7 
7 Perhaps we should Love ourselves so fiercely, that when others see us they know exactly how it should be done.
—Rudy Francisco
When I was thirteen years old, I was a year into using Myspace and I thought my page was fly (don’t hate! Hahaha). I remember my bff Taylor told me she went to school with a boy named Josh who had a brother who was two years older and super fine, hahahah. His name was Brandon, and after searching for him through the Myspace system, I agreed with Taylor that he was indeed FINE.
Brandon and I became good friends, we would talk all the time on Myspace, then we were texting and calling and eventually we met. He was the first guy I liked in that boyfriend way. I’d say we were in a cyber relationship for about a year before I could get my parents to let him come around every now and then.
I wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend, really, until I was sixteen, but they gave Brandon a pass. Puppy love! It wasn’t until I was seventeen that I embarked on what I thought it meant to be in a real relationship. I met Joey (aka first “real boyfriend”) when I was fifteen, and it was a “movie moment” for me, haha . . .
We were on the set of True Jackson, VP. Joey was really good friends with Patrick, a guy who I did a Disney original movie with when I was twelve called Jump In. #CLASSIC.
Patrick would visit the TJVP set often and one show night he brought someone with him. I literally remember the moment I opened my eyes and saw him. I had just finished jumping on Patrick, hugging him, and when I released the hug I saw Joey behind him. I couldn’t take my eyes off him!
Joey was about 5'10" and clean-cut, a lighter-complexioned pretty boy with a low-cut fade and prominent bone structure. He was an unusual mix—half African-American and half Guatemalan—very strong features and a bombbbbb-ass smile. 
At first, it seemed like he had his act together. He said he was modeling, working on a fashion line, and also had a job at a bank. The only problem was he was nineteen (soon to be twenty), wayyyy too old for fifteen-year-old me. Right? 
We did a little harmless flirting on set that day because he, like most peeps at that time, assumed I was older. After he and Patrick left it took me no time to hop right on Myspace and find his page! 
Immediately we started talking back and forth and he was totally surprised and disappointed at the age gap. However, we had chemistry and we couldn’t stop talking. We quickly went from Myspace to texting and then calling each other.
I loved talking to Joey. Even though we couldn’t hang out a lot, I really enjoyed having him to call because he was so easygoing, very shy, and even introverted, which made him easy to talk to for someone like me who can hold up both ends of a conversation no problem. 
During the True Jackson days, I was going through some depression and it truly made a difference to have him around. It really made me sad at times that people might judge him over the age difference and his having feelings for me.
MY LITTLE REBELLION 
It upset me not being able to hang with Joey or do whatever we wanted. Thinking back, I feel like the distance in my relationships with Brandon through my not being truly able to have a relationship at that age—and the age difference with Joey—made it all safe for me because I wouldn’t have any anxiety with that physical space between us. It made me, and can still sometimes today make me, anxious to be face-to-face with people who I like on a romantic/emotional level as our relationship builds. When I was younger I think I was more aware of that, at least on a subconscious level, because I sought relationships out that were impossible to a certain extent. As I got older I just found ways to sabotage the power that physical connections can add to an emotional connection. I either wanted one or the other—having both was too close.
Not to mention—this is gonna sound a little crazy, but it’s really just the way I was thinking back in my early teens—I thought guys who were four or five years older than me were safer in general! I thought they wouldn’t try to push me into doing anything sexually because they’d be afraid of going to jail. 
That was such a young-ass idea! I thought I could control them because I was legally a minor. I played the “Go to Jail” card: “You can’t touch me REALLY because I’m underage!” I also had it in my head that dating older guys made it easier to evaluate their character. If a guy over eighteen tried to have sex with me, I’d know right away he was a butthole.
Yes, I played Rapunzel games, hiding in the “minor” tower to protect my virginity until I was ready to give it up. That game got old and also enslaved me. Attaching that to my identity and using that as a game ultimately oppressed me when it came to my sexuality. When I turned seventeen, things became official with Joey. For a year and a half before that, on and off, we started trying to hang out without my parents knowing. 
My best friend at the time, Karen, who was around the same age as Joey, would drive me to see him under the guise of going to CityWalk! 
I felt terrible about lying to my parents, but at the same time I was thrilled that in my mostly “sheltered” childhood I was having a moment of rebellion, haha. It was like I told myself: My story is gonna be a little exciting. I mean, come on! 
That lasted only a year because I couldn’t bear living a lie. (My conscience SCREAMS at me.) Around my seventeenth birthday, I started asking my mom how she felt about me dating someone like Joey and specifically, someone his age. He was twenty-one at that time and my mom surprised me with her response. She said that while I’d need to get my father’s approval on something like that, she wasn’t all that opposed to me dating someone that age if she knew them well.
I’d been working on television with adults for a couple of years by then. Mom said because of my high level of maturity (and men’s natural immaturity level) it wasn’t a totally ridiculous concept for me to date a guy four years older, considering that was also my parents’ age difference.
Even so, it took much time and a personal conversation between my dad and Joey 
to clear the way for him to become a real part of my life. Finally, I thought, nothing was holding us back anymore from having complete and total love and HAPPINESS! 
CLEARING THE ROAD TO LOVE I loved Joey before, but I infused my depression into the relationship at some point. I think in an attempt to ignore what was actually bothering me inside, I told myself I was just unhappy because I couldn’t be public with my relationship. NOW that was GONE. So I would be happy . . . right?? I beat the level for this love game, or so I thought. Joey and I continued to date. At first we were only allowed to hang in groups, lol, and then six months into my eighteenth year I was allowed to date him privately. My dad was EXTRA with those rules, lolololol!
But, as soon as we were fully allowed to be together, I was over at his house twenty-four/seven. I got my driver’s license a little late, but once I had it I was rushing to the freeway to hit the 101 and see that Woodland exit right before Van Nuys. That still brings back fond memories for me when I drive past it to this day. I always had to leave before one p.m. or after six thirty p.m., otherwise I’d be f*#&ed in traffic, haha. #LALIFE.
I moved out of my parents’ house at the end of my eighteenth year. I tried to wait, because I didn’t want my parents to feel bad, but I wasn’t happy being with them for several reasons that I didn’t want to address, so I had to get away.
I wasn’t all the way happy with Joey because, again, I wasn’t all the way happy with MYSELF. I thought living together would bring us closer. Note to self: That doesn’t work! Your relationship isn’t supposed to MAKE you happy, but my conclusion was “He can make you happy if you just get closer. You told yourself you would get away once you had the chance. Get out of this house with your parents and just be with Joey like you always wanted. Then you will be happy! That’s the trick!”
I was too young to understand that I was deflecting, focusing on tiny problems rather than the real internal problems that were keeping me stunted emotionally. I couldn’t realize that I needed to create my own happiness through addressing my feelings and nurturing my gifts! My parents surprisingly didn’t make any type of fuss about it. My mom tells me now that my dad always told her that I was smart and she didn’t have to tell me the same thing a hundred times (even though she did.). 
My parents let me make my own mistakes as an adult woman. “Once you’re eighteen we can’t tell you nothing” and they actually didn’t for the most part. 
They gave me room to figure things out. It was also true that they knew Joey was friends with Patrick and his family. Patrick was like my big brother and he’d taken me under his wing since Jump In! They trusted Patrick and his family, so they assumed Joey was the same type of guy.
So off I went. 
On top of everything else, it had been a year since I stopped working on True Jackson. The money flow was slowing, and we thought it was best to move the family into a smaller house. As I said before, that was a shot to my ego/identity. Around this time, I also asked for a release from the record label I was with. They told me it would take too much money to break an “R & B artist” and it would be less expensive for them to pay and release me from my contract. I put $70,000 of that release money into making a mix tape. I was wrapped up in society’s idea of a success. When the mix tape didn’t gain immediate “popularity,” I took that as a failure (which is unfortunate because an artist’s relationship is with their FANS, not the labels). #IHADITBACKWARD.
Suddenly I felt even worse about myself and a little lost. I listened to “myself” and moved in with Joey for a year at his place and then into a separate apartment of our own.
WHAT IS INSIDE WILL COME OUT When you are in a relationship with someone and there are things inside you that have not been dealt with, it will show up. Not only will it show up, it will kick and scream until you acknowledge it. You have to name the things that you haven’t dealt with to be able to expel them! #MESSAGE.
I couldn’t put my finger on the “problem” though. Everything seemed right. I wasn’t living with my parents anymore. I had a cute boyfriend, a contented way of living, work wasn’t “outrageous,” and I was acting, which was always enough for me. Joey and I were more than public—we didn’t have to hide our relationship anymore—yet I still wasn’t “happy.”
I thought all of that should have made me happy, but still I wasn’t. It didn’t help that I couldn’t speak to Joey. It didn’t make sense to me that I was unhappy in our relationship and he wasn’t. I didn’t understand how he could act like, in the very least, MY unhappiness didn’t affect him. It seemed so fake, almost like he was doing it on purpose, pretending there was nothing wrong when there obviously was.
This was my first experience with emotional unavailability outside of my family. Emotional unavailability was my family dynamic, I thought it was attached to THEM. To experience it outside their home was so disappointing. I didn’t know what to call it then, but Joey was emotionally unattached. He couldn’t properly address his feelings and definitely not his feelings for me. He would even tell me that he loved me but that he didn’t have the ability to be affectionate and/or show in general his disposition. #POKERFACE. I couldn’t break through his emotional walls and that made the relationship hard, especially when it came to dealing with our problems.
The fact that he was “self-employed” but lacked self-discipline was wearing on me. He wasn’t consistent in his work. The real problem was he lacked certainty in himself (how funny the people in your life mirror your issues). One day when we were living at his mom’s I came across three or four college applications, which he had started but didn’t finish, and I soon realized he never finished anything. Our relationship became a push and pull of him and me depending on each other to make the other happy. It was depleting us both without us even realizing the cause.
When things went wrong, I would try to fix him or help him—and he became dependent on me for a lot of things. He and I thought that that was love, the fact that I encouraged his codependency by setting no boundaries and doing everything for him. My tendency was to let that happen, but in truth I hated that burden because it was all too familiar.
I started to realize that I was staying in a relationship that was dragging me down. I was holding on to something that wasn’t good anymore because I was afraid of letting go and being alone, really alone.
As my resentment grew, my darkness started showing up: old bad habits/defense mechanisms. #HURTPEOPLEHURTPEOPLE. Sometimes I went off on him just to get a rise out of him. I couldn’t express MY pain and the fact that he couldn’t see I was hurting caused me, I think, to subconsciously show him through making him feel that same hurt. And just like that, our relationship became physically and emotionally abusive, and mostly on my part. Sometimes we think only guys can be abusive, and it’s not true. Things can get out of hand for anyone when you have feelings you ain’t dealt with. There was one time in the middle of the night when we got into a crazy fight. I should say morning because it was like three a.m. and I wanted him to leave! He wouldn’t, and he wouldn’t let me leave. I was texting my best friend, Jamie, the whole time and like in a movie she hopped out of her bed without question and came to pick me up. He left when he realized I’d called her to come, but when she dropped me off the next morning he somehow was right on the couch. 
He never hit me, but we fought for the first two years of living together. I started to feel so ashamed, as if I was turning into the monster that I promised myself I would never become. This wasn’t me!! Who was this?? How did I end up on this end of it, how? I thought to myself. 
By the third year I told myself I couldn’t be that person anymore. If that’s what this relationship brought out of me, I didn’t want it. I was tired of feeling like he was my responsibility, and of the fact that our relationship had become codependent in every area.
We tried therapy once but he wasn’t available there either. I felt like he couldn’t hear me and that my words were falling on deaf ears. I hung on a little longer, secretly hoping he would leave. There were many months when all we would do was hang out on the couch, smoke, and eat good food.