precocious

Now Playing: Dear John by Taylor Swift (you'll add my name to your long list of traitors who don't understand, and I'll look back and regret I ignored when they said 'run as fast as you can')

I guess it's no secret that I'm kind of boy crazy.

I met my first best friend - a boy - when I was just five years old. I had my first crush three years later, when I was eight. I was a smart kid, but I guess you could say I was precocious in more ways than one.

That's more than half of my life. More than half of my life pretty much permanently in whatever I could grasp of 'being in love'.

You'd think I'd get sick of it, and I have. You'd think I'd get tired of the heartbreak and loneliness and disappointment, and I do. But love is something I find hard to fall out of. Some of the boys in my life have taken this, arrogantly, as me finding it hard to let go of them, but that's not the case at all. People are only as good as how they treat you. It's being in love, the feeling, the rush, the butterflies...I'm hopelessly addicted.

When I was younger I couldn't always tell the difference between my desire and the desire of others - maybe because they rarely intersected. That, and I bought into a lie where a woman's desire is based entirely in the desires of others. When you're someone like me, you realise what a pile of shit that is.

I don't know what's happened between this year and the last, but something has changed, about the way people perceive me. Maybe it's just that everyone's suddenly acquired beer goggles or...maybe I have changed. Maybe I'm not the little girl people used to see.

What do I think of this newfound attention? It scares me. I've never felt ready for the things that have come my way. I may be precocious and mature and not really look my age - actually, on a side note, the people who have known me since my early teens swear that I look younger than I actually am, but strangers normally think that I'm in my early twenties. Nobody thinks I'm seventeen. Anyway, I may be precocious and mature but I'm still a child. I'm still seventeen. I'll still make eyes at the cute boy in anthropology and run away when someone much older starts getting a bit scary.

Speaking of that. I always used to think that I liked older guys. I did, and I still do, but only because I thought I could learn from them. Only because they represented the freedom and wisdom and knowledge that I in my youth have yet to attain. Only because they know what they're doing and everything I do is just a very random stab in the dark. But I also liked them because I thought someone older would remember what it's like to be me - little and lost and just a little afraid, but all at once all to eager to jump then fall. I thought that someone who really cared about me who had been there, done that would be there for me, a shoulder to cry on, a friend to lean on, someone to protect me, a few words of wisdom. That's...a bit naive, I think.

I may not be used to this new attention, but don't think I come to it totally green and innocent. I've seen things and done things and know things you don't even think I've ever dreamed of. I'm seventeen, and don't you think of pretending that you don't know how young I am. But that being said...I'm a force to be reckoned with .