more hurt I can take before I give up on being love. I would like to think I am a decent person, who deserves to be loved whole-heartedly for the person that I am, but I am starting to feel like I will never be someone's number one. Always a poor man's someone.