God Bless This Mess(39)
I could not believe it. After the last few years of trying so hard to look and act like somebody else, I walked in as myself, and I won.
I won by being me.
Chapter 13
What You Don’t Know Might Hurt You
In the South, the pressure for girls to hurry up and get married is real.
Just one week after Austin and I broke up, an older lady at the store where I worked told me I should get on Match.com and start searching for a new boyfriend as soon as possible. “No time to waste!” she said.
I didn’t know her, and she didn’t know me, but she acted like she had every right to give me that advice just because she’d overheard me say something about being single.
The next day, at Walmart, I ran into my old PE coach from high school, and she asked, “Are you seeing anybody?”
“No ma’am,” I said. “I’m actually not right now. I was dating somebody for a while, but we recently broke up.”
“Well,” she said, “as long as you find somebody and you’re married and have kids in the next couple of years, you’ll be fine!”
I thought she was kidding. She wasn’t. She was dead serious.
At twenty-three, that was not what I wanted to hear.
In the grocery store, just one day later—I can hardly believe myself that this all happened in the same week—I ran in with my mom to grab something quick, and I was in my pajamas, and this old man in line started talking to my mom, and he looked at me and huffed and said: “You’ll never get a husband dressed like that!”
I was like, “What the crap?”
I looked right back at him and said, “Well, good thing I’m here looking for supper, and not a husband.”
I still wasn’t over the shock of losing Austin and Brady back-to-back. I had zero interest in finding somebody new. Even after coming home from Montgomery with the crown on my head and a sash across my chest, after being named the most beautiful girl in all of Alabama—which by some people’s definition put me in the position of being one of the most eligible young women in the whole state that year—I still wasn’t anywhere close to wanting to put myself out there again.
Actually, one of the things I was really excited about was that I would have a whole year just to focus on me.
During my reign I would have all kinds of duties, from community service projects to parades to speaking engagements at schools. The pageant duties would keep me busy straight through May 2018 as I built my experience and my résumé on the road to the nationally televised Miss USA pageant.
I got so excited just thinking about it. I was on my way to making a lifelong dream come true. So what if it wasn’t the exact dream I’d had, of becoming Miss America? Being on this road meant every sacrifice I’d made was worth it. I was going to be Miss USA. I was sure of it. It was what God wanted for me. Why else would I have won the way I did?
*
Taking a year or so without dating anyone new was one of the best things I’d ever done for myself. From Tucker, to Brady, to my summer fling with Luke, to Brady again, and then Austin, and then my very short-lived attempt to go back to Brady, I hadn’t gone more than three months without having a boy in my life since I was seventeen years old.
I started questioning why I’d done that, and why I wanted to get married right after college anyway. Having time to really see the world, whether it’s through your career or your relationships, just getting outside of your own little bubble—I think it’s important. And I think there’s more time to do that than people think. You don’t have to rush into everything. Why do we feel like we have to get all the degrees, get the wife, the husband, the kids, right away? I think if I had done that, I might have reached twenty-five and thought, Oh, God, is this the rest of my life?
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately—the things I thought I wanted versus the way things turned out. If I had married Austin or Brady, my life would have been set in stone pretty quickly. And some people love that feeling. But I really don’t think that would have been right for me. I mean, none of the things that have happened since then would have happened. None of them!
I feel like every day now is a new something, and I am so thankful that my plans way back when didn’t work out. The more I see the world, the more excited I am at the possibilities opening up—for my life, my career, all of it! One of the things I’ve learned these last few years is just how young I really am. And I have to stop myself every once in a while and remind myself of that. “You’re still in your twenties, Hannah. And you know what? You’re doing okay, kid. You’ll figure it out.”
This messy stuff is all just a part of it. And God bless this mess—because without the messes, without all the screwups, without some of the ups and downs, how would we ever learn to do things better? To do things the way we want to do them, for ourselves?
After the breakup with Austin and the ending with Brady, I participated in my church’s 21 Days of Prayer, where we went to church every day at 6:00 a.m. for twenty-one days straight, just to get into the habit of praying every morning and making it part of a routine. I journaled through that. I journaled that whole year.
Journaling gave me time to think, and one of the things I thought about was what I had learned from my two longest relationships, and what each of them taught me about what I really wanted in a husband.