Meeting Ferris Bueller

I’ve always wanted to be a part of a teen coming of age movie. The high school drama, parties, makeovers, the relatable teen angst, romantic gestures that are a little too grand to be believably conceived by a 16-year-old boy. The main factor stopping my high school experience from becoming one straight from a classic 80s or 90s teenage flick was the love interest. All my favorite films had them — The Breakfast Club, 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And honestly, I had no interest in meeting someone to fulfill that role. Romantic love has always played an extremely minimal role in my life, so much so that for most of my life I truly believed that I was just unable to feel it. But recently, something changed this for me. This is how I learned to feel.

I was born into a family where romantic love wasn’t a priority. This isn’t to say that my parents didn’t love each other. They just had their 25th wedding anniversary, and are still going strong. However, they never emphasized love as the main thing to strive for in life. My sisters and I played with toys and acted out scenarios, but instead of playing wedding, we would play games like high school, or even office. While other girls planned out their future weddings, I couldn’t care less where I was going to be married, or even if I was going to be married at all. My parents repeatedly reminded me that I was not allowed to date until I was 16, which I was sure wouldn’t be a problem anyway since from an early age I was convinced that I couldn’t feel.

I don’t know why I can’t feel. It’s just something that doesn’t come easily to me. While other little girls in elementary gushed about their adolescent crushes, about how Johnny had kissed Mary’s cheek under the swing set so no one could see, I was locked into a world of my own where emotion couldn’t reach me, especially romantic emotion. I would try my hardest to fit in with the other girls, even exclaiming that I had a crush on Stephen with a ph. He sat in the row behind me in Mr. Beekman’s third grade class and sometimes I would sneak glances at him, waiting for the famed feeling of butterflies in my stomach to hit. It never did, but I pretended that it had, and acted accordingly. Every interaction that I had with Stephen with a ph, I stumbled through my words and giggled with my friends after he was away from earshot. At recess, I watched him and his friends play on the jungle gym. I wondered if they had crushes too. I couldn’t tell if my obsession with Stephen with a ph was real or if it was simply an obsession over feeling. On my last day of third grade, the last day before I changed districts entirely to go to an arts middle school in the city, I turned to him and mumbled some words about our spring concert earlier that year. He nodded, and then went back to his friends. I sat in my chair, blinking. My first interaction with a crush had gone about as smoothly as one would expect from a socially awkward third grader, and I decided that I had enough of dealing with crushes (real or pretend) for awhile.

Middle school and the infamous puberty years hit me and my newfound friends hard. Our graduating eighth-grade class was barely 100 students, with a far greater percentage of them being girls, so all the girls had crushes on the same three boys. I, for one, didn’t feel like joining the bandwagon of pre-teens who were in love with Alec or Kevin or Ayinde, so I stayed away from crushes and boys for awhile. They simply weren’t for me, I decided. And plus, it wasn’t like anyone was going to be getting a boyfriend anytime soon. Right?

This is why it confused me so much when my friends started dating boys. They plugged each other’s phone numbers into their Rumor Flip phones, told me all the details of their hot date to the mall, in which they — cue the gasps — held hands for the first time. Everyone gushed over their pre-adolescent love life, where the craziest thing that happened was a kiss on the cheek, and once in awhile, a girl would tell me all the details about her very first real life kiss on the lips. She emphasized that they didn’t use tongue, but they talked about it for next time. I didn’t understand where the tongue would even come into play but nodded my head in agreement.

I didn’t ache for a first kiss and I didn’t care much what boys thought of me, even when puberty hormones started to really come into play. I graduated eighth grade alone and confused, like most eighth graders. Transitioning into high school passed by remarkably fast, making my way through the so-called best years of our lives by scraping by. By this time, I’d finally recognized that I just wasn’t meant to feel, or at least not in the way everyone around me did. However, something new started happening — boys were for some reason starting to take an interest in me. So I went along with it. First dates and first kisses, the whole high school teen movie experience. When a boy told me that he liked me, I assumed that we were supposed to date now, even if I wasn’t sure I liked him back. My first boyfriend felt more than anyone I’ve ever known, and I couldn’t fully explain to him that I just wasn’t capable of reaching his level of emotion. My sophomore year, he handed me a mix CD that he’d made for me to tell me that he loved me. I had no idea what love was supposed to feel like. Was it butterflies in your stomach? Or did just simply saying those three magic words qualify you to be able to feel them? So I said it back, to hear what it sounded like out loud, to see if I connected with those words like he did. “I love you too.” His face lit up, like I’d just told him a life changing secret, like it was the best day of his life. I felt nothing.

Our relationship fizzled out before the year was over. He told me we were just drifting apart, but I think it was because I told him I was having a hard time feeling anything at all, and he couldn’t understand what I meant. Heartbreak was simultaneously easier and harder than I had anticipated. It still hurt — I still cared about him as a person, even if I hadn’t felt real romantic emotion for him. I didn’t cry on the shoulders of my friends and family while drowning myself in pints of ice cream, or any of those other cliche things you see in movies. I did, however, listen to angsty teen breakup music and found myself relating to it more than I care to admit. Sometimes, it seemed like I was feeling more pain than the so-called love was even worth. I romanticized our relationship in my head, retelling the story to myself as if I had been desperately in love with him, as if he was the one who broke my heart, when in reality it was probably the other way around. After my heartache, I didn’t want to feel any pain anymore, even if it meant that I could feel real romantic emotion. I spent the rest of high school covering up the emotions that were barely there to begin with, never attaching myself to any one person. That is, until he came along. There’s always that misfit boy protagonist in teen movies that changes things.

He came into my life like a hurricane, an agent of chaos. He quite literally dropped into my life, introducing himself to me and my bewildered roommate by finding the people who lived on the floor above me and jumping, making my ceiling sound like a jackhammer. While this act of rebellion was undoubtedly creepy, he also made a lasting impression on me. So much so that when he asked to hang out with me, I — against all rules of logic — agreed. I told him that I didn’t know how to actually feel, so he shouldn’t be expecting much from me. “Great,” he replied. “I have a crush on a robot.”

And that was it. Before my eyes, my life became a coming of age movie. My obsession with teen movies materialized in front of me into the form of a Ferris Bueller-like trouble maker. I found myself hanging out with him more than I should’ve been, and I found myself feeling. The night that I found out that the ache in my chest was actually romantic attraction, I freaked out. I ran out of class and called my friends, trying to figure out if there was actually something wrong with me. They assured me that everything was fine, and I was just experiencing this thing called emotion. After a couple of deep breaths, I returned to class. I wondered whether I should break things off, because I didn’t want to get my heart broken again. If heartbreak was bad when I didn’t feel anything, imagine what it would be like now that I’d discovered emotion. Despite my survival instincts to save myself from pain, I continued to see him, and I started to revel in this new, feeling me. The heartbreak was inevitable, so I might as well embrace the feeling while I had it.

Of course, my heart did get broken. And of course, it hurt far more than my first heartbreak at 16. But somehow, the pain was worth it. I paid less attention to the grief of losing a love and more attention to how incredible it was that after all these years, I finally got what people were talking about in those coming of age films that I obsessed over.

The romance parts of my favorite teen movies were always my least favorite scenes. I never connected with these moments, never understood how the characters were feeling, that “I love you” means more than just three words strung together in a sentence. I related more to the rebellion and teen angst, living vicariously through the adventures that Kat Stratford and Cher Horowitz got up to. But after meeting a real life Ferris Bueller, I realized that these sections of these movies are interconnected, and I began to understand and even relate to the cheesy romance bits of these movies. I’ll never care for a kitschy romance film, but I gained a little more of a sense of how a feeling can take hold. I can’t take feeling for granted, and for all I know my sense of romantic emotion could be disappearing every day that I experience heartbreak, but feeling real emotion is worth it. Learning how to feel put me through a lot of pain, but I don’t know who I would be without that experience. As Ferris Bueller says, life moves pretty fast.