I hate the feelings the come along with "crushes"—hopelessness, despair, emptiness, contempt...every new crush brings with it less of the happier feelings and more of the depressing ones.

I'm too old to be having crushes like a child—to spend all day thinking about this person and how it would be like to be in a relationship with them, about love and sex...which I know nothing about, again like a child.

I think about him until my mind struggles to conjure up his image. Maybe this is my mind telling me that I just need to forget before the crush goes deeper...before everything hurts even worse than it does now.

Adults should act on feelings of attraction and see if the other party is interested and either date or move on, right? But despite my age, I'm not an adult am I? I'm still 11, daydreaming about my first real crush. 14 years later, I've never really gotten older. What's even worse is that my first crush and my latest crush have the same name. It's a common enough name that it shouldn't bother me too much, but it just makes me sadder.

How do I stop having crushes like a child, and have them like an adult? How does one cope with all the horrible feelings that accompany having a crush on somebody? Seriously...I must feel far worse than the average person or the only adult to only get childlike crushes because if this were common, nothing in the world would ever get done.