The Effects of Love On a Broken Heart

The Beginning

Here we begin with the story of Cassie Peterson. She grew up in a very religious Catholic home in a moderately sized city in America--big enough to have multiple grocery stores, but not big enough where traffic was stopped on six lanes of highway both ways. Because of her parents' beliefs, Cassie was always expected to be the perfect angel child, never doing anything wrong, achieving good grades, and most importantly, finding the person she wanted to spend her life with and only ever being with him. After she turned 18, of course. But that wasn't how things would work out, and she started to stray from her parents' wants when she went to college.

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When I finally went to college, I didn't even want to go. Teachers and counselors from my high school kept pushing everyone to go to college, and all through school, we were told that we could either go to college, enlist in the military, or get a job, and they made getting a job sound like it was a cop out option, and that you would be seen as less successful, so I did what everyone else did aside from a few people that went into the military and I went to college. I didn't know at the time what I wanted to do, but I was going to the local university to get some generals out of the way, and I would transfer to another school to eventually earn my music therapy degree. Everything that I was told in high school about what to expect from college was a complete understatement. Hardly anything we learned in class was actually taught, teacher's assistants were the ones grading our work, and a lot of the work was supposed to be done online without any warning of due dates until the assignments were already past due. Because of this, I failed two of my classes that would've applied to my major and on top of that, my financial aid didn't go through (apparently people assume you've applied for financial aid before and you know all of the hoops to jump through just to get a loan), so my parents had to pay $4500 for one semester even though I failed two classes and had, as a result, been put on academic probation. 

During that time, I had gone against my parents and while they were out of town visiting my brother without me, I had gotten a tattoo. I made sure to do research and find articles written by religious sources that would prove to them that my tattoo wasn't a bad thing, but both of my parents were extremely upset, especially because when my dad asked if it was a tattoo, I told him one of my friends had just drawn on me with Sharpie. That was my first act of defiance against my parents, and it felt good, so I continued with it.

After my first semester of college, I dropped out, not liking the atmosphere of the school and the way that lecture classes were primarily online, and there was little communication between professors and students. Three months after I dropped out, I finally found a job at a local car dealership. Little did I know that my life would completely change just from a choice in employment.