the conversation

Recently, I’ve been watching my new favorite show called The Conversation with Amanda de Cadenet. It’s a show produced and directed by Demi Moore and her daughter with the goal of sharing these honest conversations about love, health, money, relationships and so on, with women all over the world. Or as they’ve deemed it-- The conversation is the universal language of women. Amanda de Cadenet interviews big name celebrities, artists and icons in a very casual manner, getting them to reveal their personal stories and life lessons. It’s a show that allows viewers to learn more about themselves through the advice that is shared by Amanda and her interviewees. In short, I have been obsessed with it because I am learning all these life lessons vicariously through this show! Also, it's interesting to hear about celebs' life stories and struggles--they are so human and are not exempt from life’s tumultuous rides! As cheesy as this sounds, this show leaves me inspired about my future. 

One question that Amanda always asks her interviewees is, “What advice would you give to your 14-year-old self?”

I love that question and have even written a letter to my younger self about it. Specifically though, my 14-year-old self was too preoccupied with doing well in school and fitting into what I thought was the “cool group”…or as cool as the smart honors kids can be. I would tell myself to stop worrying so much about what others think of you. Don’t worry about being judged because you cannot control how others view you. And invest more time into activities, like learning to play the guitar and not with your high school boyfriend.  

Lady Gaga replied that she wouldn’t advise her 14 year-old self anything because she needed to go through whatever it is to become who she is today. And of course, it makes total sense, but if I could pass along any advice to my younger self, I think by now, I would know how to relax more, feel more confident about myself and perhaps even love myself more. If I had been able to work on my self-esteem and confidence throughout high school, I would have had a stronger foundation going into college and perhaps not felt so behind as I did freshmen year.

But then again, all of this is speculative.

One woman who was interviewed, Leslie Bennetts, author of The Feminine Mistake, said that she would advise her 14 year-old self to not be so boy crazy. When she said that, it struck a chord in me. I was never boy crazy at 14. I had my first boyfriend at the age of 15 because I thought that was the age I “ought to have a boyfriend”, just like everyone else. Little did I know I would end up dating him for three years. If that relationship taught me anything it was this: Don’t stay with a person for the sake of that person because in the end, you are only hurting yourself and giving the other person false hope for a future together. The other thing would be if the person you’re with isn’t helping you grow in any way and it’s just a monotonous relationship, re-evaluate what is holding the relationship together. It could very well be that you’re clinging on to something that’s not worthwhile because you’re afraid to be alone. To be honest, these are lessons that weren’t even apparent to me one year after the break-up, not even two years. But it was only three years after that break-up when I entered into my second serious relationship (and my first adult relationship) that these lessons became apparent to me. Why? Because I became so “boy crazy” during the first two years of college that I didn’t want to deal with the "lessons of the break-up". I’d been dating this one guy for three years and finally, I was liberated and in college with very good looking boys! 

I look back now and think about how ridiculously boy crazy I was during my freshmen and sophomore years in college. To be quite frank, it was more like an obsession over my crushes. My girlfriends had it bad too and we only made it worse as we divulged to each other every detail of our interactions. Everything from, “The way he looked at me, I could tell he felt it too” to “L climbed up to a table and watched us all hook-up with our boys”. These were the most ridiculous of times and the most memorable.

I’m glad I got to be a little boy crazy in college because I feel too old for that now, having been graduated from college for a year now. The Middlebury bubble was like a safe haven to be boy crazy. In NYC, being boy crazy can have some serious repercussions because the playground is just that much bigger and wilder. Being boy crazy to me nowadays is catching the eye of my gym crush and running an extra mile because of the adrenaline I got from our eyes interlocking for that quarter of a second.