Friends Lost, Family Found

One of my biggest struggles with writing is getting started... it's probably my biggest struggle... and I wasn't sure what I wanted to write as my first piece here, so I've decided to basically share about my life at this point.

We are through an entire year of the Covid-19 pandemic, and I find that my life today is unrecognizable from my life in 2019. I'll delve into my past in future articles, but those are stories for another time.

Somewhere near 18 months ago, my life changed entirely. I met a woman, now my fiancee... and the night that I met Molly was the night my life started changing (for the better).

It is not a story that you would expect, if you watch romance movies or like Nicholas Sparks books... and to be very clear, she was the hero and I was the antagonist of the beginning months of our courtship. But I learned more from her and with her about my life and who I want to be, than I have ever learned throughout the rest of my life.

We met for dinner one evening, late into the year, when the leaves on the trees had finished changing their colors and had started to drop like raindrops from the sky. It was a dark and stormy night that fateful evening, but only literally... and we started talking like old friends as we ordered our food. We connected on a level that I was not used to sharing: we could speak to each other on an intellectual and knowledgeable level. Unfortunately, my mind was preoccupied with another friend and I cut that first date short to go play "knight in shining armor" for someone else.

Molly gave me a mulligan date. We decided to go out for dinner and a movie in a theater on neutral ground... equal distance from her house at the southern tip of our county, and my apartment at the northwesternmost corner. The dinner was nice, and she asked about my friend and we talked a bit about our work before walking over to the movie theater. The movie itself was a very mental, thought-provoking narrative about the hazards of ignoring mental health flags and bullying.

I'm being vague on purpose because the little details aren't relevant to understanding the overall trajectory I've travelled the past 18 months but they are personal for me and things I wish to hold close for a while longer.

We spent the next two months growing more close to each other... her intentionally, me unwittingly... as I continued my spiral to rock bottom.

I felt comfortable talking with Molly about everything, and at the same time kept her at a distance. Molly helped stabilize me, for which I will always be in her debt... and this is something that weighs on my shoulders quite frequently these days. The past 10-16 months, I've been on a different track and heading in a positive direction.

I'm not sure she knows this, but I'm grateful that Molly stuck around long enough for me to get my act turned around. And I'll spend the rest of my life trying to show how much I'm grateful for her.

Turns out, and I'm going to cut this somewhat short because it's bumming me out, I surrounded myself with unreliable and toxic people in 2019 (and earlier). Most everyone that I associated myself with, were concerned with themselves. It took Molly and a year of counseling to understand I had surrounded myself and grown up with toxic people.

I don't need to be around toxic people, and neither do you. It doesn't matter if they've been around for your entire life.

It's OK to leave people that are toxic to your life and happiness.

This includes family members. I have dropped most of my friends from my past. I feel more welcomed and comfortable with Molly's parents and in our pandemic circle, more included and part of Molly's and her daughter's life, than I felt in a world not restricted by Covid-19... I'm happier and balanced as a result of leaving those toxic people alone.

Molly and I will be getting married in the coming months, and I don't know if my parents will receive an invite... I don't know who I will be inviting, to be honest. And you know what, that's okay.

Sometimes I forget and doubt that it's okay to stop engaging with people for reasons that aren't obvious. It's a concept hard to come to terms with and accept. It's something I actively work on, these days, thanks to counseling and the support of Molly and her family.

It's okay to stop engaging with toxic people.

I don't know who else needed to read this today, and I'm really just sharing so that I can get in the habit of writing and address some thoughts that persist in my head.... but hopefully this will also help someone else too.

I think that's enough of a recap for my first essay... stay tuned for more in the future.