I was sitting at my computer desk this morning, going through my normal routine, when I glanced at my high school diploma and noticed the date: May 27, 2000. I graduated high school ten years ago, this very date. And so I got to thinking about how life can change in 10 years, all the things that can happen to a person to mold them and shape them into the person they are today. And let me tell you, I was molded and shaped, and torn down, and reshaped, and reshaped again.
Ten years ago, I moved out of my parents’ house, young and naïve – well beyond the definition of the word naïve. I gave up my prospective college softball career for a boy, blinded by love, thinking I could mold HIM and change HIM into the person I thought he could be. That was the first wrong step in a path of countless wrong steps centered around that boy.
It was a relationship I had no business being in – at that age, or any age. It was argumentative from day one, and the warnings rolled in from every single person who knew me. “Love” should not be this hard, they would say. Love does not trap you into four years of explosive fights, or mental, emotional, and physical abuse. But I endured; I thought I could change this boy. I dealt with the bruises, though everyone at my work saw them and expressed their concern. I dealt with the emotional beat-downs, vowing to stay strong and battle through. I lost friends, who just couldn’t watch it anymore. I saw the frustration in my parents’ faces. But I endured. I was determined to make this boy a good person.
In the end, I lost not only the battle, but the war. The war with him, the war with myself, the war I never should have waged in the first place. I lost myself. In the final days and nights of that relationship, after watching the police drag that boy off to jail, I hit bottom. I moved back to my parents’ house. I spent days in bed, in a haze, trying to comprehend how I let one single person take me from the confident, outspoken, funny, sassy girl I had been, and break me down, day by day for four years of my life, to nothing. There was nothing left of me.
I was offended by those who suggested I go to counseling. Even at the lowest point, I was still too stubborn to accept help. I wanted to build myself back up, piece by broken piece. And I can’t explain how long that took, or when I stopped flinching away from people when they would make a sudden movement. But life moved on around me, and eventually, I joined in. The guy never went to jail for what he did – he somehow managed to squirrel his way out of every last charge. And I’m sure he’s quite proud of that.
And I moved on. I got involved with another guy, who was a friend of mine from high school – we got engaged and it didn’t work out. We managed to have a somewhat amicable break-up after a couple of years together, and I can say I learned a lot from that relationship, too. It gave me the time and space I needed to truly move on from the previous guy, yet have someone to talk to and spend time with. It was, in my opinion, a great relationship to let me heal from the past, and decide what was right for me in the future. And that future was Eric…..and we all know how that story goes!
I eventually did go to counseling – for myself, for my relationship with Eric, and for Carter. I not only wanted to be a better person, I NEEDED to be a better person. And to do that, I needed to face my past. I needed to talk about it, to live it again (as extremely difficult and emotional as that was), and to find it within myself to forgive and move on. I often questioned my decision to endure that relationship. I don’t look at it and think “it happened to me, why did it happen to me?” It didn’t HAPPEN to me. No one was testing me. I made the choices, I lived through it, and I learned from it. And I’m glad that I endured the counseling as well because even though that, too, was hard, it reshaped me to the confident, outspoken, funny, sassy woman I am now. The one common denominator I find in the past 10 years is one word: endure. We live. We learn. We endure.
It’s amazing to me what can happen in a 10-year span of life. Knowing that the worst is behind me, I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years have in store.
