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LET’S TALK ABOUT GRATITUDE

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I used to be a fairly negative person. I think I was for most of my life until I hit my 40’s. It really got bad when I learned about Facebook. I didn’t even know social media existed for a very long time. But that’s a post about abuse for another day. Something would happen… let’s say I would stub my toe, and then I would drop something, followed by something else. A lot of little things that really should not have affected how my day would go. However, they did. I found myself saying things like “REALLY??” “WHY ME?” “SERIOUSLY, WHAT NEXT?” I got caught in this cycle of only seeing the things that were going wrong in my life. For the span of about 5 or 6 years it was really bad. Everything during that time was terrible, everything that could go wrong, went wrong.  I fell in to the bad habit of posting about these things on social media… because… why wouldn’t I? That’s what we do right? Something happens in our lives and it immediately becomes a status update good or bad.  I’m not saying that I shouldn’t be real about what is going on in my life.  There is a difference between being tired and overwhelmed and needing to maybe vent for a minute… and only seeing what is terrible happening in my life. It was genuinely hard for me to see the good things happening, when I was so consumed with negativity.  One day I posted a status update. I don’t remember what it said, but I had someone I’ve known for decades, message me and say, “Ang, surely you can find something in your life that is good, it can’t all be bad.” He totally called me out, and I was so angry. I waited a day, because I was livid and then I wrote back to him, and I told him what I was going through. I tried to justify my total circle of negativity.  He was nice enough about it and he let it go. That was a turning point for me. I realized I needed an outlet for what I was feeling and going through as a caregiver to my then husband and I also realized I needed to change how I thought about things. 

Even when things are going wrong in my life, I can still see the good. I can still recognize and be grateful for every blessing.  None of this happened overnight.  It takes time to rewire our brains.  I mean seriously, it’s a process.  It started with me one night being late for work. The car that I had to drive at that time was a piece of junk that felt like it was going to fall apart any day. I felt every bump when I drove it.  This one particular night I left late… as I did most nights.  My kids were still young, I needed to make sure they were fed or at least knew what they were eating for dinner before I left. Their dad was sitting in his usual spot in our garage smoking, and had already taken the pain meds he was on.  I hated working nights and leaving my kids. I left for work, I had 23 minutes to get there, it was a 25-minute commute on a good day.  I was flying down the road and I remember on this particular night it literally felt like my tires were not on the road… I felt nothing. I just remember thinking how weird that was. I remember looking at my clock when I got to my exit and knew I had 5 minutes to be there… no problem. Just enough time to park, run into the building, and clock in at the last second.  I didn’t look at the time again I just focused on getting there.  I got to work and just as I hit the bump going into the parking lot, my car died. Like shut off it was done…died. I coasted and then had to physically push it with the door open and steer at the same time… by myself… to get it into a parking spot.  I called my then husband… because I was now stuck at work. My shift didn’t even end until 2:30 in the morning. He was literally no help at all. He couldn’t come out there, he couldn’t even drive by this point in the evening. By this time clearly, I was late… really late. There was no possible way I wasn’t. I was probably going to be fired. I called my mom.  She told me she would bring her car out to me with my brother. I got everything worked out and I walked into work. When I got inside, I looked at the clock to see how late I was… I still had 5 minutes to clock in.  I don’t know how… I mean I really don’t. But I immediately said a prayer and thanked God.  I didn’t care at that moment that I had no clue what to do about a car, that I wasn’t able to afford another. I didn’t care that my husband wouldn’t/ couldn’t save me.  I was so full of gratitude for unbelievably being on time, for still having a job, for having a mom and brother that were willing to drop whatever they were doing and bring a car to me. From that day on, I searched for the good things. I made a point to start noticing everything around me.  From that day forward my brain slowly started making a shift. Am a perfect? Well no. Do I still have times that I say…. Seriously, what the actual heck? Recently actually.  I’m job hunting and at the moment I can’t seem to find what I want.  The reality is I’m fine. I’m grateful for everyday that I get up. I’m grateful to have opportunities like this to maybe inspire someone.  I’m searching for other things to do.  Things will work out because… I just know they will. Gratitude isn’t thinking that everything is fine all the time. It isn’t pretending that everything is always ok.  It’s seeing that even when there are things going wrong in your life, there is always something to be grateful for.  It helps you to handle things better when everything feels like it’s going wrong.  What am I grateful for today? My sunflowers that I can see out of the window as I write this, the sun shining and blue sky.  All the little things.  Maybe that sounds silly.  Try it. What are you grateful for today?

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So, you didn’t unpack that emotional baggage…

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As I sat considering the term ‘emotional baggage’ I wondered where that phrase came from. While I didn’t search extensively, the answers I found that made the most sense seemed to indicate that the cliché came from the depression era or possibly relating to individuals in the military.  Essentially a reference to the idea of a person carrying around the burdens of emotional pain, trauma, or some other past event.  I suppose it’s an accurate analogy for this very human condition in that all adults have a past, and the vast majority of us have emotional issues that cause us to suffer.  In my wife’s recent post, she spoke about the importance of ‘unpacking’ our baggage and dealing with it in an appropriate manner that will allow a person to move forward.  I love that she was able to recognize the need to ‘unpack’ what we both had been through. However, I can state from experience what can occur when we don’t unpack or continue dragging un-needed bags around for extended amounts of time. 

If we are claiming that people are carrying around heavy or full bags as adults, we are therefore under the assumption that we’re born with an empty bag. I’m fairly certain that I began packing all sorts of emotional matters at a very young age. Being raised in a dysfunctional home where my dad was an alcoholic ensured that I would start accumulating heavy items that would go directly in my bag. While I may have been spared any physical infliction of pain, my dad’s anger and harsh words hurt more and longer than any punch to the face ever would.  I don’t remember every incident when my dad got drunk and lashed out at me, there are a few that I recall with vivid detail.  One time while still in elementary school (I’m thinking perhaps when I was 9 or 10), I stayed home for school, perhaps I was sick, maybe I wasn’t. Whatever the reason, I apparently lied to my dad about it earlier in the day and later, after he had spent the evening drinking, he discovered the truth. When he discovered my lie, he proceeded with a tirade of calling me names including ‘gutless wonder’, ‘coward’ and the completely unrelated ‘pig’. On other occasions I merely was called the standard ‘worthless.’  

By the time I was in high school I was fully convinced that all of his descriptors of me were completely right. Along with the multiple incidents where he did his best to make me feel small and worthless, he seemed to want to make me feel unlovable too. Because I didn’t love myself, and my fathers love for me seemed non-existent, I came to believe the only solution was to find a girlfriend who would love me. I had fully convinced myself that if I could find a girl, she would not only shower me with affection, but magically fix every flaw I had. Ironically, I didn’t think I was physically attractive, nor had any qualities that would make me attractive to a girl. My flawed thinking was a double-edged sword (and those are really difficult to put in a bag). 

In the second half of my senior year in high school, for some reason unbeknownst to me, a girl in one of my classes took interest in me and we started going out. She would be my first girlfriend, the first person I had sex with, the mother of my first child, my first wife and the first, and thankfully only, person who tried to kill me on two separate occasions.  That is a lot to carry, let alone try to unpack.  

Without going into the details of all that went down in our 2 short tumultuous years together, that horrific marriage seemed to double the weight of the baggage my dad had already given me. By the time I was 20, I had numerous extremely heavy bags that I would continue dragging around well into adult life. I carried the weight of it everywhere I went. They were my constant companion in multiple relationships, my jobs, and every aspect of my personal life. Because I never even attempted to deal with the baggage, they just got in the way. Those heavy bags kept me from ever being the husband, father, son, friend or just person that I really wanted to be. I didn’t know how to love myself and subsequently I didn’t know how to love anyone else. The mental anguish from that baggage also manifested itself as frequent severe migraine headaches, depression and eventually addiction to pain pills. When I turned 50, I hit rock bottom. That birthday hit me harder than I thought it would. But it also became the catalyst to finally not just unpack those bags but burn all the heavy garbage inside them. Four months into my 50’s I met the love of my life. Because of her I found a way to deal with my past and for the first time in my life, find true joy.  I’ve learned it’s never too late to reinvent yourself by addressing the past, and truly learning from it.

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Got EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE? UNPACK IT

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What exactly is ‘baggage’? I have it, my husband has it… we ALL have it.  It’s the mental and emotional ‘stuff’ we carry.  It starts when we really start forming memories and we just keep gathering things as we get older.  For some people it may look like a carry-on.  They pack it all in a nice neat little bag and tuck it in an overhead compartment. For others it may look like you’re headed on a year long trip with bags upon bags packed like you just threw everything in something, hoping it gets there. Here’s the thing.  That small carry-on bag may hold the weight of the world in it for one person…. And conversely the bags upon bags packed chaotically may hold a lot of little things that have built up and built up over time and now feel like the weight of the world for somebody else.  My point is, we can’t judge someone by the amount of ‘bags’ they carry. We all go through different things in life. We all have different experiences, challenges…trials. We are all individuals.  I will stress that over and over again.

As you may have noticed in our first posts, Chaz and I come with quite a bit of emotional stuff that we’ve each carried throughout our lives. If you don’t know that, go back and read our first couple of posts…I think they’re interesting…maybe you will too. I decided early on in our relationship that we absolutely needed to address this. I really…really liked Chaz when we met, and I needed him to know that his heart and his mind and everything that came with him were safe with me. I needed the same reassurance from him. At the very beginning of our relationship, we both knew there was something special between us. We had these invisible strings pulling us together. It is hard to describe, and nothing I had ever experienced in my life before that. But we had to address all the things that hurt us, all the emotional crap that we had both been carrying and had been affecting us individually.  He was going through a divorce; I had just months before buried the man I had been married to for 18 and known for 19 years. How in the world do you start to unpack it all when it’s…a lot? A few years ago, I described it like this. “One day we sat down threw everything on a table, sorted through it, talked about it, cried, and then gathered it all up and threw it off a mountainside.”

Was it that easy? Hahahaha… (straight face) …no. We started with hard conversations. Did we like talking about each other’s past relationships? I can’t say it’s in my top ten things I loved to talk about, I’m positive it’s not on my husband’s either, but we did it, because we needed to. We talked about our childhoods. We talked about abuse in our respective relationships. We talked about self-esteem, what we hate about ourselves, if there were regrets from our pasts, traumatic experiences that changed our lives, addiction. There were times Chaz would walk into a room and I would smile and he would give me what he thought was a convincing smile back, and I would look at him and say, “Don’t fake smile me.” For awhile it always stunned him that I would even notice if something was off. It took a while for him to realize that in some ways I saw him better than he could see himself. He would say, “What do you mean?” And I would say, “That’s not your real smile…what’s going on?” And a conversation would start.  It was not easy for each of us to learn about all the hard things that happened in our lives, it was painful and heartbreaking. And it was absolutely necessary.  Communication is a keystone in our relationship.  We have to talk to each other, and I love knowing we can talk about everything together. I talked to Chaz more in the first six months of knowing him than I talked to the man I was first married to in the 19 years I knew him.  That’s not an exaggeration and it’s hard to even admit out loud. 

Did we actually throw that baggage off of a mountainside? Figuratively… for the most part… yes, we did. All that really means, is that we addressed what we needed to and then left it all in the past where it belongs, where we no longer live or belong. See the thing is we had to learn from all of the stuff that we’ve been through.  Because of that, we have been able to grow as individuals and as a couple. We are not the same people we were when we were kids, or teenagers or 20-somethings, we aren’t even the same people we were 7 years ago when we met, when I was 44 and he was 50.  We’ve had many, many conversations since then. We know each other better and continue to learn and grow every day. That’s part of life… learning from the past, growing, and living in the present. There is still some baggage, I think there always will be, but the weight is much lighter, because we carry it together. The weight is lighter because we unpack, acknowledge, and work through it… together.

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Our back stories…the condensed versions

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Part 2. Chaz

My life is incredible. That describes life after meeting Angela in 2016 and getting married in 2018. Life before Angela was not incredible. In fact, it had been filled with depression, abuse, addiction and mostly void of love. The depression I speak of came from being brought up in a home where my father was an alcoholic.  And despite having a loving Mother, that wasn’t enough to overcome the emotional abuse which would affect me well into adult life.  There are pleasant memories from childhood, but for the most part I grew up hating myself and believing I was essentially worthless.  

Those feelings of inadequacy led me to believe that having a girlfriend would provide the love I lacked, fill the void of despair and fix anything that was wrong with me. It was that skewed perception of a relationship that convinced me to marry a girl I had met as a senior in high school and subsequently gotten pregnant only a month after meeting. The marriage was doomed from the start as my teen bride had some severe psychological issues that manifested within a very short time after we began dating. Unfortunately, it would take her trying to kill me to leave the marriage. There had never been any real love between the two of us, but my lack of self-love kept me in a relationship I should have never entered in the first place. 

The combination of my childhood trauma and the trauma of my first marriage led me down a path filled with multiple other relationships that I had no business being a part of.  Along with the dysfunctional relationships, I had difficulties remaining in any particular job. In my teenage years I had dreamed of going to college, but my lack of confidence, along with depression, lack of money and stress never allowed me to pursue my passions. 

In January of 1993 my father died at age 61 due to alcohol induced illness. That summer I met a woman who I would end up dating, breaking up with, dating, breaking up with, marrying, divorcing, marrying and ultimately divorcing again. Our first time being married happened in 1995 and lasted less than 3 years. The second time occurred in 2000 and somehow lasted 15 years. During those years my life was consumed by a relationship that would be filled with contempt and constant arguing. In 15 years I moved 8 times, changed jobs frequently and became addicted to pain killers (as did my former spouse). 

Just when it seemed that I couldn’t sink any lower, it did. In April of 2016 I turned 50. Some people turn 50 and can reflect on their accomplishments. For some they’ve reached a pinnacle in their careers, for others they witness their children grow and subsequently become grandparents. For me it was a time to merely reflect on what a loser I was. There wasn’t any aspect of my life that brought me joy and sometimes it seemed that living wasn’t really worth it. 

Perhaps reaching that low point in life was the catalyst for change I needed. In August of 2016 I went on a lunch date with a woman who would literally change the course of my life. I had met this woman via Instagram. Her page was filled with images of flowers and other landscape, interspersed with photos of her children and herself.  The nature photographs were beautiful, but more than that, the photographs of her were stunning. I had ‘liked’ her photos as well as left the occasional comment. Then one day I took the bold move and sent her a DM. The conversations were never intended to be a means of flirting, or trying to date, but somehow that’s the direction it went. Talking to her was easy and it seemed as if we had known one another for years. Soon we were talking on the phone and decided we should meet. 

There are moments in our life when we know something momentous is about to occur. We may not know how or why, but we intuitively know that an event will forever change everything. That is exactly how I felt the day before our date. After numerous chats and phone calls I had already had loving feelings towards this woman. The skeptic in me said that you can’t fall in love with someone you’ve never met, but the romantic in me said otherwise.  

It was hot that August day and to boot I was extremely nervous. As I sat in the restaurant waiting for my date to arrive all I could think is “I’ve got to stop sweating”.  Just then, Angela walked in and with a glance of her beautiful blue eyes and dazzling smile, my love for her was confirmed.

In A Nutshell…. Who Are We Anyway?

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Our back stories…the condensed versions

Part 1. Angela

Growing up people always referred to me as shy… To be fair I have a hard time meeting people, but I am actually not shy at all. I am an introvert. I love having deep conversations. I am quiet…and around some people, I can be loud. I spend a lot of time in my head surrounded by a million different thoughts.  I grew up with a terrible self-esteem, and to be honest, I still struggle with this occasionally.

I was setup on a blind date (because I never dated…like ever), when I was 24 with the man who would turn out to be my first husband. We dated for about 2 months before I got pregnant. It happened the first time we had sex… it was terrible and painful.  I remember thinking as I drove home… Why did I do that? I married him, because I didn’t want to raise a child alone…and truthfully, I thought so little of myself, I didn’t think anyone else would ever want me.  We spent 19 years together.  He had a 2-year-old little boy, with beautiful, big brown eyes, when we met that I later adopted, and love with all my heart. We also had 3 beautiful children together.  It turns out he was an alcoholic, an addict and abusive. It took a long time for me to stop making excuses for all those things. I took care of him until the day he died.  For the last few years of his life, I became a person who was easily provoked to anger because I was taking care of a man that nobody would help me with. We knew he was sick and slowly going downhill…we knew it for 8 very long years. I felt trapped and alone, and for a very long time I hated everything. I would work the graveyard shift, anywhere from 8-12 hours, and come home to take him to multiple appointments every week. I slept anywhere from 2 to 4 hours sometimes less, sometimes not at all, because that is just how it was. I hated the person I became. I was angry (and tired) all the time. Then one year towards the end of his life, I started taking moments here and there for myself. I bought a camera and started taking pictures. I would drive to a pond that was near my home and take pictures of ducks, and geese, and pelicans…I didn’t even know pelicans existed in Utah, before then.  I started noticing all the little things around me. I took pictures of flowers, trees, sunsets, clouds the mountains…everything I could in nature.  I started finding myself, through these short outings I started finding peace. It was just what I needed.

One day, shortly after he passed away, I was sitting in my room on the edge of my bed. I remember the weight of all those years, just pushing me down and I was crying.  As I sat there it almost felt like somebody came up and took the weight off my shoulders, and I physically felt it leave. I didn’t know it was something that could actually be felt… but I did. After that day, I let go of the me that I held onto for years to get me through those tough times, and I started embracing the new me. The me that craved peace, that focused on gratitude, that made myself a priority. I wasn’t looking to jump into another serious relationship. I was walking a path that I was fine being on by myself. I liked the new me. I liked feeling free. I met Chaz 4 months after my first husband passed away.  I know…only 4 months…well, you’ll get it as I write more. He kind of came out of nowhere messaging me on Instagram that he liked my pictures.  We just started messaging back and forth. I really liked talking to him and we realized we only lived 40 minutes away from each other. We met for lunch one day, just to talk. I knew that day, I wanted him in my life forever. He was kind, and comfortable, and handsome.  He was the complete opposite of the men I was normally attracted to, at least I thought I was attracted to. Sitting near him made me calm. Sitting near him and talking to him felt like the most natural thing I have ever experienced. We moved in together 4 months later, and a year and two months after that we got married. He is the love of my life, my best friend, my soulmate. I love him unconditionally. I can look into his eyes forever and know that I am loved.  We can talk for hours and days about everything and anything. We are very much alike, and we have our differences. He has his strengths and I have mine, and we support each other in developing and using those strengths. Love, peace, and gratitude are my priority, and are essential in my everyday life. 

I just want to reiterate, what we found and works for us, may not work for others.  My first husband was my complete opposite.  For me the saying ‘opposites attract’ ends in a big mess of anger, resentment and bitterness. Opposite just doesn’t work for me. (Don’t worry I’ll get to forgiveness in a later post…it’s very much important). I like being married to someone who is like me. We love spending time together doing everything.  I need to point out however, we are ALL individuals. What works for you could be something completely different than what works for me. That is the purpose of our blog, to point out that we all need to focus on who we are, what we want, and where we want to be. Our love story may look completely different than yours. If we all were the same people with the same story…. what a boring place this would be. We just want people to find the love that fits best for them.