How did we get here?

I am a combination of all the experiences of my life up to now. I would not have become the musician, friend, son, brother, uncle, Godfather, teacher, employee, colleague, man that I am now without all the crap, joy, laughter, frustration, pain, and everything else that has made up my unique life. There is no possible way that anyone in this world anywhere has lived the life that I have. There is absolutely no one who is like me. It’s not even close. (Well, maybe there’s someone who might be a little close….ummmmm…..hmmmmm. No. Probably not.)

I don’t think that I compare myself too much to others, but I still do to some degree. Not in a way where I think to myself that I want someone else’s life, but more along the lines of, “I really would like to have that aspect of their life to be an aspect of mine.” That’s not so bad, is it? Isn’t that how people decide that they want to become parents, or just get married, or try a new career or get a specific degree? I think so. Or maybe as a way to attempt to try something new?

Where we come into problems, I think, is when we ONLY look at everyone else for changes that we think we MUST do in order to be “happy”, whatever the hell that means. I’m not sure most people really understand what happiness is. A state of mind? A feeling? A label? An identity? A choice? A goal?

Everyone has to decide what they are looking for in this context, but for me, I’m not sure happiness is what is on the mark. It seems to be closer to contentedness….to being content…to be in a state where you feel content MOST of the time. If I do not sleep enough, I notice that how I feel is restless and not fully rested, so I may not “feel happy”. More accurately, I’m not feeling content with my current sleep schedule or even just with how much body would feel on that particular day. I struggle a lot with my relationship towards money. I think it has more to do with being content on my relation between how much money I make and how much money I spend. And in case you are wondering (if you are one of the 3 people who will ultimately read this blog), this is very much including the money I am currently “spending” on paying off debt that I previously borrowed and have yet to pay off. I often joke that I just paid for a hamburger I ate 3 years ago. Ultimately, I am not content with how my life has gone along those lines.

But I am content with how I’ve been dealing with it in past years. In being able to keep living expenses low. In being able to setup and follow a budget (at least most of the time). In being motivated enough to work extra side hustles in order to just make extra money to go towards paying off this debt as fast as possible, because I’m just so sick of it being there.

Yes, I’d say I’m more just looking to feel content. I’m not totally sure how I got here. It seems like something that I just couldn’t plan. I got here in a manner that was a series of decisions and opened/closed doors, loving people and others who weren’t so loving.

But I am where I am and it seems to me that it’s much more healthy to be thankful for everything, even though my life could have been much different if I made different moves. Yet, that isn’t what happened. I made the decisions and moves that I made and that has made all the difference.

Be brave, keep going, strive, thrive

I was engaged. I met this beautiful woman at my day-job and our relationship was fun and exciting and so many wonderful things for some time. We started talking about marriage a little after a year of dating and I was so excited to be in a place where I was ready to take the plunge and be committed to her. After attempting for almost a year to plan the wedding, we had to call it off. We couldn’t make decisions, couldn’t agree on the size, and we couldn’t agree on what would happen after the wedding…. where we would live, how to navigate children, and such. Maybe I’m making it sound worse than it actually was, but it was really tough on the relationship. I backed off on the planning and decided to give her the opportunity to take a breath, decide if she wanted to be initiated into my faith, and be ready to start making plans again. 4 months after we cancelled our original wedding date, there was not end in sight to this time of preparation and discernment. I felt awful bringing up the state of our relationship, which I knew would initiate a break-up (we had this conversation several times before but never ended it).

I felt as though I was abandoning her. I felt like I was giving up and running away, as I have done in previous relationships for various reasons. But how do you make it work? The difficulties that we were both facing within ourselves and our relationship made it clear to me that we were not a place to commit to a marriage, much less a wedding date. My life was on hold. It still feels on hold now, but I’m not feeling a need to date right away since we’ve been broken-up for about a month now. I look forward to being in an exciting, loving, caring, nurturing, supportive marriage that will welcome children. I could have just agreed to everything she wanted and that I didn’t want just to make the marriage happen. But how would that reflect on our marriage later on? I’ve heard of people who refuse to notice the red flags in a relationship because they want to be in one so bad. Or thinking all they have to do is make a change (move in together, getting married, have a kid, have another) to make each other happy or make themselves happy, but that does not seem like a sound method of making a big commitment like this.

I am sad the relationship did not work. I am sad that she is going through the difficult time that she is going through. But I feel that we both need to be brave, to keep going, to work to strive and thrive, even though that means not together. I trust the peace I have encountered since the break-up to mean that I’ve made the right decision.