A Date Four Years Ago Changed My Life

But the real story isn’t the man I went on the date with. It’s the woman I became afterward.

I’ve been trying to write this story for a while, and tonight, sitting here under a full moon, I finally understand why I couldn’t finish it before. The story wasn’t finished yet. Apparently I needed four years, a whole lot of healing, a few shattered illusions, a broken-down car, a canceled flight, a trip to urgent care and one final giant mirror held directly in my face before I could sit down and tell you what actually happened. 😂

Just over four years ago, I went on a date that changed my life.

Now before anybody gets excited, this is not some romantic story about meeting the love of my life and riding off into the sunset. Quite the opposite actually. I was kind of a drunken fool that night, we definitely had ourselves an evening, and somehow in the middle of all of it this man said things to me that would stay in my head for the next four years.

At that point in my life, I did not see myself the way I see myself today. He did. He looked at me and told me my story was powerful. He told me I was beautiful from the inside out. He told me never to let anyone hold me back. He told me he believed someday I could become more successful and more well-known than he was, and basically asked me why the hell I thought there was any reason a woman like me couldn’t be sitting across the table from a man like him—or someone even more successful.

Something about that conversation flipped a lightbulb on in my brain.

It wasn’t because suddenly some man had given me value. I had value before I ever sat down at that table. I just didn’t fully know how to see it yet. Sometimes someone walks into your life for a moment and holds up a mirror. They don’t necessarily stay. They don’t necessarily become your person. They just show you something that you’re eventually going to have to learn how to see for yourself.

There was music attached to that chapter of my life too. Certain songs became almost like little anchors for me. “100 Proof” would resonate so damn deep. “Ooh Na Na” could pull me out of a funk almost instantly, and “I Don’t Know” somehow kept hope alive in me when I needed it. I didn’t just listen to that one. I felt it in my soul. I shared the music I loved with my followers like I always do, and they started listening too. At one point Minnesota became the number one state listening to this musician’s music, which still makes me laugh because apparently even four years ago I didn’t realize how much people actually paid attention when I shared something I genuinely loved.

What nobody knew was what those songs represented privately for me. They became part of the soundtrack of a much bigger transformation.

Because life after that date certainly didn’t become magically easy. If anything, Spirit apparently said, “Oh good, she got the message. Now let’s give her the fucking curriculum.” 😂

There were relationships and friendships that forced me to look at how deeply I love people and how much of myself I was willing to give away in the process. One of those relationships was a friendship that lasted more than twenty years before I finally had enough. I loved hard, stayed too long and eventually learned that loving someone doesn’t mean they get unlimited access to me. What makes that story even crazier is that this spring, years after everything ended, that person came back into my life long enough to apologize for taking advantage of the way I loved them.

Twenty-plus years.

Apparently my learning curve needed some work. 😂

Then there was another relationship that had been weaving itself through my life for eleven years. I’ve written around this connection before because some stories belong to me without every detail belonging to the internet. There were periods of incredible closeness followed by what I started calling the void. Every time I wanted more closeness, consistency or presence than this person was willing to give, eventually the void would show back up.

And yet I could always see the softness underneath everything else.

That was probably both one of my greatest gifts and one of my hardest lessons. I am incredibly tuned into people. I could see through the deflection, the avoidance, the projections and the walls. I could see glimpses of the person underneath all of it, and because I loved that person deeply, those glimpses kept hope alive.

At one point I finally said, “I can’t chase your ghost anymore.”

And I meant it.

I stepped away for nine months. I went back to school full time. I worked. I healed. I poured energy into myself. There were attempts to reach me during that time, but I didn’t cave. Eventually, when I was ready, I reached back out myself.

And there he was.

That was when I heard Spirit very clearly. I was finally strong enough. We would need each other, but this time I wouldn’t be blind. I was going to grow through whatever came next, and eventually one of two things would happen:

Either the chains would melt or the glass would fucking shatter.

I carried that message with me.

Last year I went back to Aveda, and that experience closed trauma doors that had been sitting open inside me for years. I physically returned to a place connected to an older version of myself, but I wasn’t that woman anymore. I got to walk through those doors as the person I had become instead of the person who had originally been hurt there. It healed so much bullshit I didn’t even realize I was still carrying.

And somewhere along the way I started realizing something else.

Real healing doesn’t necessarily mean you never repeat a pattern again. Sometimes it means you recognize it faster.

A relationship once took me more than twenty years to finally release.

Another took eleven.

Hey, progress is progress. 😂

But this eleven-year cycle was different because through all of it, I genuinely believed there might eventually be another side. I believed someday I might finally receive this person fully. I believed maybe one day the consistency, time, presence and communication I wanted would finally match the softness I had seen underneath everything else.

And then there was a man I may never receive fully.

That sentence hurts, but not in the way it would’ve hurt me before.

Because somewhere during this last round, the mirror flipped so fucking hard that I stopped asking whether I was finally going to be good enough to be chosen and started asking myself why being chosen by somebody else had anything to do with whether I was good enough in the first place.

That was the glass.

And it fucking shattered.

Once I saw the disrespect clearly, I couldn’t unsee it. Loving someone deeply no longer made me willing to explain away what I was actually experiencing. Seeing softness underneath somebody’s walls didn’t mean I had to keep accepting the walls. Understanding someone didn’t require abandoning myself.

I could still love hard and say, this isn’t enough for me anymore.

I deserve consistency. I deserve time. I deserve presence. I deserve communication. I deserve to know where I stand instead of being left questioning everything.

And holy shit, apparently Spirit wanted to make absolutely certain I understood the assignment because these last few weeks have been WILD. 😂

I was supposed to go back to Florida for my first solo trip in years. This time I wasn’t going there for an old relationship or an old friendship. I was supposed to fly into Tampa and head toward Clearwater for a retreat with more than forty women I basically didn’t know. I was nervous, excited and completely outside my comfort zone, but I knew I was supposed to do something different. I thought Florida was going to be my big symbolic return.

Then my flight got canceled.

Of course it did.

I was still determined to go. I figured I’d catch the later flight and keep moving because apparently I participate in life by saying, “Well, that was inconvenient. Anyway…” 😂

Except instead of getting on another plane, I ended up in urgent care having a serious allergic reaction.

And because apparently that wasn’t enough excitement for one week, my car broke down too and I ended up buying a brand-new car.

The retreat never happened for me.

But the new beginning did.

That might be one of the biggest realizations of this entire story. I thought I needed to physically get back to Florida to cross some invisible threshold. Instead, everything around me went sideways and I discovered I had already crossed it.

I handled these past few weeks with a level of calm that is honestly blowing my own mind. Things that would’ve once sent me spinning happened one after another and somehow I just handled them. I rested when I needed to rest. I made decisions. I dealt with what was directly in front of me. I didn’t need to control everything around me to feel safe inside myself.

Meanwhile, people I genuinely thought would be walking beside me into this next chapter have quietly dropped away.

And there hasn’t been some giant dramatic explosion with all of them either. They simply went into their own voids.

And I let them.

That might be the wildest part.

Because while old connections have been peacefully falling away, new people have started walking into my life who are more like-minded than I ever could have dreamed. I’ve been letting myself meet people differently. I’m showing up authentically instead of wondering how I’m being perceived. I’m trusting myself in rooms I would’ve once been terrified to walk into.

And my extrovert is finally starting to come back out and play.

She was wounded for a really long time.

She isolated because she needed to. She needed somewhere quiet enough to heal, somewhere she could learn to trust herself again. But apparently she’s had enough of hiding because lately she’s looking around like, “Okay, are we going outside or what?” 😂

And through all of those years, somewhere in the back of my mind, I carried the message from that date.

My story was powerful.

I was beautiful from the inside out.

There was no reason a woman like me couldn’t sit across from someone successful and know she belonged there too.

Don’t let anyone hold you back.

Then, over the last couple of months, something started happening that I can’t ignore. Those old songs started finding me again. Songs I hadn’t intentionally gone searching for suddenly started playing on my radio again during the exact period when all of these loops were closing.

“100 Proof.”

“Ooh Na Na.”

“I Don’t Know.”

You can call that whatever you want.

I call it divine alignment.

I believe everything happens for a reason. I believe Spirit guides me. That belief has carried me through some of the strangest, hardest and most beautiful chapters of my life, and I’m not going to water it down to make it easier for somebody else to understand.

And now here I am four years later, sitting under a full moon realizing the story is finally ready to be released.

The funny thing is, four years ago I thought the important part of that date was that someone extraordinary saw something extraordinary in me.

I understand it differently now.

He wasn’t giving me something I didn’t already have.

He was holding up the first mirror.

Then life handed me mirror after mirror after mirror until eventually I couldn’t look away anymore.

Some showed me my wounds. Some showed me how much bullshit I was willing to tolerate because I could see the good in somebody. Some showed me how deeply I could love. Some showed me exactly where I was still abandoning myself.

And eventually one shattered.

The chains didn’t melt.

The glass fucking shattered.

And underneath all of it was me.

Still soft. Still weird. Still loving hard. Still believing in Spirit. Still seeing the good in people. Still capable of loving someone even when I know they can’t walk beside me anymore.

But I’m not waiting for somebody else to choose me now.

I’m choosing myself.

I’m trusting myself.

I’m letting people leave peacefully when their path isn’t meant to continue beside mine, and I’m opening the door to people who actually fit the space I’m holding now.

And apparently I’m even letting my extrovert back outside.

Pray for society. 😂

Four years ago, I went on a date that changed my life.

But the real story was never the man I went on the date with.

It was the woman I became afterward.