Since That Moment

Sometimes things happen and you come away with a new perspective. Sometimes the new perspective is of yourself.

Sometimes one moment can change who you are.

I've been thinking a lot lately about a specific moment in group therapy last semester. I told everyone I was thinking about coming back to Boise. People were shocked. Some were adamantly against it. Some told me to do what I wanted to do. Only one - one woman fiercely into her schoolwork and 100% serious about a career and independent like no other - told me to do it. Do it, she said. William & Mary has been here for 400 years and will be here for 400 more, but he won't be, she said. If you love him, you need to be with him, she said. And then we were both crying.

Since that moment I'v been defining my role as a person in love with a man. I've had to figure out what that means to me and how I will represent that to people around me. For a long time, I was told that I don't need this and maybe even that I shouldn't want this - this life in a house with a dog and a fence and a car where we look forward to seeing each other at the end of the day and pay bills from a joint checking account.

But that was someone else's reality. I just convinced myself it was truth of sorts and that it applied to me too.

Whether I've merely been conditioned by society to believe that I need the heterosexual partner with 2.3 kids and comfy jobs or whether that's strictly outlined as my fate in my complicated little DNA codons I don't care. This is what I have because this is what I want. This time I'm not fooling myself into something because it's what is all around me or because it's according to someone else's beliefs. This is all me. I just had to wake up.

So thank you, Anne, for turning on the light. You helped me see that my life truly is my own and what I wanted to do about that. You showed me that it's my choice to share that life and that doing so can be good - it doesn't have to be what I've seen it be. You woke a part of me that was afraid and unsure but is now thriving and happy.

Sometimes things happen and you come away with a new perspective. Sometimes the new perspective is of yourself.

Sometimes one moment can change who you are.