Epiffany (o:
11/27/2002 07:28 p.m.
I wrote this a while ago after I'd been talking to Koye... I'm just going to put it up here. Sim, this is the thing I wanted you to read. I think it explains some things I should have explained before. Ah well, here it is.

I had an epiphany. It’s a nice thing when that happens. We were just talking (Koye and I) and he was calling me wimpy and rightly so. I was complaining that Tommy didn’t love me. It was dumb and silly but he just burst out and said “You’re such a wimp! What happened to you? I remember in high school the hyper-feminism and you saying ‘if you can’t give yourself a feeling or be happy in yourself, something’s wrong.’ What happened to that?” And we’d both been talking to me about that. I’d wonder that whenever I talked to Tommy on the phone. “What’s wrong with me that I can’t just be happy? Why do I base what I’m feeling on him?” There was a time when I despised girls who did that. (Silly me, I never thought there were boys who did that with girls... turns out boys can be just as wimpy as girls.) So I decided that now was the time to work this out because it had gone on long enough. So I settled myself into my bed and began to talk and figured that I’d stop whenever I was done. I talked for a long time. I don’t even remember what all I said, but there was so much going on, I doubt it matters. Koye and I determined that I had given something to John and I needed to get it back, but I didn’t know what it was or how to get it back. I actually put in words for the first time today what I gave to him. (When I had the epiphany, there weren’t any words for it; I just needed to stop what I was doing...)

I became Mrs. Monroe, which is fine for her, since she’s married, but I wasn’t married to John. (The whole story here is that she said one day that her entire self-confidence was based on what David thought about her. It stuck with me and I’ve evaluated that idea in my brain about a thousand times, each time finding some new thing I hadn’t had before.) I gave my self-confidence to him. I gave him all my self-respect. Anything about me that I liked, I gave to him and made sure he liked it too and then I just left it all with him. After we broke up, I never thought to get it back. Sure, you think about getting back your CDs and other things of yours they borrowed, but you don’t think about your self-confidence. If you put how you view yourself into the hands of someone else, when you lose that person, you lose yourself. I got so used to John reaffirming me all day everyday that, when I lost that, I lost any belief in me. When you have someone telling you five times a day that you’re okay, if they stop, you stop being okay. So you have to get to a point where you’re comfortable just being you and having the friends you have and the God you have and that being enough. It’s about wanting what you have; appreciating that you do have amazing friends and God is working in your life and showing you things. I think I would have appreciated more the direction that God has given me recently towards ministry if I wouldn’t have been so caught up in being “good enough.”

When I told Tommy about this epiphany he became me for a second and said “Wait, wait, being in a relationship is wonderful. The ultimate happiness is finding a person to share your life with.” Yeah, I agree. Love is amazing. Once you’ve been in a relationship that was really good, you miss it when it’s gone. Believe me, I know this. You lose a lot of the excess happiness you were getting. Being in a relationship with someone is definitely a good thing. It definitely brings happiness. But what if you never find that person? What if you go through your life and never marry? Does that mean you don’t ever get to be happy? It shouldn’t be that way. You should be content with what you have, and thankful for it, and rejoicing over it. There is a fine line between basing your happiness on another person and simply enjoying that happiness when you can get it. Putting your entire self-esteem on someone else is just a bad idea. People make mistakes and they’re going to let you down. That shouldn’t affect how you see yourself. It just means that people aren’t perfect. If you put the way you see yourself in something less erratic (contentment with being you, the joy in a God that loves you and will always) then you aren’t going to need someone telling you that you’re okay every five minutes. Isn’t easier to just be okay with you?

I gave John more things. Bigger things, maybe. I gave him the way I thought of boys. I gave up all I knew to be true about boys. He was one exception to the rule and I thought everyone was like him. Growing up it was very normal for me to love someone and to never ever tell them. If I did end up telling, I never expected anything in return. It was my experience that if you tell a boy that you like him, he’ll almost never like you back. So I got used to that. I figured that’s how it would be with John. But I told him that I liked him and he said “Okay, cool. I like you too” and we dated. So I reevaluated my entire view of boys. I thought maybe I’d just been seeing them wrong the whole time. Well, no, I hadn’t. I’d been seeing clearly. John clouded my vision of boys. And I expected every boy to respond to me the way John had, even though that response was only a 30% kind of response. Boys mostly had nothing to do with me romantically in high school. Somehow I threw that out the window and expected boys to all be what they’d only been 30% of the time. Those kinds of expectations are ridiculous and that’s just when I put them on people like Simeon who I’d known for years. (Yeah, this whole epiphany even helped me see where I was going wrong with Simeon. Even though we have always only been friends, I was expecting more than that from him because I’d given up the part of me that was able to see boys as “just friends.” I’d look at boys in my classes and if I thought they wouldn’t date me - that was it for them. I’d cross them off the list and not even consider them for friendship. Well, that is just dumb.) But to put those kinds of expectations on someone I’ve never even met like I did to Tommy... I don’t know how he handled that. I can’t look at boys in that way anymore. I can’t expect all boys to be John and I don’t want all boys to be John. It’s just as bad to group all boys into the “good” category as it is to shove them all into the “bad” one. Looking at any group without seeing individuals is just dumb. It makes you do things like I was doing.

It’s like the horoscope thing Tommy and I were talking about last night. He found out that he’s actually a Capricorn, not an Aquarius like he thought. Yeah, so who cares, you ask? Well, apparently, Capricorns and Geminis aren’t compatible. (This, by the way, is ridiculous since Karla who I’ve been friends with since kindergarten, and my grandma who is my favorite relative are both Capricorns.) Who’s to say who is or isn’t compatible? People are so individual that it must be impossible to make those kinds of predictions. So yeah, it’s all a bunch of crap, right Tommy? So the main thing with this epiphany is that I was just being overbearing and I had some impossible standards for the people I love. When I got done talking about it with Koye my response to it was “I need to call like a million people and apologize.” I definitely feel bad for causing so much trouble.

Can you believe it? – I even used Jon Huff in this epiphany. I was thinking that I really needed to go to that Tori concert with him. He was necessary in that situation. If Simeon had gone with me, I might never have had this epiphany. Everything that happened with Jon was so platonic and I just really haven’t had that in a while. It was me and a boy and just friendship. I don’t think I would have felt the same way if I’d gone with Simeon. And it’s not to say I don’t want to spend time with him, obviously. But it took being away from him for a little tiny while to realize something that will make our relationship so much better.

So I think I got my things back from John. There may still be some things I haven’t noticed I’m missing yet. That’ll come eventually, I’m sure. But these things... my self-confidence, the way I see me, the way I see boys... I got all those back. Um, and now the hugest thank-you in the world is owed to Koye Berry cause I wouldn’t have gotten this far without him. Thanks, and don’t you dare name your daughter Epiffany.

I am currently Happy
I am listening to "Sorta Fairytale" by dearest Tori Amos