2012: Not The End of the World but the Beginning of Better Times

Looking Back On 2012

Simply putting it, I fell in love again with many aspects of life and found happiness within myself again. The words of Alicia Key’s “The Thing About Love” seem to sum it up well. However, love means different things at different times in our lives and with different people. Every love story has a silver lining.

"The Thing About Love"

Love
Love will come find you
Just to remind you
Of who you are

Oh love
It will forsake you
Threaten to break you
Take what you got

 
(…)

Then life
It will embrace you
Totally amaze you
So you don't give up

Love definitely touches you in a way that makes you question who you are and it can also break you in so many ways. Since Alicia passed away in 2010, I spent the last few years grieving. I knew I had to go through the many steps of grief but I never realized just how long and how low it would take me.  But I was also grieving the broken relationship with my ex. And missing the life we had built around that relationship. I dove into trying to just be OK, “move on with my life” and simply be “happy”.  God knows I tried to do so in every way possible, but when I was alone or when I drank one too many drinks, the emotions, vulnerability and colliding emotions just flowed out of me. Often the flow of emotions felt like I was rolling in barrel down Niagara Falls (not that I've ever been there) and I would never come out the other end in one piece. But I prayed incessantly for healing and for forgiveness to come and fill our hearts. I also pray that God would help me find the person who would be my lifetime partner in crime. But the truth was that true love had already touched my life and I was too busy hanging on to the pain from the past to allow myself to be loved fully by this person.

Love is supposed to build you up, make you strong and you feel almost invincible.  But imagine if the person you love the most in the world uses the worse things you think about yourself and how you would feel if the person you trust most not only thinks them too but uses them as reasons not to be with you. Now this is what happened to me with the man I dated off and on for almost 9 years.  By the end of the relationship, I literally ran away because the relationship had broken me down to the point that I started believing that as horrible as I felt in that relationship was as good as it was going to get. I was prepared to accept that the painful abyss that I was in was what I deserved. Until what appeared to be a miracle, a man, a familiar stranger told me one night as I cried, “You seem unhappy, I don’t really know why but whatever it is, from what I can see in you, you deserve to be happy and you deserve more out of a relationship than what you have now. Maybe its time for you to let go and find what you really deserve. And if you need a friend or anything at all, I'm just a phone call away.” A friendship was born and soon we both fell in love.

           This man could not have been more right. I was lost and in pain and needed to find myself again and heal from the grief of losing such an important person in my life and from the pain that the current relationship was causing me. Thanks to my faith in God and the love of my friends and family, I have been able to heal and not only heal but forgive and let go of the painful past. And thanks to this man, I was able to believe in love again and know what having a man by your side that is proud to hold your hand feels like. This man protected me from everything and everyone, even from myself when I needed it. Sadly, I had forgotten what love was supposed to feel like. He taught me a painful lesson but in the end, he taught me what love should be and that I needed to take care of myself before I could love or take care of anyone else. This man, whom we'll call G. He was my best friend and my love for a time. A time when I needed him the most and I will forever be in debt to him for what he did for me. He held me together when all I wanted to do was fall apart.  He opened my eyes and helped my heart heal. He was the right person at the wrong time for us.

Two years have passed since all this began to unravel, but I can now proudly say that I know what true love is and what it should be and what I need from the man who is to be by my side. I need a man who is going to be by my side no matter what. Someone who truly loves all of me with the past, present and future and always respects me. A man I can trust. A man who can accept my past and know that I am not defined by where I have been but by where I’m going. A man who can be my best friend and partner in crime. And a man who expects nothing less in return.