All I Really Need Is A Little Good News

The last time I wrote a blog post was on September 12, 2018. I guess I've been, in a way, "too busy living" to post as consistently as I used to back then. The past (almost) seven years have gone a little something like this: Around the end of October 2018, I met a guy on Bumble who was a year older than me (*G A S P* An older man?!). I remember going on our first date around the beginning of that November, and we began "officially" dating shortly after that. Back then, I thought he was "different." He said and did all the right things. When we first started dating, he once texted me a paragraph-long message listing everything he really liked about me. The first time he came over to watch a movie at my parents' house (I was still living in their basement at the time), he was very charming with them, immediately earning bonus points because he had brought me my favorite ice cream (Häagen-Dasz Coffee ice cream) and my favorite candy (Sour Patch Watermelons). About a month after we began dating, probably around the beginning of December, we went to a Chase Rice concert at Joe's Live in Rosemont, IL. When Chase played "Eyes On You," I immediately decided that would be our song (I know. I'm lame... sorry), and the caption of the Instagram post of us at the concert (before I later deleted the post) was a lyric from that song: "there ain't no better view than you in my arms with my eyes on you :)". At the hotel after the concert that night, I built up the courage to tell him that I thought I was falling in love with him. Thinking back on it now, I don't know if I actually was, but I had never said that to anyone before, and I just wanted to express to him that I more than just "liked" him, that I was really starting to care about him. He didn't say the same thing back, but he didn't get weird about it either. He introduced me to his parents and his twin sister probably around a week or two later, which no other guy had ever done before. For Christmas, his mom gave me cookie cutters and other little baking things because he had told her that I loved baking. He seemed to be very mature in how he communicated with me, and he once asked me in advance if he could go out for a drink with a girl he was good friends with in high school because he didn't want me to ever feel like he was trying to sneak around behind my back. When we were in Canada at the end of December with my high school best friend and her then-fiancé (now husband!!!), we were lying in bed talking before we fell asleep, and he told me he felt the same way that I did, but he didn't want to say "I love you" too soon like he had in previous relationships. I remember my heart skipped a beat, because no guy other than my dad and my brothers had ever said that to me before. I was so stupidly happy and excited that after twenty-three years, I was finally going to get to feel what that would be like -- I was finally going to get to experience my "first love." When we returned home, I found myself very weirdly working as a door-to-door salesperson selling "clean power." Basically, I found a job on Indeed that marketed itself as being a position where "promotions were always possible" and "the pay was great," but it kind of left out what they actually did and the fact that the pay was commission-only (unfortunately, I wasn't smart enough to think to read the Glassdoor reviews about what kind of job it actually was). I needed a job, and I didn't want to have to be a waitress anymore, so I decided to go for it, especially because it would mean pushing myself outside of my comfort zone. I remember I used to call him after I had been walking around my assigned area for a few hours without anyone answering their doors, and he'd talk with me for a little while to help the time go by faster. It didn't take long for me to realize that the job wasn't at all like it had been advertised and that I had to walk door-to-door in the dead of winter when it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit outside, sometimes not getting anyone to sign up for the service (which meant that because the pay was commission-only, I didn't make any money for the day). I left the job after not even three weeks, but he was very encouraging as I was applying to other jobs. Toward the end of January 2019, I went to an interview in downtown Chicago for another sales position ("Business Development Associate," or BDA), this time for a conferencing solution called LoopUp (a London-born conferencing solution whose rivals were Zoom and Microsoft Teams). Unlike the door-to-door sales position, they were very clear that although some cold calling would be involved, the job offered great benefits, time off, and the pay was salary plus commission. When I was offered the position, I immediately accepted, because although the commute would be annoying (especially commuting downtown from the Southside of Chicago), this would be my first big-girl-salary-paid-position job. I was set to start Training Week on February 18th in Dallas, TX, and I couldn't wait; I felt like everything in my life was actually working out for once. At the beginning of February, I decided to tell this guy about my anxiety and depression. February 15th is the anniversary day of when I went to the psychiatric hospital for the first time, so because that day would be coming up soon, I wanted him to know about my past and what I went through during that time. He was pretty quiet (which seemed like a pretty normal reaction to me at the time), but he didn't seem all that affected by it when I first told him. However, over the next two weeks leading up to when I left for Dallas, he seemed to pull away more and more, and when we would text, his once pretty immediate responses became more sporadic, oftentimes not even responding at all. When we would see each other, he seemed uncomfortable and distracted. I think he may have had some mental health issues himself, and I think it hit him that our "honeymoon phase" would eventually end -- that our relationship probably wouldn't always be sunshine and rainbows. When I was in Dallas, he broke up with me via text message, and I was blindsided, feeling like the wind got knocked out of me; I had sensed something was wrong, but I just thought he was stressed because of school (he was still in school to get his degree in Accounting). When I texted him something along the lines of "but what about what you said when we were in Canada?," he told me he didn't feel the same way anymore. He said that I was "a great girl" and that he would "never regret the time we spent together," but he said he didn't want to date me anymore. Despite being together for only three months (which was actually my longest relationship I ever had back then), the breakup hit me like a truck, and I had a really hard time getting over it. I had been rejected by other guys and even friends in the past, but this time hurt so much more, because I felt like I was so close to love, and I somehow let it slip through my fingers. A month later, I turned twenty-four, and shortly after my birthday, I tried to "get back out there" by joining Bumble again to distract myself... but I was still sad about the breakup two months later in May when I was a bridesmaid in my high school best friend's wedding (the same best friend we had gone to Canada with). About two weeks later, at the beginning of June, I finally cracked after yet another guy decided to randomly ghost me; I felt so incredibly rejected and unwanted, like I was just too hard to love and like I didn't even deserve love, because if I had, then I would've found it by now. What was wrong with me? I don't blame the guy who ghosted me, and had it been under different circumstances, I wouldn't have let it affect me as much as it did. Because I already felt pretty fragile, though, getting ghosted YET AGAIN was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I called my mom crying on my lunch break one day at work, and I asked her if it would be okay if I went to the psychiatric hospital again. When I got out of the hospital (this was for the third time, mind you) after staying there for a few days, I just felt really empty and numb; I felt like my life was filled with so much darkness. I know it was really hard for my parents to see me the way I was, and they tried to do little things to help keep my spirits up: my dad would make me homemade Cake Batter ice cream because he knew how much I liked it, and my mom would give me great books to read to help keep my mind occupied. In the lyrics of Shaboozey's 2024 song, "Good News," he sings, "Man, what a hell of a year it's been / Keep on bluffin' but I just can't win / Drowned my sorrows, but they learned to swim / Man, what a hell of a year it's been"... and that's how I felt back then: that 2019 had been a hell of a year and that it felt like I just couldn't win. I remember "wish[ing] someone [had] told me that living this life would be lonely" -- I just really needed a little good news. As June turned into July, I told myself I needed to start trying to be more social instead of continuing to just stay home and isolate myself. I very tentatively joined Bumble once again, this time telling myself that it was just to meet new people. I wasn't looking for a relationship, especially from a dating app where I clearly didn't have a good track record, but I told myself there wasn't any harm in going on a date with a nice guy (as long as I emotionally kept my distance and acted like the "cool girl" without mental health issues). And so, I did exactly that: around the second week of that July, I went on a date with a nice guy. He took me to a Sox game, and I walked away from the date feeling proud of myself for putting myself out there again. Nothing ever came of that date, though, because on July 20, 2019, my recently-married high school best friend was hosting a kind of "housewarming" party at their apartment. I didn't particularly want to go, but because I had told myself I was going to try to be more social, I went. Going to that party turned out to be the single best decision I've ever made in my life, because it was at that party that I saw Adam, the cute groomsman from her wedding who I had wanted to talk to at the time but didn't because another bridesmaid told me he "had a girlfriend" (Girl Code is a very important thing to respect and follow). He had been at the party for a little bit when he went in the kitchen to make himself another drink. Seeing my chance and knowing that he didn't actually have a girlfriend and was in fact very single (my friend told me this probably about a week after the wedding), I chugged the rest of the Bud Light I was drinking and went to the kitchen to talk to him... and the rest, as they say, really is history.

I feel like from that day on, my life quite literally did a 180. Adam brought the light back into my life, reminding me that I deserved to smile and laugh -- he brought back all those feelings of hopefulness and carefreeness that I somehow forgot about, and being with him was everything I had never experienced before. As we spent more time together, he showed me that I wasn't hard to love (and that I deserved to be loved), despite my mental health issues. The day I told Adam about my anxiety and depression (probably about a month or two into dating), I told him that I would rather he just break up with me then and there if he wanted to because it would save me getting more hurt. Instead of rejecting me, though, he pulled me closer. He accepted me for who I was (sadness, nervousness, and all), and he loved me anyway. I guess another thing they say is also true, which is that sometimes, love finds you when you least expect it and when you're not even looking for it; I don't think either of us were expecting to find each other. He was pretty closed off because of a past painful breakup, and I was... well. I was me. We did find each other, though, and as the months went on, it became very clear that he wasn't going to decide to leave me like so many before him had. He proved time and time again that he was in it forever, for better or for worse. Adam very quickly became my best friend, and being with him made me feel like I could finally be myself around a guy for the first time in my life -- my weird, nerdy, sometimes very intense self that had so much love to give. Love really is healing, and it was in being loved by Adam in a way that I had never been loved before that I slowly learned to start loving myself. Everything seemed to move pretty fast, because two months after our first-year anniversary, we closed on our own home (!!!), and two weeks after that, we adopted a little eleven-week-old pittie puppy named Bud from a shelter about two and a half hours from our house. We have built a life together that younger me only ever dreamed of but never thought possible -- one that is filled with so much love, patience, understanding, and laughter. Sometimes I can't believe that we've been together for almost SIX years now... time really does fly when you're having fun! If I could say anything to the younger me back then who was desperately wanting and needing just a little good news, it would be this:

It gets better.

xoxo,