She has not marched onto the pages of this WordPress blog, hands on her hips and cowboy boots kicking the blinking cursor, demanding to stay.

For that, I am sitting in buckets of Sorrys, because I feel just a tiny bit disingenuous.

She is just the reason I wish we could clasp hands through the phone lines. Just the reason every time someone tells me This World is Better Without Them, I start to insist This World Cannot Afford To Lose Them.

The World Cannot Afford A Tomorrow That Disregards Your Yesterday.

She is That Reason.

That Reason you’ll refuse to buy her cat litter for her twenty-third birthday. When she tells Future You that she’s alone, it’s the Reason you’ll pray her husband’s just in the bathroom taking a shower.

You conjure up images of a woman you don’t know – Future Her. A woman who doesn’t yet exist. A woman she cannot imagine.

She is the reason behind all the dark moments I’m trying to prevent. And she is the story that subtly threads itself through each line of each post, of each girl, real or imagined, who finds herself printed on these pages, whether I care to admit it or not.

I don’t talk about her because I keep waiting for her Happy Ending. Instead, I tell the story of hundreds of others who have pushed past roadblocks in their lives in favor of a Brighter Side, because I do not know How it Feels.

Tell me, dear girl. Pull up a chair and tell me how it feels to want to fall asleep and never wake up. How it feels to want one less Tomorrow, an abbreviated Today.

Tell me what the word Suicide looks like scrawled inside your marbled composition book when you test the cursive acknowledgement out for the first time.

Does it feel different when I put a name to it? Does it scare you?

If I’m being one hundred and ten percent honest, I would tell her we only want one thing: to coax her into happiness like the outside of a cat’s travel cage.

We only want her to stop stepping lighting on the subject. Stop pretending she is worth only a few minutes of our time when she’s worried she won’t like tomorrow any more than she does today. We only want her to stop making herself smaller. Stop letting her hide behind oversized sweatshirts.

For every single moment that she uses to push herself down down down, I am desperately trying to pull her up by her bootstraps and tell her to listen to someone else’s story.

Sometimes, though, it is time she recognize her own.

This is for her. She is the reason.

But if you asked me what I’m doing, I’m just as likely to tell you I’m in the business of designing fashionable kneepads.

“Kneepads?” you’re saying.

Yes, kneepads. And elbow pads and wrist pads and helmets, too.

But not just any kind of kneepads. Fashionable ones.

We are in the business of protection and prevention and healing, but we’re making it personal and attractive.

We’ll have pink glitter ones for the Glam Gals. Camouflage prints for the Deer Hunters and ROTC members. Argyle for the Preps and plaid for the Westerners. Teal and tan for the California Surfer Boys and black and purple for the Rocker Chicks.

We’ll stock them in all the university colors and people will begin to buy them as graduation presents because what better way to say “welcome to your new life” than to suit up for an epic battle with impending disaster?

Growing up, my mom had to wrestle my Barbie bike helmet onto my head. She had to paint a picture of what might’ve happened if I had an accident and wasn’t wearing it.

And even then, that didn’t stop me from complaining about the bangs in the eyes or the constant itching at the back of my neck as my ponytail scratched me.

That didn’t stop me from feeling like a Loser with a capital L.

But these days, I am wishing it were that easy—strap on your kneepads and helmet and swerve to avoid all the orange cones:

Loneliness. Depression. Breakups. Anxiety. Divorce. Suicide.

I am learning, with each new email, that we are all hiding behind the Cool Factor.

It’s not cool to be depressed or self-harming or bulimic or otherwise unable to cope with change and disaster and heartbreak and low self-esteem.

But it happens.

So I am hoping we can unravel this piece of fabric knotting our lips together in favor of something new—open minds and fashionable kneepads and attractive ways to say You Aren’t The Only One Suffering.

Because you’re not. Have I told you that lately?

Before there were boyfriends and broken hearts and buddies that moved away, there were just three girls, a song, wooden bedposts, and a feathered comforter.

Our hands wrapped around the wooden spheres we’d wrestled from bedposts, makeshift maracas we alternated shaking above our heads and stuffing down our tank tops to make us look like Real Life Barbie Dolls.

The music played in our heads as we belted out renditions of a song we knew so well and not at all. A song fit inside us to make us feel like rebel girls all the while holding us in suburbia.

We knew the words, but we didn’t understand them. Heard the regret, but didn’t feel it.

We chose, instead, to bounce on a bed draped in a feathered duvet comforter. Our tiny toes trampled all that was Light & Airy & Floating Along Fine Just Fine.

“He was a skater boy. She said, ‘See ya later boy.’ He wasn’t good enough for her.”

I look for it now—those words, that verse, the moment when everything shifted from Peace Out, Sucker to Wait Wait Wait, Come Back To Me.

But it’s gone.

The song didn’t make it into my iTunes library when I shifted from Windows to Mac. The words didn’t wait for me to find them, relish in their bittersweet regret, and tuck them deep into my pocket for safekeeping.

“Now he’s a superstar. Jamming on his guitar. Does your pretty face see what he’s worth?”

I wonder how many moments it takes for us to figure out we won’t get it back. If it’s possible, at twelve years old, to be hyperaware of that while you bounce on your parents’ bed with your two best friends and a pair of makeshift maracas.

Back then we could end songs when we wanted to. Forgetting, sometimes, that it stopped well before we restarted the first verse after the last chorus. Forgetting we had the ability to hit Repeat six million times but it wouldn’t slow Tomorrow down.

Forgetting that we couldn’t stay in that spot where we were three girls in a bedroom with two pairs of wooden bedposts in our fists and a beige feather duvet comforter softening our falls.

The song ends. The day ends. The girls stop bouncing on the creaking bed. The stereo remote gets kicked beneath the bed and lost. The girl moves. The bed gets shipped to another state.

And then the three girls start to wonder if that moment was even real.

I want to shake her shoulders and tell her to stop pining for the boy who has his fingers running through another girl’s hair.

Stop standing on his front walkway, waiting for him to hand his heart to her. Stop slow dancing to the sound of his heartbeat against her head on our living room couch.

“You want to be with someone who thinks you are the greatest thing ever,” I tell her.

Her cheeks blush and her eyes glaze over.

“I know you don’t want to hear that,” I continue. “But it’s true.”

I watch her hold a stopwatch while he runs laps around her. She’s hoping he comes back tomorrow. Every day, I think, she wakes up sure this is The Day.

I want to tell her to fall in love with a boy who loved her first. Who loved her more. Who loved her best.

I’ll leave out the part that boys like that are hard to find.

I want to tell her to stop taking her anger out on the bottles of Lucky Duck lining the windowsill above the sink. Stop stacking them atop the kitchen cabinets like trophies for the girl who never finds First Place in His Heart anymore.

But those words stay silent. Those secrets stay sealed.

I’m trained to stand in the hallway and wait for sobs. To listen for the cracks in her voice when she says his name. To push the conversation forward when she doesn’t have the strength.

I am the heartbreak healer. The boyfriend bully. The future finder.

I am supposed to carve out a path for her, complete with a white dress and a country ballad and a tall boy with brown hair and a big heart beating just for her.

I can’t. I can’t find it.

This is me, the girl who doesn’t have a Pinterest board for that Big Day, the girl who gave some boy her heart and broke it twice, the girl who still isn’t sure if she’ll ever hum a slow ballad barefoot on a dance floor, telling her to hang on.

But not for him. Not for the boy running laps without stopping to see her. Not the boy with his fingers in another girl’s hair.

Not him, my darling. There are billions of other hims to choose from. I have a feeling, someday, you’ll find the right one.

The truth is rarely simple. Often, it falls into our laps like leaves from maple trees and lint from the insides of our sweatshirt hoodies. It does not apologize for the dog fur coating our couches or the dirt tracks ruining our carpets.

It stands tall and tells us “tough luck.”

And sometimes that is enough to bring me to my knees.

There are plenty of truths I’ve shared in the last twenty months. I have been honest with you for as long as I can remember. But someone once reminded me that a lie of omission is still a lie, and to say every day is beautiful is to look through a distorted telescope.

We are blessed to have support when we launch ourselves into something risky and unapologetic. And if we’re really lucky, those people who hold our hands as we cross highways and lift us over barbed wire fences are the people we hold in our hearts. The people we pick over and over again.

Those are the people we imagine when the playground question is proposed: “Who, if you could only take one person with you, would be on your hypothetical deserted island?”

My list has evolved over the years. People come and go, waltzing into my life and shimmying out like contestants on a game show. But a handful stuck to the concrete in my heart, unable to move for much longer than others.

It is their support that turns me into a pile of mush. And when I find myself absorbing the momentum and wind at my back, compliments of people in places I’ve never been, I somehow still ache for the people whose feet have swapped shoes with mine and whose sweatshirts have warmed my chilly arms to recognize how much I am pushing for a better world.

I don’t want to seek the approval of people who don’t notice. I don’t want to cry over those who underestimate or dismiss me. I don’t want to volley between gratitude for the kindness of strangers and anxiety that I am pushing the ones I love far away every time I lasso them close.

It is just that we, us humans, want to be noticed by the ones we love. We hold others up on platforms that don’t retract when we should be focusing on the love we’re given.

If there are words enough to comfort me and you and your friends and your family, it is that we love with our hearts, without question, and we do not focus on getting that love back but concentrate on being nothing but grateful for those who believe we are bigger than our missteps, wiser than our younger selves, and stronger than our failures.

And I hope that is enough for the moments when the ones you love most don’t understand the passions you hold dearest.