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Expecting A Busy Signal

Being a woman is amazing, as long as you don't lose sight of what (and who) is important to you. My friends and family members make jokes about when they try calling me.

When they want to talk to me they can't get through because I'm always on the Internet. Being a writer, I spend a lot of time outlining articles, researching for accuracy, and writing draft after draft.

I also spend a lot of time marketing my words, hoping that someone out there will love what I have to say. My friends and family members are very supportive of my career path, and have become expectant of hearing a busy signal after dialing my number.

So has my boyfriend, only he never calls me. When it comes to women achieving their goals, I am proud to be living in a society where our aspirations are as reachable as ever. I have always wanted the best of both worlds: a career and a family.

One would never outweigh the other; I would live a long and whole life. After I graduated high school last June, I truly believed the cliché that we are all told at some point or another: the world is at our fingertips.

Let's not call it naivety; let's just call it genuine ambition. While my head was in the clouds (or in a strategically balanced pile of homework), my boyfriend came into my life and turned my whole way of thinking upside down: my never-ending list of things to do, my obsession with perfection, my misunderstood intensity. It was wonderful.

When I was growing up, the spotlight was always on me. My parents had me when my brother and sisters were already in their twenties, so I was everybody's little girl. The reason why the spotlight has continued to stay on me has to do with my grandfather. He was a writer who came to Canada from the Ukraine.

From what I've been told, he wrote poetry and plays, but was never published. Out of his four grandchildren, I was the only one he ever picked up and held in his lap. He passed away on my first birthday. When I was in grade one my teacher noticed that the stories I wrote were detailed and colorful.

My family started to believe that my grandfather passing away on my birthday meant he had passed his writing talent onto me. The spotlight suddenly became brighter, and I soon became everybody's little prodigy.

I received a great deal of attention for everything I did. I had a lot of friends at school, I got good grades; it was even suggested several times that I skip a grade. My dad didn't let this happen, as he didn't want me to grow up too fast. It happened anyway.

I didn't particularly crave the attention, it became more of a routine: for example, we would have a test at school, and after they were marked everyone would turn to look at my grade. If someone got a better mark than I did, they would gloat for days, and bring it up every time they saw me.

I would shrug casually, but my mind would be racing: how could this happen? I would pick at myself, as if dissecting every detail of the moments before, during and after the test would change the fact that someone got a better grade than I did. I tortured myself.

People would see my list of awards, and they would talk about me as if everything came so naturally to me. I had all these qualities that everybody wished they had, as if school was my world and I was in my glory. I was miserable.

Never once, did I like school, but I knew I needed an education to become successful. I am one of the few in my family who is a high school graduate with plans to go on to university. Every project I start seems to naturally receive praise, and always ends with me hearing that golden phrase from at least one of my family members: "It'll be nice to see one of us make it."

It became apparent that I needed to succeed in order to fill the void of what my family missed out on. I should point out that my family has never forced me to do something I didn't want to do, and has never made it sound like it was my duty to take on this colossal task; when they brag or ask me a gajillion questions about my goals, it is because they are sincerely happy for me, and are truly interested.

But when you are always asked, and you know you are always going to be, you begin to pressure yourself, feeling like you should always be doing something productive so you always have ambitious things to say. It got to the point where I just wanted to be treated like a regular person.

I didn't want to talk about myself anymore; I didn't want to talk about school; I didn't want to talk about the future, because the fact was I turned into a forty-year old at eighteen, who had never once acted her age. I never learned how to swim, I never learned how to skate, and I never once went on a roller coaster that made me want to throw up.

Laugh lines would not have been in my future had I not met my boyfriend. I was very secretive about how insecure I was, and nobody had a clue that all the things I was doing were only because I could control them. I would indulge myself to keep my head in the clouds, so I could feel as if I belonged on the pedestal my family placed me on.

When I started dating my boyfriend, I felt phenomenal; I felt sincere. He took me away from everything that bothered me. Of course, after about six months of dating, I began acting like my regular obsessive self, and things were very rocky for the both of us. It was a tough adjustment having someone in my life who didn't ask me about school, my projects, or my future plans.

Not that he didn't care about them, but they weren't his priority, I was. Just me. When all of the pressure was stripped away, I was very intimidated. This made me work even harder, and made my boyfriend feel completely shafted. He almost broke up with me several times; each time I made him promises so that he would stay, and each time I would never keep my end of the bargain.

I have several times made him feel like I didn't want him around, and that I wasn't remotely interested in him anymore. I was working hard for our relationship so we could start a secure life together, and was sabotaging it at the same time by not realizing we already had a secure life together.

He wasn't an inanimate object that I could control to make myself and my family feel better, he was a guy who really liked me, not what I was accomplishing. If I didn't care so much, and if I didn't win awards and get good grades, he would still be mine. I was alienating the most important person to me, the guy who could give me the best of both worlds.

When it had gotten to the point where I didn't even believe the promises I was making, I needed to make a change, and fast. If I really was going to have the best of both worlds, I had to make sure that my career and family would not be outweighed by each other, and that each would be a completely separate entity.

I also had to realize that I graduated from high school; therefore the spotlight could finally be fixated on what I wanted it to be fixated on: my writing career and my boyfriend. It really was as simple as that.

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