July, 2020

This is one of my favorite times of the year. I love the sun being available for the long amounts of time, I love the smell and feel of summer, I love that it reminds me of swimming until my heart’s content, and I love that summer equals happy in my being.

This summer is particularly special because I met an amazing person. At the beginning of the COVID March madness, I sent a playful text on, of all of things, an online dating app! It was a response to a profile that said that he had told all the jokes he could remember to his dog and now he has been reduced to repeating the same old jokes. To which I responded, do you have any good jokes I could tell my dog?

That was the beginning of it all. I was lit up in ways that I thought were impossible mostly because I thought this was something that I needed to do for myself. And I do, but he has amplified what I thought I could do for me beyond what I can do as a single soul.

I have wanted a relationship that insists that I elevate myself at every opportunity to deepen my relationship with me in a way that makes me a better me and him a better him. And this is what I have encountered. It’s not all easy all the time. It requires me to get very real with myself about my patterns, my wounds, but not from the standpoint of healing them, more from a place of letting them go. Not holding to what I think I’ve known as truth rather letting truth arrive. Trusting that I’ve done the work around my relational distortion patterns and letting what comes up be deleted.

This is not about being perfect. It is about being me. Fully me. Letting the me that I didn’t know wanted to be expressed show me who I am from a different vantage point. I didn’t know that I could trust myself this much. This explicit trust in myself frees who I am with to be fully themselves. This mechanism is new to me and yet somehow intrinsically has always been. So much distortion has now been lifted that I can see how much I can connect with another from places I’ve never connected and the cool thing is I am still learning (I love to learn!). And I am fortunate to have met someone who also wants this connection.

You’d think this would feel like the falling in love scenario shown in movies but it’s nothing like that. It’s calm, centered, whole, and connecting. It releases me of any previous notions of what love is or can be. It’s a journey in and of itself and it shifts and deepens daily. Where I see the deepening most obviously is how I feel about and treat myself. The ability to come into deeper connection with me is what this relationship has granted me. As much as I could go on and on about the many things that I have in common with him, how much I love him, his presence in my life takes me to places within myself that are new to me. Expansive, connected, curious places that I am eager to get to know. And the best thing about all of this is, he supports this exploration, this expedition into me. He sees its importance and encourages its growth even when it scares the shit out of him.

Perfection? No. Just being the me that I’ve always wanted to be.