This picture doesn’t directly relate to any of this story aside from this is me less than a few weeks out from losing everything that I thought I wanted. This is me being brave. These friends were a bright light in a very hard season and when I think about this night it makes me smile. It’s much easier to walk through a hard season when you have good people by your side.
Before we jump in here, I want to talk about why I’m sharing my story. It’s impossible to tell my story without talking about the people I met along the way but I want to make it clear this story is about me and my journey…and not about them. This story is the journey I went on and the way I chose to handle really hard circumstances and the way I always tried to make the good out of the bad. It’s a story about how I changed so much and how I held myself accountable, how I worked really hard to become who I am today. It’s a story about the things I learned on the journey of trying to find love and it’s the story of how in my pursuit of love I learned to love myself. It stopped being about finding love and it started being about becoming the person I want to be. I know pretty much nothing about manufacturing but I know you’ve heard of the word by-product…it’s like the leftover thing after you produce a product. It’s not what you’re setting out to produce and it’s not the end product either…it’s just the thing that happened in order for you to be able to create the end product. This story is about the by-product of this experience being better than the end goal.
It’s not a story where I want to focus on the bad or the people that weren’t quite there yet or the ways they hurt me intentionally or unintentionally. That’s just dating and that’s just humans. It is not that I was right and they were wrong or that I was perfect and they were flawed…that’s not how I want to tell my story. There are a lot of people that choose to tell their story that way and a lot of people who choose to see their story that way. That is not me and I don’t want you to confuse my story or the purpose of it with that. I wish I could tell this story and leave all the people out of it but you can’t understand my journey without them in it. They all played important parts in my journey….there was always good that came out of the less than great experiences along the way. They helped me grow into the person I am today and I wouldn’t be me without meeting them along the way. But they also don’t get to take the credit for my growth. I did that and I chose that.
There will be points where I speak matter-of-factly about my own flaws but also know that I try to hold grace for myself. All the things I believed about myself and about love were well-earned through the experiences life handed me and the ways people treated me. I know I have blindspots…I know at points in time there are things I wish I did better but I will stand by the fact that I did the best I could at that point in time. If I could go back as who I am now, I’m certain I could do this whole story better. This isn’t a story where I was perfect and my dates were terrible. It’s a story where we both were human and I’ll only ever be able to tell this story from my vantage point. This story is my truth and I’m sure they hold theirs too and I just want to acknowledge that before we begin.
I aim to be objective in the way I tell my story. I aim to not criticize the supporting characters in this story because I believe everyone who is putting theirself out there is brave and courageous. I believe it’s a lot easier to give up and not try. I believe that dating at a certain point becomes really difficult and we’re all just trying our best. I know I’m not the perfect person and I’m not the best dater. I know we all have flaws and we all have our own baggage. I also know all we really want is to find love. I never want someone to come across my blog regardless of whether they’re someone I barely know or someone who did me wrong and for them to leave feeling hurt. That’s not the type of person I am and it’s not how I want to impact people. I’m intentional about it and while I may not do it perfectly….I try my best.
This story is about the by-product of this experience being better than the end goal.
Talking about singleness while you’re in the middle of it is a sticky situation…it’s why most people don’t. It requires you to be vulnerable. It requires you to tell a story that you don’t have a happily ever after to. It requires me to talk about something no one is talking about. It requires me to talk about something very personal. But I’m telling my story because I know my story…may be your story and I believe you need to know you’re not alone. I believe that someone has to open the door to the thing no one is talking about. We were raised in a generation that was taught that you go to college, you get married, you have children and you live happily ever after and that’s just not really the world we ended up in…and no one ever taught me that there was another life path or what you do with your life if it didn’t go like that. I was given a map of the milestones in life but no one told me what you do when you look around and you can’t see a single one of the landmarks around that’s on your map. How do you start moving in the right direction, if you can’t figure out where you are? And who’s to say that a right direction even exists?
I keep thinking about where this story really starts and the prologue if we can have one is…I grew up in a culture where getting married and having children and staying at home was the golden standard. A culture where being single at thirty was positioned as one of the worst possible things that could happen to you. A culture where having someone was often positioned as better than having no one.
We’re going to start this story after for lack of better terms my entire life blew up. What you really need to know is everything I was building towards and counting on and the life I wanted at the time in one moment was burned to the ground, metaphorically. Not casually or accidentally or from a small ember that grew but more like in a movie when someone throws a match over their shoulder onto a building they’ve doused in gasoline and a mighty explosion occurs leaving nothing where something used to be. It ended in one moment.
In some ways, this made the end easier…because there is no way to put back together the remnants of an explosion…the only choice is to rebuild somewhere else. So that’s what I did. I walked away with my head held high. I didn’t make a scene and I didn’t have any conversations. Because sometimes there are no words that will make up for the choices that are made and it’s best to just move on.
I was more like the baby giraffe and that type of brave is something I really admire in a person. I didn’t know it in the moment but I chose to be really, really brave.
So I then did, what we all do in this day in age when we are running from loneliness. I downloaded a dating app for the very first time. I think back to all the other times a relationship ended and I just had to sit with the pain. It would take months before I would meet someone new that I was excited about, usually long after I had moved on from the hurt and pain of the end of the prior relationship. But in this day and age, we have instant gratification at our fingertips. We don’t have to sit through the pain and process it in a healthy manner…we can just hit download and we are onto the next. We think we can shortcut the healing process by stuffing it way down and pretending it doesn’t exist. We can run from the pain by running into another person’s arms…or so we think.
I had high expectations for dating apps. I thought it would be so fun to swipe right and to have all the people to choose from. There are filters so you can find him sooner. You can find exactly the person you want to date without leaving your couch or that’s how it was sold. I’ve learned a lot about dating app dating since this day but it takes a lot of lessons to learn that dating app dating is nothing like organic dating. You have to treat it differently but I didn’t know that yet.
I chose to be positive in the worst of circumstances and I chose to have hope. I chose to believe that there was purpose in my pain and that something good was just around the corner. I chose to get back up and to dust myself off and to put myself back out there. Brave can look like a lot of things. Brave can look strong and assured like Wonder Woman but brave can also look a lot more like a baby giraffe taking its first steps after birth. It can look timid and shaky and scared and vulnerable but you do something anyways…I was more like the baby giraffe and that type of brave is something I really admire in a person. I didn’t know it in the moment but I chose to be really, really brave.
My first dating app date, we set a date for Friday evening and the morning of I texted to confirm. He took a long time to reply and then told me he was on call that night, could we do lunch the next day instead. I got up on Saturday morning and got ready. We’d set a vague plan to meet downtown for lunch but hadn’t selected an exact restaurant. I was excited to go on a first date, I was moving on to better things. As the minutes ticked closer to time and the non-response continued after a second text….I was confused. I didn’t understand what was going on. Maybe he forgot? Maybe he overslept? I never heard from him again. He had ghosted me. The tears welled and I cried. Why? Why was this how boys treated me?
To Be Continued…