Writing, Reading, Reflection

The book Eat, Pray, Love has struck a cord. It’s been on the book shelves at Border’s now for a while and has been calling to me. After watching the interview of the author on Oprah, I bought the book today. I opened it and began reading. It is as if the author was writing about me–with some exceptions, of course. I’ve been writing my own story of self-discovery, and in the process have become incredibly aware of who I am and what I want in my life. Reading this book, allows me to know that there are so many other women out there struggling to find themselves and find love–that is good and true.
This past week, I’ve had some serious conversations with the man I’m dating. In the process, I’m seeing my self in a new light. For the first time, I’m beginning to trust a man with every ounce of who I am. It’s difficult for me, which is frustrating to him, I must say. I keep testing him, and I must stop doing that. There is such fear though that I’ll dive in and be hurt in the process. That being said, if there was one person I’d trust not to hurt me it would be Eric. So why must I test him?

While reading the book, though, I understand that believing in the fairy tale romance is unreasonable, but making a choice to bring someone into your life because they are good, because they are capable of love, because I am capable of being loved and loving in return is a wonderful and mature thing to do. Several months ago, I was made aware that I was ready to be in love. I was ready to find someone to spend my life with. I didn’t think it would happen so quickly, but years of eating, praying and loving–no matter how misguided, have gotten me to a place where I am ready for a life-long commitment.

At this moment in my life, I’m afraid that I’ll mess this moment up, that I am deluded  into believing that this is real. I suppose that is normal. I do not know. I’ve never felt this way about someone before, so that in itself makes me feel safer. Like it’s real and the right thing to do.   This relationship is different. Eric is different. Thank God.

To help me see the difference, I’m posting a part of the writing I’ve been working on so that I can see how my life is different, how I’m accepting love into my life now for very different reasons than I did the times before. Of course, before “love” wasn’t real love. But to see it, makes me realize how different I am from 10 years ago. Again, thank God.

Eric, if you read this, this is an important event I’m about to share. You didn’t have to ask; I’m just offering it to you so you know a little more about me. If you do ask, you know I’ll answer. Thank you for being good to me. I know you said I don’t have to thank you, but I need to thank you.

Excerpt:

“Though I try to live a life that is good and kind, I am not religious, nor did this journey lead me to a religion. What I discovered, however, is that if you stop and listen, God—or what I deem to be God—is everywhere. But I didn’t realize this immediately. I knew the little prayers to help me find more information were getting answered as I asked them, but I didn’t quite understand why. I had prayed for years. Never had those prayers been answered so obviously.  In fact, most prayers were never answered. Why now? It wasn’t as if the burglary was the first time I had been victimized. My entire life was filled with one form of trauma or abuse.  Some much worse than the fear initiated by the burglary, and yet during those truly horrific times when I prayed hard, I either received no help or I quickly accepted what I thought was an answer to my prayers. As a child when scary things were happening around me, I’d close my eyes and whisper, “Please god, help me. Make it stop.” But it didn’t.
As an adult, I had nearly stopped praying until one life-changing event occurred.  Just minutes before a horrible car accident, of which I was the sole witness, I was talking on the phone to a man who would become a boyfriend and continuation of abuse because I thought of him as an answer to a prayer. On this particular evening in late fall of 1998, he insisted knowing my exact location—which, I later learned, was one of his controlling characteristics. At the time, I questioned his need to know exactly where I was. After all, he was in Las Vegas thousands of miles away from me. What did it matter? He didn’t find it funny when I tried to make up numbers for longitude and latitude, and instead of continuing to argue, I told him where I was. The signposts I passed at that moment said Hwy 6 and Hwy W. It proved to be the most beneficial thing I could have uttered that night.
Twenty minutes later when I was returning to town, the accident occurred at that exact location. The car sitting in front of me at a stop sign pulled out in front of a grain truck. In a split second one woman was ejected from the car and landed in front of me, my headlights shining on her dark clothing. The other two remained in the front seat of the car that now rested in a field a few hundred feet from me. The November sky was pitch black. The country roads were empty except for my screaming into the phone. When the 911 operator asked where I was, I knew exactly. Highways 6 and W. If the man in Vegas hadn’t insisted on knowing my exact location just minutes earlier, I wouldn’t have known what to tell the operator.
I was in desperate need of someone to help me. A car drove up alongside mine, an answer to my prayer, I thought. The woman who was driving just looked at me, mouthed “Sorry”, and drove around the woman thrown from the car and continued to drive, leaving me there alone. I couldn’t do anything.  The 911 operator demanded I stay near my car for fear that if I tried to help the woman lying in front of my car or tried to cross the highway to check on the others, I’d be hit by an unknowing passerby.
Once emergency vehicles arrived, I was asked to call someone to come and get me. The emergency lights that filled the night sky beckoned me closer. I found myself wandering the highway, the pasture where the car had stopped, the man still slumped over the wheel. Several troopers kept removing me from the area, and placing me in their cars. Within a few minutes, I was again wandering around. I was in shock, and the patrolmen knew it. I began to call the handful of numbers I could remember at that moment. It was Friday night. No one was home—not even my 70-year-old grandma who was always home. There was no one there for me. I sat in my car, praying that someone would call me back. My phone rang and it was him, the man in Vegas. A sure sign from God. He was, after all, the reason I knew where I was when I called for help. He was the only one that Friday night who was there to talk me through what I’d just seen, and he was trying to help me the best he could. Since my own friends and family weren’t able to get me, he said his parents were willing to do it; instead, a group of firemen drove me home. Rather than seeing the firemen as the people God had placed in front of me that night to take care of me, I perceived the man in Vegas as an answered prayer, and I went forward with him, which was possibly the single biggest mistake I could have made.