My Greatest Wish
Welcome to our column written by Managing Editor Caitlyn Mae Araña, called Catching Up With Caitlyn. Through letters, she addresses the trials and tribulations that come with learning and growing as a 20-something.
This semester, she will be focusing on one particular narrative that has impacted her over the years, although not all articles will be about this one situation. So, tune in for your weekly dose of drama and strap in ladies and gents… Nothing is off limits here.
Dear Jacob*,
The argument right before our breakup happened over text, and truthfully, if I could go back and do it again, I would. I would defend myself. I wouldn’t give in to the unrealistic standards you placed on me. And as much as I would’ve wanted our breakup to happen in person, your unwillingness to meet up allowed me to write this with a fact-checking resource. I’m equipped with screenshots of our messages as I type this up, and it makes it easier for everything to be accurate. I don’t want to bend any narratives or recall false memories. I want this to be the most authentic part of our story, because in that moment, we were probably the worst version of ourselves.
After you kept Emily’s* identity pretty incognito, and after I was petty and subbed you on Instagram, we hashed it all out. And by hashed it all out, I mean we definitely made things worse. Four days before Ella’s* birthday, we had gotten into an argument but mutually decided to get over it pretty quickly. Of course, for us, this never meant truly getting over it. Instead, it was more so just another incident of sweeping things under the rug. I could get into it, but then we’d honestly be here for another fifteen articles; in our last argument, as suspected, all of the same issues carried over.
I apologized for my petty Instagram caption, and you wouldn’t hear me out, which I see now is understandable. Somewhere within my apology, I said, “I miss you and you never miss me back.”
You responded with, “How can I miss you if you’d rather be with other guys?” This was one of the big arguments we got into regularly—you constantly thought that I wanted to be with other guys or hang out with other guys or be noticed by other guys when all I really wanted was to be noticed by you.
At this time, I was at dinner with my family, but I was way more consumed by my phone and why you weren’t replying to me after I told you that what you said couldn’t be farther from the truth. When I confronted you about ignoring me, you told me that you were busy. Of course, me being the petty person I am (also because I just don’t learn from my mistakes), I told you to let me know when you had time for me. I guess you never learn either, because you said, “Sure, for now replace me with Ricky*.” Once again, your odd obsession and indistinct jealousy of Ricky came up.
This quickly escalated into arguments about who kept picking fights with who. Then, this escalated into the bigger issue which actually had nothing to do with Ricky or about the petty arguments that we kept falling into. Instead, it had to do with how you actually felt about me, and even more honestly, how I felt about myself.
You told me that I wasn’t letting you be happy with me. Somehow by trying to be with you and talk to you, I wasn’t letting you be happy. “I feel like you only want to be with me because it’s ‘Caitlyn and Jacob,’ and you only want me to go to Ella’s* birthday so that you can be like, ‘look at my boyfriend,’” you said, and finally, your actual thoughts were out there.
Apparently, you thought my motives were superficial, and after a while, I believed you. I thought that maybe there was a part of me deep down that was more concerned about how I looked than how you felt. Now that I’m writing this, I don’t believe that to be the case at all. But in the moment, you had me convinced.
It didn’t occur to you that I wanted you to come to Ella’s birthday because I wanted to be with you or because I was getting all dressed up and felt like you’d think I looked nice. That couldn’t possibly be my motive, because then that would mean that you were overreacting and potentially borderline toxic. I say borderline because I didn’t realize you were toxic until you asked me how I was going to dress and then answered your own question with, “Like some girl trying to get with another guy? I don’t want to see you dressed like that.”
For some quick backstory, people have always had issues with the way I dress. I hit puberty very early. From the third grade on, my body developed quite quickly which made clothes that I loved very difficult to wear in public. It was hard to dress the way that I wanted to because my body made it look like I had ulterior motives, when in reality, if anyone else my age wore the same outfit, they’d be told that they looked nice.
So, us arguing about the way I dress definitely hit a sore spot for me. I ended up sending you a picture of the dress I was wearing. Looking back at the person I was then, I see that I was so desperate for your love and your approval that I let the toxicity control me. You then quickly put our relationship on the line and said that you weren’t sure if you could be with me if other people were also trying to be with me, and that I was letting them.
This was the actual moment when I knew that we were getting nowhere over text. I asked if I could call you, and you said no. Then you told me that, in the future, I would definitely cheat on you while you’re away in the Air Force because I would “need the attention.” You said it like you knew everything about me, and I hated that the most. You 100% did not trust me, and you spun it as if it was because of something that you thought you knew I would do in the future. But, the worst part isn’t that you were treating me like I had betrayed your trust or like I was actually a horrible girlfriend. It was that I still wanted to be with you. I still wanted you to say that I was a great girlfriend, as if your word had to be the truth.
When I got upset that you were with your friends and wouldn’t call me, you tried to make me out to be the toxic one. I wasn’t upset just because with your friends. You could’ve hung out with your friends all the time if you wanted to. But when you started to put our relationship on the back-burner and use your friends as a way to ignore me, it wasn’t okay anymore.
And when I told you that we needed to talk on the phone to work out our issues because I wanted us to be happy, you accused me of being selfish yet again: “You want you to be happy. I can’t be happy if you are out there doing you by yourself.”
I always thought that my greatest wish was to be happy. But actually, what I wish, more than anything in the world, is to be able to scream at the person that I was in the past and tell her that she is worth so much more. I want to tell her that there are people who will actually love her for all that she is, including the way she dresses, the way she expresses herself, or whatever else she’s blaming herself for. I want to tell her that she wasn’t the one ending the relationship. But I can’t.
Honestly, if I didn’t have these screenshots pulled up next to me while writing this, I wouldn’t have been able to write this part of our story. I wouldn’t have been able to show who we had become. And while I’m being transparent, I want to say that writing our story is not easy. It hurts, and it makes me angry and exhausted and sad for who we were. But, it also makes me see how far I’ve come. Because what came next was the actual worst of it. It was my rock bottom. And it’s only been up since.
Only Love,
Caitlyn Mae
**Names have been changed to maintain integrity.