NEW YORK, NY July 10, 2009 —Surviving unrequited love may be one of the most universal experiences of being a teenager. We listen to excerpts of Catalina Puente's and Linda Cuevas's stories about how tough it is to pick yourself up and move on. Then host Marianne McCune sits down in the studio with both of them to hear their advice to people trying to heal from a broken heart.

HOST INTRO: I’m Marianne McCune and this is Still Here –Radio Rookies looking at how they survived adolescence. Teenagers are infamous for crushes that consume them. It's a kind of a rite of passage -- thinking you absolutely need somebody's love in order to survive. It comes up quite a bit in Rookies stories. Listen to Cat Puente talking about a crush so intense that she almost forgot the rest of the world existed. She called the object of her affection K-licious.

NARRATION: When I talked to her, my heart beat fast, like: ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom...The obsession was like a second person. It felt like I was responsible for two people: my regular self and my obsessive self. … My report cards were disgusting. The feelings were so strong - it started to hurt. I used to cry in the bathroom because it was the only door with a lock.

CAT: I remember those mean days.

NARRATION: I wrote poems and haikus to clear out my mind.

CAT: I feel like I'm trapped, trapped as the walls around me. I want to get out.

NARRATION: My sister was getting annoyed.

MARIA: After I figured out that y'all were never gonna get together, and this was going nowhere, I just wanted you to shut up about her and to move on and leave her alone because you guys were never gonna be together.

NARRATION: Maria told me: "Don't tell me anything if you don't got her number or have not done anything with her." So what I used to do was, while I was in school, I used to think of a good lie to tell my sister, so she could be interested in my talking about K-licious. Almost every day, I would come home with a story.

CAT: Can you tell me like, one of the, like, stories that you remember?

MARIA: Oh, um, "Today, guess what happened to me? I don't have my I.D."

NARRATION: I told Maria that K-licious stole my high school I.D.

MARIA: "And, um, she said, ‘Oh, if you want it back, you better come to school, because you never come to school.' So I can't wait to go back tomorrow. She's gonna give me back my I.D. Oh, my God. She's holding it. She put it in her back butt pocket. Oh, my God." (Laughs.) "When she gives it back to me, it's gonna be from her pocket! Oh, my God!" (Laughs again.)

NARRATION: We're the stupidest sisters in the world.

CAT: Are you in a good mood?

MARIA: Why?

CAT: I just wanna know.

MARIA: I'm always in a good mood.

CAT: I need to tell you something.

MARIA: What you did?

CAT: Something I need to confess to you.

MARIA: You have another story.

CAT: No. Like half of them that I said...

MARIA: Were fake!

CAT: How you came up with that?

MARIA: I don't know!

CAT: Yeah!

MARIA: You're idiot!

MARIA: Eeeww, that's sick, yo!

CAT: I know.

NARRATION: Radio Rookie Catalina Puente – admitting just how crazy she got over a crush. If you go to radiorookies.org and listen to her whole story, you’ll find out she never did win the love of K-Licious. But she somehow survived -- managed to pull herself out of the quicksand. As did Radio Rookie Linda Cuevas, after almost letting a break-up truly ruin her.

NARRATION (Linda): When I was 14 I tried to commit suicide, at that time things were pretty bad.

MARCHO: What made you want to commit suicide?

NARRATION: That was my friend Marcho Lopez. I was going out with this guy Danny, and that was like puppy love, it was some stupid reason I can’t remember, but he broke up with me.

DOCTOR MARCI: If I remember right in your case, everything was going along okay.

NARRATION: Dr. Douglas Marci is one of the doctors that treated me after I tried to kill myself.

DOCTOR MARCI: And then one day there was one major problem or development in the relationship. Right? And in that moment of feeling horrible, you did something rash, and impulsive.

NARRATION: Wanna know what I did? I took mad pills. And if you don’t know what that means, it means it’s a lot of pills.

LINDA’S MOTHER: That day as I recall, I was doing exercise in the gym. I come home and my silly daughter she pass out and she says, ‘oh mom how long does it take for something to happen if you take a lot of pills? And I told her, ‘did you take pills?’ She said, ‘No I saw it on TV, this girl took a lot of pills and after a while she died.’

NARRATION: Daddy made me feel like I was nobody and I didn’t wanna feel like that anymore. When you’re dead you can feel anything. After I took the pills, I started loosing my balance. So I went to lie down on our sofa, that’s when my mom knew something was wrong.

MOTHER: She looked like she had the biggest hangover of her life. Then I just got dressed again, called a cab, and took her to the hospital. And from there they washed her stomach and everything, then they sent her to a mental hospital.

HOSPITAL EMPLOYEE: Fourteen year old female transferred from Wyckoff hospital she was taken to their ER two days ago after she took an overdose of various pills: thirty Tylenols, three Xanax, five prednisone, and 3 Theopholen. You made good eye contact, you were pleasant and cooperative. You were wearing a hospital outfit…

NARRATION: I felt weird because I wasn’t like some of the other people in there. But at the same time I felt wanted, someone was always around to listen to you and cheer you up.

LINDA: When teenagers come in here, um, do some of them sometimes want to stay?

DOCTOR MARCI: Yes, usually the reason people feel that way is that life has been so difficult for them at home, that even the staff of a hospital like this is a big step, in terms of getting the kind of love and attention that they wanted but haven’t gotten before.

NARRATION: There was a lot of other stuff going on for me that year besides my boyfriend troubles. My brother had passed away a year earlier. He died of a asthma attack and I also got an abortion. Going through arguments with Danny just stressed me out more. So I guess it all added up to a suicide attempt. My mother still gets upset about it.

MOTHER: After all of this and she moved on. Who went through everything? Me, myself, and I, the mother, and nobody else.

NARRATION: In a way, my mom is right, when I was in the second day of the hospital, she cried, and said, ‘How could you do this to me after I lost my son? And I thought I was going to loose you.’ At that moment I realized what I did was stupid. My piece of advice: if you feel like you wanna kill yourself, think about it twice. If it’s for the same reason I did it, think about this, while you’re six feet under, the person who stressed you out is still living and moving on going along with his or her life, making something of it, and you don’t even exist in the world and no one’s going to listen to you. Take it by me, I know what I’m talking about.

MARIANNE: Radio Rookie Linda Cuevas at age 17.

MARIANNE: All right Cat and Linda, do you guys know the term unrequited love?

Cat and Linda: No.

MARIANNE: Ok, it means when you love somebody and they don’t love you back.

Linda: Yep!

Cat: I’m very familiar with that.

HOST INTRO: Marianne McCune here. I’m in a studio here at WNYC with the reporters of the stories we just heard. I’m trying to get Cat and Linda to tell me what it is that allowed them to survive rejection, to move on and laugh, instead of getting completely lost.

MARIANNE: How do you get that strength to do that?

LINDA AND CAT: Get over it!

LINDA: I just flirt. That’s what I do. I’m being real, real honest! I could go online, I could be crying, I smoke a cigarette, and I start talking to mad people, girls, guys, everything. I’ll be like let me get your number or whatever. I don’t care -- but I don’t call the person, but it makes me feel good. It makes me forget about what I was stressing over. That’s what I do, I dunno. I flirt and it helps. For me it helps.

CAT: It’s when I hit rock bottom. That’s when I know it is, you know? I sit back and crying --am I’m like, what am I doing? It’s ridiculous. Look what this one person can do.

LINDA: There’s plenty of people out there.

CAT: And there’s worse situations going on. There’s like people being blown up like on the other side of the world. You can’t just sit here and dwell on it, just try get up and do something for those who have worse situations than you do.

LINDA: It’s true though, I completely agree.

MARIANNE: So, flirt, and open your eyes to the rest of the world.

LINDA: Well that’s mine, that’s what I use.

Go to the Radio Rookies site for bios and audio segments of the stories