Embracing the Good

Much of life is about embracing the good while honoring the bad. I’ve spent most of my life looking for the good even from the bad. Although I wouldn’t wish my life and experiences on anyone else, I know I wouldn’t be the person I am if they hadn’t happened.

The past month has been a special mix of happiness and grieving. It’s been a little over a month since I lost one of my longest and truest friends. There have been moments almost daily where something has reminded me of them, and I am reminded they aren’t here. Such as a Hilary Duff song coming on or a video that I want to send them. I honor the feelings and the sadness in the moment. Then I let it pass.

No one knew or witnessed my life and all of the pain and glory like Stevie. Most of the people and animals I grieve, he knew them personally where most people in my life do not. While grieving the special person that Stevie was and the sadness that comes from that, I have also been the happiest I’ve been in a long time. It’s a weird and sometimes conflicting feeling. I also know the thing they wanted for me the most was to be happy.

There are a few shifts and reasons why I am happier than I’ve been in about a year. I’ve spent many months trying to get over someone and how the shift in our relationship affected me. I’ve talked about it before, but it was the shift of several important relationships happening at once that made it an even harder time. Who I remember the most getting me through it, especially when I was on the floor crying, was Stevie. In the midst of that pain was my amazing and loving friend, making me feel seen and loved.

As hard as the last year has been, it was a vital part of my healing and growth. I discovered a lot of the aftermath of my abuse and trauma bond was still very much inside me. Even before the shift in relationships, it was coming out. Which was frustrating and discouraging. For a few years, I was doing really good. I was pretty decently secure in myself. The thing about a trauma bond is that it can make regulating emotions extremely difficult, especially when it comes to relationships with others. As someone who is usually pretty satisfied not being in a romantic relationship, the idea of being in a relationship has never been something I worked towards. Especially since it would have to take someone special to handle me and my brain.

The past month or so it was solidified that the person with whom I developed feelings contributed to my dysregulated system. I’ll forever support them, and I hope they heal from their own personal issues. I will love them as a person and appreciate the time we spent together. Like everything else, I am changed because of them. I don’t know if I would have pushed through the issues I needed to work on if they hadn’t come into my life the way they did. If you’ve been around for a bit, you know that I’ve been working on my attachment issues. A lot of which stems from my trauma bond with my abuser. Though there were things the person I fell for could have done differently, a lot of how I felt was on me, no matter how they handled things on their side.

I also believe the people who have come into my life in all kinds of ways came when they were supposed to. Especially the last couple of years. I’ve had a lot of people come and go, but our relationships happened the way they did because they happened when they did. I’ve done a lot of growing in the last couple of years that even just months apart, I’ve changed. A lot of it has to do with becoming secure in myself and embracing who I am, no matter how it makes others feel.

My entire life, I’ve struggled with feeling like I need to fit into one box when, in reality, I fit into many boxes placed in different rooms. In college, I switched my major every semester, and a lot of factors play into that, but I’ve come to realize that it was also that I have so many interests. It wasn’t always that I lost interest in my major, but there was another one that I was also interested in. At the time, it didn’t feel like I could do one thing and still do the other things without changing my major.

Losing Stevie so unexpectedly reminded me how fragile life can be. I refuse to live a life where I’m not doing things I love or holding back from loving people in the way I love.