It is amazing to me the mysterious ways in which God works!
I have known for a long time that I have wanted to find a woman with whom I am sympatico. Call it a soulmate, a girlfriend, a lover, a confidant, whatever. I want somebody like that in my life, not because I need a very exclusive fan club (even with both of us present, many times, she might be my only fan), but because I want someone there in whom I can invest the love and trust that lives inside me, and there's alot.
The first part of my life has not been a bed of roses. There was alot of emotional turmoil. I wanted to do things differently from the people in my family who hurt me, and who hurt each other; like I said, there was alot of negative energy. In 2007, I was nearly at my rope's end trying to figure out how to reconcile negative energy and positive intentions. That, for those of you who don't know the whole story, is when my friend Dawn suggested I find a good therapist. Well, having never been in therapy, the fate of it all was in God's hands and He matched me up with Vickie. I think it speaks volumes as to my opinion of her that this blog is named in her honor. Then, when she took her leave, I had the good sense to know, with God's help, what to look for in a new therapist. I found Kerry. Let's just say The Man Upstairs is 2-for-2, with both at-bats yielding home runs!
Back to my part of the story. People told me that in order for anyone else to accept me, I first needed to learn to love myself. Well, being a naturally self-depricating smart-ass and cynic, that made no damned sense to me at all. I didn't think it would work. Two or three sessions in, Vickie discovered a severe disconnect between me and my emotions. She helped me rewire the connections - the main ones first. Wow!
I have taken all of the negative energy and created a detoxification plant for it within me. Well, the detoxed, negative energy was converted to love and kept having to be stored up. I used alot of it to help mend a fence with a family member that had been nearly 30 years broken. Then I looked, and there was more love than when I started to put things right between me and my father. I still had never learned to spend it on myself. Slowly, that changed.
It started changing when I cried out to Dawn for help, and admitted to myself, her, and God, that I wasn't in a place to be able to fix these things alone. I knew I was in for a battle. I used a multi-pronged attack of therapy, and friendship, and prayer, and social reconnection. I think, all glory to God, that the social reconnection strategy has been the most effective tool in my aresenal. I spent most of my life dwelling on what I was not. I didn't want to be my dad. I worked in law enforcement, but I wasn't a cop. The spin on everything was negative.
I went to church. I also started going places when I would otherwise just have rushed back home or hidden out behind my camera. I drew from some of my photo school friendships heavily. It started with Dawn, but my healing was helped along by Jack and Alison and Chris and Lou and Veronica and Isabell and Nicole and Jenn and Colleen and Macao and Jeff, among many others. I started feeling social acceptance from these people. However, it was not until one night several years ago when I decided to make a friend that night and met Erica that things really began to turn around dramatically.
Erica, and subsequently, many of her friends accepted me into their circle. These people didn't know me from Adam. I didn't really have to get good grades, or be a good dispatcher, or produce prize-winning photographs, they just liked me! I didn't know people could just like me. I wasn't even sure if I could just like me. Maybe I had been likable - and, indeed, was liked - without having to do all the other things all along. What? WHAT! I guess I always assumed it was conditional.
Unconditional love and acceptance is one of the most humbling realizations you can get to if you don't have it. During my time disconnected from my emotions there was very little within me that could bring about feelings of happiness, peace and contentment and/or provide some kind of catharsus. Some of the few things were music, heady discussion, history, ironing, great art and vacuuming. For some reason - I think because of the unparalleled need for hope in its truest sense - music and art from the 1930s and 1940s resonated with me, even as a young man in college. I was mesmerized by swing and big band and men in suits and hats and women wearing stockings with the line up the back and pin-up girls. It all seemed like a good time. I think it is less than slightly coincidental that all of these things existed before me or anyone in my immediate family-of-origin. Back then, I think I believed the world might have been better off without me having ever been in it. But I got to a point where I think it is a blessing to be here to accomplish God's will with the time He has so graciously given me. The big picture was and is coming close to achieving razor-sharp focus.
So, enter Ashley. I've been looking for a woman person to be that one special friend. I don't know if she's it, but the positive attention I have gotten from her is amazingly appropriated. She's not just any woman. She has the capacity and apparent compassion to understand a tough past. She is into the 1940s era stuff I enjoy so much. She's also petite, friendly, funny and pretty. She kinda reminds me of a cross between Lucille Ball and Audrey Meadows. Things that I thought (and maybe, indeed, do) make me seem like a dork to most other people, she also enjoys; there is that hint of "sympaticism". Her invitation to go swing dancing has launched me into a rediscovered indulgence of those few things that used to connect me to my emotions when I, myself, was cut off from them. I'm having so damn much fun revisiting the things that used to bring me happiness when I didn't even realize that's what I was looking for and needfully craving, that it makes me thankful and proud to be my own kinda dork. The fact that I get to share this with a gal like Ashley, at whatever level, and for however long, is just the cherry on top the sundae. This woman has made me fall in love with myself, and she validates my interests in a way that, because of her approval, makes those things seem really cool!
Put it this way, I'm so happy that today I ironed nearly everything in my closet!
"Things Ain't What They Used to Be", Duke Ellington.
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