I’ve come to realize in the past year that you have to go through some shit in order to really appreciate things. I’m not talking about things such as “Oh, had to get a new expensive part for my car” or, “had to get a new phone”. Yeah those type of things suck financially, but those are all material items. They don’t help shape our soul or our minds. I’m talking about going through deep shit, shit that fucks you up and really shakes you… something that is taking more of you than just your wallet.
A year ago today, was one of the worst days for me. I had been with my boyfriend for almost a year, we had only 3 more months until our one year- almost 2 months. This guy… he blew me out of the water. When I met him for the first time, I NEVER would have thought that what would happen between us would have. I never would’ve thought we would’ve ended up together, I never would’ve thought that I would end up falling in love with this man. We met through one of my best friends, her boyfriend was one of his bestfriends. Well, she and I were hanging out one day and he snapchatted her, and so she snapped him back just a random pic of me and he thought I was cute. So, he got my snapchat and we started to snapchat and text each other all the time. The day comes for us to finally meet, and I almost didn’t go. He was taking too long to reply to confirm anything. I told myself I don’t wait around for anyone, especially dumb boys, I have better things to do. So I gave a time limit, if he doesn’t say anything by this time, I’m going to go do something else. Well, he barely scraped by! I end up driving to a park by his house to meet him. He was quite the charmer from the beginning. Never have I ever gotten flowers on the first date, but he brought me the most GORGEOUS flowers. What girl doesn’t love flowers?! He automatically scored major brownie points there. Well, he totally got busted by his friends, ruining his plan for us to hang out, so we end up just driving around. We end up in a church parking lot, and just talking for hours. Well, one thing led to another, and we almost completely hook up all the way the first time we meet. I decided not to, but it got pretty damn close! We end up messing around for so long that his car battery dies, and we had to wait for his friend to come and jump start the car. He was totally embarrassed, but I thought it was funny, I didn’t mind one bit.
After that, the rest is history! We ended up continuing to talk and then eventually becoming each others boyfriend/girlfriend. It was the first real relationship I’ve had. I mean, I’ve had only one other relationship that was important to me and really affected me in my life, but that’s a different story for a different day. I’m just picky! It’s very rare that I actually end up liking someone, rare that if I do like them I like them for more than a week, and even MORE rare that I like them enough to actually get into a relationship with them. I figure, I’ve had butterflies before. If this person doesn’t give me butterflies in the beginning, than why would I be with them? Butterflies are rare, and so awesome. So if I don’t even feel them in the beginning, it’s a lost cause. There’s never anything wrong with that person, it’s just the fact, I don’t feel it. But anyway, we’re getting off topic. So he and I end up together and it’s fantastic. Yeah, we definitely had our problems. He lived 45 minutes away and we were both in school while working, so seeing each other twice a week was definitely hard. But that didn’t take away the fact that it was so perfect in the beginning. I remembered what it was like to be excited, I remembered what it was like to get butterflies. It was perfect and I hadn’t been so happy in a very long time.
I remember when he first told me he loved me. It was too early for me to say it, my feelings weren’t as strong as his were at the time. He told me very early; I mean, we were probably only together for a month when he said it if I remember right. But I was honest with him, and told him I couldn’t say it back yet, and he didn’t mind. He said it was okay, and it didn’t bother him too much. If it did bother him, he didn’t ever show it. But man, once I loved him, I LOVED this man. He was so goofy, I loved his goofiness. I don’t love often so when I do I love deep, I love hard.
Eventually, April rolls around and we’ve been together for 8 months at this point and I confess to him something that I was TERRIFIED to tell him. I was so scared of how it might make him feel, of what he would say. I told him that I honestly never wanted to break up with him. I told him I wanted to be with him forever. I quickly followed with “It’s okay if you don’t feel the same, but I want you to know how I feel.” He didn’t react how I expected him to react, he said the same thing. He told me he loved me, and that he never wanted to break up either. I remember our first fight we had he told me the same thing, he said someday I would hopefully be his wife.
Come May, he and I are thinking about and trying to work our financial situations around so we can move out together. I was so happy. Things were finally starting to get better. You see, March-May was hard for us, because he had depression, and it was starting to get pretty bad during those months. I did whatever I could to try to help and support him. I would write him these intense letters, and just tell him how much I loved him every day. It was hard on me, hard on us, and I know it wasn’t all his fault. It was very hard to be with someone you love so much, and to just watch them be so sad and just dull all the time. I tried my hardest to make him happy, because that’s all I wanted. I wanted to make him so happy. His depression was definitely one thing that tested our relationship. Anywho, May is here and things are finally looking up. He said he was working all this overtime to get money to move to where I lived so we could get an apartment together, and I was so ecstatic. His depression had been making me extremely lonely. He started shutting me out, we only hung out like once a week, we didn’t talk to each other as much daily(hardly at all, to be honest), and it was tearing at me. So the fact that he was going to move here, the guy who said he was going to marry me was going to move here so we could have a place together?! How much more perfect does it get?!
Well, it doesn’t. The end of May, May 22nd to be exact, I found out he had been cheating on me. My best friends all came over, sat me down, and showed me his tinder profile of him asking to hook up with other girls. I was broken. I drove right down there that night and confronted him. I screamed and cried and yelled at him for two hours outside in the cold. I remember driving to work the next day and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t go and pretend to be happy. I didn’t even receive a text from him the next day asking for me to forgive him. He wasn’t trying to come after me, and that hurt just as much. He didn’t care. He didn’t want me. I remember telling my parents the next day what had happened, and my dad cried. My dad isn’t an emotional person at all, he didn’t even cry at my graduation, or any of my surgeries growing up; but it hurt him so much that he cried.
The following months after that were hard on me. I was on such a rollercoaster. I would be fine, and then I would come crashing down. I remember getting rid of all the things he had given me weeks after it had happened; and it just hurt, my chest physically hurt. It was like that night all over. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, however I still questioned myself. This man who promised me a future, who led me to believe I had a future to look toward too, broke all my trust, and showed me I wasn’t enough for him. I was not enough. I was not enough to keep him happy. And that killed me. I was trying so hard for so long to do my best to make him happy, it was taking all of my energy through his depression to try to make him happy, yet it wasn’t enough. I was broken. It took me a long time to put the pieces back together, and even still, sometimes a piece wouldn’t fit right, or would fall apart and I would have to put it back. It hurt like hell, and it was constant rollercoaster of being great and totally okay, to not. I would only be sad for two-three days tops, and then I would be fine. So it took me a long time to completely heal.
In light of it though, it taught me how to truly be happy again. How to be happy on my own again. I forgot what it was like not to depend on someone else for my own happiness. People don’t understand how hard that really is! Some grown adults still don’t understand how to do that. There are many people who don’t know what its like to be happy on their own. Which I think is so sad! You should take a significant amount of time, years, in your life to learn how to be happy alone. It is so important for yourself. You need to remember you are your own human being, and you can make yourself happy. People let you down all time, if you rely on others for your happiness, you will NEVER be truly happy.
I had my life change to a completely different direction in a matter of 24 hours. The direction I thought my life was going completely changed. I was burned at my core from this person. But just like land, sometimes you need to be burned in order to grow. And that is exactly what happened. I grew into a better person. Here I am, a year later, and I’m still trying to figure it out and better myself, but I am working on it every single day. If I hadn’t gotten so badly burned, I never would have learned how great I really have it. I never would have been able to appreciate the things and people I have in my life now. I love them all before, but now I can really appreciate it.
A person has to be badly burned in order to grow, in order to be a better person, in order to really appreciate things. You have to be sad, you have to be so sad for a time in order to know how happy you are, and how happy is really so easy to attain. Once you are burned, and you learn to crawl your way back to happy, you are really happy. You thought you were happy before, but now you KNOW you are happy. You’re life changes and your perspective changes when you are burned. But you grow, and grow into something so much better than before.
If you get anything out of this, please understand this. You were burned, and I’m so sorry about that. Burns hurt, and they leave you with a scar. But it shows you lived your life! It shows you did something that could hurt you, but you didn’t care because it was worth the potential burn- whether you knew it or not. Burns take a long time to heal… but they do heal. And you become stronger, wiser, and a more beautiful person for it. It may have hurt like hell, it might still hurt like hell, and it might even hurt again every once in awhile. But you will get better. You will be a stronger person. You will learn to appreciate your happiness. You will learn how to be happy again. You get to find yourself again! You get to mold yourself into a different person! That is such a remarkable thing, and once you get there you will look back and be so proud of yourself. You will be happy. You will be more beautiful than you have ever been.
So please, get better from your burn. Learn from your burn. But know that it will get better, you will survive, and you will transform into an even better, more beautiful, and happier version of yourself.
