Some moments will haunt you; the right ones will inspire…
[Originally posted as a Facebook note on April 4; retroactively posted to this blog days later. Note to self: I should really use this instead of FB Notes…]
To those who rejoice every time I change my Facebook relationship status for April Fool’s, your wanting to celebrate my intrapersonal success is very much appreciated. So I mark this as a success in its own way.
I’m not normally sentimental about these things; but this is a one-time specialty. Today, April 4, 2014, marks the one-year anniversary of my first date. Ever.
While I don’t want to write a sappy romance novel here or anything, suffice to say that asking her out in the first place was so ridiculously far out of my comfort zone, and was only thanks to the encouragement of amazing friends. Even though the end result of that date may not have been what I ultimately hoped, it forced me to break free from my comfort zone to really try to find my own happiness, rather than waiting for it to find me as I had done for so much of my life. To this day, I am eternally grateful to my friends for their advice and encouragement (and not just in relationship matters); but moreso I am grateful to my date (nameless here, for her sake) for her acceptance.
We all wear our proverbial masks every time we step into the real world: hiding the reality of who we are and letting everyone see only the selves we wish to show. But with her, it was as though I was reconnecting with an old friend, and that quick rapport of common interests and passion for technology really made that mask unnecessary.
Maybe it started as a simple infatuation; but for so long I had been lost (and often still am) in my own internal dialogue: constantly interpreting, analyzing and over-thinking everything. Ration, logic, and reason seem to work so beautifully for everything else in life; but not for such as these. My choir director so often advises to “listen louder than you sing”; and this seems so apropos to matters of the heart as well. When I asked her out, it was the first time in forever that I had seriously listened to my feelings louder than that dialogue. I broke free of wondering about how the question would be taken, free of the worry of negative result, and just did.
That initial crush is gone; and I am uncertain of the feelings that remain (some emotions defy analysis) …but I do know this: I am, and want to be, a better person by her having been (being?) in my life.
I’ll end this introspection here; I won’t celebrate this anniversary any more than this simple post, because its significance will fade as I grow to understand and embrace these more intricate emotions, bit by bit.