It'll Humble You

Life bends in a way to make you break your rigid mold. It forces you to fold. All your cards on the table for everyone to see.  Sometimes that humbling fold distorts you beyond recognition just so that you have no choice but to build again into a sturdier version of you.

    I say that because I was engaged to a quality fella I had been with for 6 years. 2 years long distance but when my dad passed. Life became too real. Too precious to waste. Too real to just exist in. You evaluate your life in a way that forces you to really decide what you stand for. 

    Then Peter came into my life. I told him and I still tell him everyday when he walked into my life I felt like I had just been woken from an endless dream. Not a bad dream, just a hazy fog of being. I had been conditioned to believe that at best you find a partner in life that you work well with. Boy, was I wrong. I had muddied my way through trying to match my expectations of love with the realities of life. 

    Most people don't believe in love enough to find their soulmate. The one that makes their spirit sing. The one that reawakens the heart. The one that's being makes you feel seen. You need not turn cold on the idea of warming up to someone with the same freedom you did with your first love. We learn to fear the thing we want most in life. Pure love. Love you give without hesitation, without reservation, without discretion, without regard. When we forget to do that how do we ever expect to find that love again? You can't have something without putting into practice what's required of its existence.

    I do believe Peter is my soulmate. I remember when we first talked about it "I hate to say this because it sounds so cliche, but I feel like you're my soulmate". We push away from the notion because we're embarrassed to believe in such a beautiful thing. That's the real tragedy. When I say soulmate I don't mean this mystical magical only intuitive feeling. I mean Peter's and my thoughts are synced in an almost creepy way. Which isn't magic it's just we've got similar ways of viewing the world that make understanding one another feel like a connection ingrained in our DNA. Maybe it's just as simple as chemistry, pheromones, like minds. I don't know. I also don't care because I know he's another person in this big world that relates on a wider scale than anyone I've ever meet and so I dub him the mate to my soul. 

Just because you find a "soulmate" doesn't mean you tap out and you're set. A soulmate will understand you to your core which is a real humbling thing. They see ALL of you. I mean all of you. The nitty, the gritty, the things you try and hide about yourself, the things you don't even know about yourself. You lay yourself at their feet and have no choice but to trust they will love you as you rearrange your baggage.

Now this is just a stream of consciousness so bare with me.

But maybe we have to go through the steps. We know what love is from the start, it's not complicated after all. We get our heart broken to bits, it gets complicated. We rebuild with armor to protect us, that armor prevents us from feeling the warmth of another's touch. Maybe that's where people stop. Safety is good. Security is nice. We're being practical, pragmatic, smart. Some lucky souls find someone to love at a comfortable distance or someone who also has their armor on and they love each other for their strengths. I believe there are so many kinds of love in the world. I believe that all those kinds of love are equal. They're all meaningful, they're all beautiful, they're all worth while. 

Now I'm older and thinking of kids. If I had a child and had to help them navigate through this crazy existence. I would tell them to not stop until they get the love they want even if its scary and even if they don't really know what their doing. 

I'm a unique case. I've always been the unique case. For better or worse. I'm the outlier. I'm part of the group whose steps they had to go through is as follows: lose a loved one, lose their mind and inadvertantly  lose their fear to live and to love, in just the right moment for divine timing to guide them to the right one. 

Peter was my preceptee on the COVID floor. The day I came into work I was running late. I didn't want to go in. I had just driven 14hrs back from California where I was visiting my Mom after my dad had passed. In the throws of grief. I hadn't checked my schedule and didn't know I was going to be training anyone. I knew I was going to be training someone, sometime, for the first time. Peter says he was trying to find out who he was going to be with that night. One of the Nurse Assistants said " You're with Andrea don't worry she's always late".  I'm so frazzled when I clock in, mind you didn't even want to be there and I was in the throws of grief and now I have to train. I proceeded to introduce Peter to one of the other nurses as "Robert". The wonderful thing about it is he went with it, " I'm Robert nice to meet you!" with a smile and a laugh "my name's actually Peter" then ensued an apology and one of the most needed belly laughs of my life. 

I later explained to him why my absent mindedness. The rest was written in the stars. 

They're a instagram reel that I want to leave here because maybe the grit and the armor we put on is there to help us get through the rough times ahead. Soulmate or not we're still human, still unfit, faulty and unsound at times, just trying to do our best.