Yesterday, Danielle Brooks wrote a letter to her 15-year-old self on Refinery 29 that’s as applicable to many of us today as it would’ve been in high school. The letter was written with the same mix of sentimentality and wit we’ve come to love from Brooks and her character Taystee on Orange is the New Black, and I can’t help but admit I let out a good, hearty chuckle at this paragraph from the actress:
“Spoiler alert: You won’t be asked out to the prom. One day that boy you had a crush on, you’ll run into him at the grocery store and discover he has three baby mamas and works at Verizon. Not even as a manager. And the other dude, you’ll realize he doesn’t even have enough courage to pursue his dreams. How would he ever be able to handle yours? Again, be patient. One day you will bring all the boys to the yard. They will be sliding in those DMs girl. That phrase will make more sense in 2017.”
With nine sentences, Brooks took me right back to 15, 14, 13, 16, 17, and 18. Like her, I also was not asked to the prom and as far as that “boy” I had a crush on? Well, I had more like a crush conglomerate. About half of the boys in my church youth group I was trying to get to know — not totally in the Biblical sense but close enough to it to sit on the phone with my best friend countless hours every night talking about who talked to who, hugged who, wore what, was “so cute,” and possibly still a virgin, besides us.
Fast forward to 2017 and I’m friends with the majority of said boys on Facebook now and, save for one, all I pretty much see are baby daddies who never left the sad city we grew up in and don’t do much with their lives except go to jobs to pay the bills — and complain about their baby mamas on social media. One slides me a Facebook message or Snapchat approximately every other month asking me when I’m going to invite him to visit and why I never gave him a chance back in the day; another has been on the verge of being blocked by me for years — mostly because whenever I see a status update from him I can’t stomach the thought that I ever obsessed over him at any point in my youth. And while I have no knowledge of the whereabouts of the diehard boy crush who played me to the left on any given third Sunday, considering he did a stint in a juvenile detention center at some point during the height of my crush, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I didn’t miss anything.
Of course, after typing that out I have to question whether the status of these men says more about me than them. But considering I’m not doing so shabby on my own, I’m gonna ride with Brooks’ advice as a grown woman and “Be patient.”
Do you know where your first crush is now? Is he doing well or making you wish you never drew his name in hearts on the back of your Math notebook?
Photo: Bigstock
The post Serious Question: Where’s Your First Crush Now? appeared first on MadameNoire.