The Dark Ages Before Shane.

HOWDY Y’ALL :) Long time, no see lol. I mentioned over on my other socials that there wouldn’t be a blog post or shop update on the week of Thanksgiving. As you probably saw, I was trying to make it through hosting Thanksgiving and I had to prepare for DAYSSSS. I can’t wait til stuff like that comes normal to me one day. I can only hope it will anyway lol. I really, REALLY want to be that superhuman grandma that gets it all done in a house dress with rollers in her hair lol.

In the last blog post I mentioned an introduction to a “returning” character in my story. I hate that I worded it that was because I feel like it might add a sort of anticipation for this person…like sort of a special reveal. I have stayed up thinking about going back in and erasing that part of the blog post. I ALMOST did, but I promised myself I wouldn’t go back and change anything. After I say it, I consider it said. It’s the only method I have that keeps me from chickening out and retracting ALLLL of this information I’m giving you guys.

I don’t find this blog posting thing fun. It’s not fun to revisit the kind of memories I have. It digs up a lot of emotions and to be honest, I find myself dreading sitting down and writing these posts because once I’m sat down and in the writing zone…I’m taken back in time to the moments and situations I’m telling you all about and girlfriend wants to hop off that train lol. I want to pretend that I didn’t hear God tell me to start this blog. I want to erase everything I’ve written and act like nothing ever happened.

But I can’t.

If God says “do something”. There is a reason. Even if I never know what that reason is on this side of Heaven..I can rest assured that God never has me do anything in vain. There’s always purpose in the hard stuff. I believe that with my whole heart. I don’t know whether this thing is helping you, helping me, or helping the both of us.

Maybe the whole point of this thing is so that I can get all of this off my chest. I’ve told you the beginning parts of my story, though, and it still feels like it’s on my chest lol so I don’t think that’s it.

Anyway, I really lost sleep after writing it out in the way that I did at the end of the last post. I really had a pit in my stomach for a solid week. I bet you I won’t do that again lol.

The truth is…it’s not a *grand reveal*. This person isn’t special. I mean they’re special to God, of course. God loves them just as He loves me…but this person is not special TO ME. I actually have a really hard time with my emotions when I speak on this person. I feel a lot of anger and resentment when they are brought up which is why I’ve only spoken of them a handful of times in the past ten years. The only time I ever speak about them or any of this part of the story is when Shane and I are talking about it. Every now and then the guilt still eats me alive and Shane has to bring me back down to earth and remind me that I’m not that person anymore. He teaches me a new level of grace every time that he does that. I don’t understand how someone can be so forgiving. I like to think that when God gave me a heart transplant, that He gave me an extremely forgiving heart. As a matter of fact, I know he did. I have successfully forgiven every single person who’s ever done me wrong. There’s only one person I still can’t forgive. And that’s me. And that’s because while I did do myself wrong…I REALLY did my person wrong. I don’t like Shane being done wrong. It’s the most backwards thing on the planet, and I have some audacity saying that considering what I’ve done to him, but it’s the God’s honest truth. I would fight a MMA fighter over that man. I would wrestle an elephant, I’m not even kidding. Even to this day, Holy Spirit has to keep me in check when someone is mean to him. My first reaction is to throw hands every time. Instead…I throw my words…like I would throw my punches… REALLY hard…that way they make it to Heaven real fast lol.

I’m afraid that if I try to forgive myself for doing what I did to my family..to my HUSBAND…that it will feel like I’m letting myself off the hook. I’m afraid it will feel like I’m moving on…like all of that never happened.

Do you know how it feels when you lose a loved one and you’re in active grief? Those first few weeks are brutal and there comes a point where life just keeps going and you have to jump back into the swing of things…almost like nothing ever happened? Like your whole life wasn’t just altered? Like you don’t have a pit in your stomach every waking hour of every waking day?

That’s kind of how it feels when I think about trying to put what I did behind us.

On the other hand, another way I think of it is…when someone commits murder they have to carry that guilt for the rest of their life, right? They have to live out their sentence, their consequence, that was given to them as a repercussion of the decision they made.

In my mind, I killed something in Shane when I did what I did…over and over again. He was able to revive it within himself, but the guilt I carry is still there. It’s my life sentence.

I’ll catch up to where we left off in the last post now. I just really needed to make it known that this person isn’t someone special to me. He isn’t someone to romanticize or anticipate. I’m trying to find a nice way to say I couldn’t care less about them at this point in my life lol. Shane always tells me to pray for them and I do, but it’s hard. I admire Shane so much because he prays for this person probably more than anybody does.

He. Prays. For. This. Person.

For the person who has a history with his wife.

For the person who knew his wife was married and still pursued her.

For the person who was half of the problem.

He wholeheartedly, sincerely prays for them.

I ain’t never seen Jesus in a person like I see Him in Shane.

At this point in my story…I’m a teenager living in this house with people I can’t stand. I feel the ultimate betrayal towards the person I loved most in this world. I’m failing school. I have friends, but I’m nobody’s favorite friend. I’m going down a rough path. Drugs are heavily present in my circle of friends.

It’s not a good time.

I finished up my freshman year on a prayer. Nanny’s prayer, I’m sure. I can’t tell you a single thing I learned that year, because I genuinely don’t think I learned anything. I was in the counselors office a lot. They were worried about my arms. (If you know, you know) but I somehow kept them from calling nanny about it every time. I hid my arms from the elbows down. A lot of times I wore long sleeves. The times I didn’t wear long sleeves I wore sweatbands lol. (You’re probably like ….huh. Sweatbands with band logos on them were big at that time and I had ones from like HIM, Bullet for my Valentine, Blink 182, and a bunch of other more alternative bands) I layered them down my arms. Everybody thought it was a fashion statement.

I was still getting made fun of but by then I learned to stay out of the way. I didn’t want people to notice me. If they noticed me, it gave them an opportunity to find something about me to make fun of. I got smart about that and begin to do everything I could to draw the attention AWAY from me.

Despite me getting made fun of for my weight, I never had an issue getting boyfriends. It’s the weirdest thing..boys either REALLY liked me or were REALLY mean to me. I had a lot of little boyfriends here and there, but none too serious. I always cheated on them. Even the little two week boyfriend/girlfriend things as a young teenager…I could never stay “faithful” to anyone. I had no loyalty..no sense of it at all.

One day I came across a boy who really DID NOT like me. He was looking for a girlfriend and he and his friends were outside at the front of the school and as soon as I realized what was going on I tried my darndest to get the heck out of there. Before I knew it someone had grabbed my arm and pulled me over to the table this guy was standing on and said “here! Found your girlfriend!”

In that moment I tried to do what I had done as a little kid…I tried to dissociate. I knew the blow was coming and I knew it was gonna be a hard one.

Go figure my brain wouldn’t cooperate and I got the privilege of standing there for a solid 5 minutes under God and everybody being pointed at, laughed at, made fun of, called names, and God knows what else while this guy continued to degrade me and point out everything that was wrong with me. By this point I was so over being called fat that I WANTED people to get more creative,

Be careful what you wish for. There was a lot more creativity that day lol.

That’s a day I don’t like to look back on. Something clicked in me that day and it wasn’t something good. My brain had a response to that situation that it didn’t have with any other situations leading up to that…even the worst of the worst situations haven’t stuck with me like that thing stuck with me.

To this day I get sick when I have to pass a particular gas station to get into town and the sign out front has the kids last name on it. It’s not a well known name, it’s very different so it sticks out to me like a sore thumb and I have to actively try not to have a mini panic attack.

After that situation, I stayed away from boys. You would think the other things that happened to me would’ve made me do that. I don’t know the science behind my brain or why it took something like that to make me swear off boys but that’s what it took apparently. I had no interest in guys for the rest of my freshman year.

I went into my sophomore year with the same mindset. That whole ordeal had put me in a deep state of depression. There were just so many people out there when that happened. i mean it was shoulder to shoulder packed and not one person stood up for me. I got a ton of pitying looks, but no one stepped out and saved the day. I guess that’s why I’m adamant on taking up for others now. I’ll be the odd man out, the first person to stand up for someone. Whether others follow suit or not, I won’t stand back and watch someone publicly get torn apart or broken down by others. My heart can’t handle that.

It was towards the beginning of sophomore year and I went to the county fair with some of my friends. This friend group was pretty large and even though it was one large group, it was separated into a bunch of little groups. Every one kind of knew of one another though and everyone was friendly with each other. While at the fair, MY group kind of broke apart and went different ways, to different rides and games, and stuff and I found myself with this one boy. I knew of this boy, he had dated a friend of mine for a good while freshman year ….and he was at this time dating another friend of mine (I told you, I really didn’t understand or want to understand the concept of loyalty at this point). We hung out that night and from then on..we were a thing.

I really liked this boy. And this boy really liked me which I thought was bizarre. I had went from being openly made fun of and called names to dating this really well known guy in my circle. He was considered conventionally attractive and a lot of girls liked him…which put a lot of targets on my back. I don’t think I’ve ever been so hated by so many girls as I was then. The internet might rival that now cause I do have a lot of little women who reallllllllyyyy hate me now, but I still think the high school girls were meaner lol.

My weight was never a problem for him, though, and I think that alone is what made me get so attached to him so quickly. I can honestly say I tried to be loyal to him and was for the longest time. But eventually, I did what I always did, and I got messy.

He had a lot of patience with me, but I wouldn’t communicate so we inevitably split apart.

School went bad real quick after that. We shared the same friend group, so it got awkward fast and there became a sort of split in the friend group. It was Junior year at this point and so I tried talking to other people, but I couldn’t find someone I *vibed* with like I had with him. Eventually, like magnets, we began gravitating back to one another again. It was literally like an omen or something…you’ll come to understand. He was never disrespectful, even given what I did, but he was hesitant and so was I . I really didn’t know what I wanted. I was a teenager, I had no clue. I had a hard time processing my emotions even then. I was very cut off from people. I would let myself feel a little bit, but I would never allow myself to feel anything big. He felt stuff BIG. I should’ve known the two of those things would make up for a bad situation.

It was a recipe for disaster.

And at that I’m tapping out until next week, lol.