I moved back home after college until I could find an "adult" job and move out. I first worked a part time retail job at the store a friend of mine's parents owned near my parents' house. My friend, Whitney, had passed away in a car wreck my freshmen year of college (adding more pain to that already awful year), and I think her Mom felt closer to Whitney to have one of her daughter's friends work at her store, also she’d known me since I was 5. A few months later I got a temporary job in Columbia and moved back to Columbia into a house with a couple roommates I met through Facebook (one was from Aiken, and we had mutual friends). When the recession really hit, my temporary job ended, and it ended badly. The company had never explained it was a temp job to me, and after telling me how awesome of an employee I was and giving me wonderful reviews, they let me go right before my 90 days when I would have gained benefits. The only thing I remember them using as a reason was that I'd sat cross legged at my desk when they told me not to. There was nothing I could do. It made the voiceless, broken girl I was feel even more like a failure. I lost most of the little confidence I had left at that point. They let much of the company go, one by one, after me. The recession hit them hard. I wish that had been explained to me at the time so it would not have been so wounding.
I was jobless for another few months until I started working for the company I still work for today. My roommates and I moved from a house into an apartment when the house lease was over. One roommate was great, and the other roommate and I were like oil and water. She was extremely abrasive and outright mean to me. She earned some pretty awful nicknames in my head, all that I felt she deserved at the time, and I found every way I could to be out of the apartment as much as possible. I felt like I was her emotional punching bag, and around her, I completely clammed up. Nothing I could say or do was ever right, so I gave up doing anything but cowering around her, which only added fuel to her fire. She was absolutely awful and made my home at the time, what should have been my safe place, no longer safe. Our other roommate had to be the go between for us to try to keep some peace and protect me as best she could. When the apartment lease was about to expire, I decided I was absolutely done with roommates, so I looked to buy a house. I was able to get in on some first time homebuyer incentives and buy a small patio home before my 24th birthday. Living alone seemed like the safest way to be since I couldn't even stand up for myself.
A friend of mine moved in next door to my patio home, and she kept telling me I needed to meet her coworker, Alex. I told her over and over that I wasn't into being set up, but she persisted. Finally I agreed to go with her to an after work gathering, and Alex was told to get a haircut, shave, and be there to meet me. It would be a safe, group setting, and she would be there to make it less awkward. From the moment Alex and I met, I went into it differently than I ever had before with a guy. I cannot explain my sudden ability to stand up for myself, but I think I was just done with wasting time and being hurt. I simply couldn't do it anymore. I was specific and unwilling to waver on the things Alex and I needed to be on the same page about before even considering talking past that first night. He went above and beyond my initial criteria. We spent that evening and the rest of the weekend talking. By the end of the weekend, I'd laid all my cards on the table, made everything in my past known, including Xavier, despite that I still didn't quite know how to explain it. I didn't want to go any further or get my hopes up with Alex if anything from my past could cause him to want to run away. I was not going to go 6 months, a year, multiple years, and then find out that something in my past was the thing he couldn't deal with. Nope, I was making sure that if he was going into anything with me, he was going in eyes wide open. And so was I with him.
The biggest and most important differences when Alex and I started dating were my expectations. I was not looking for a guy to walk in front of me, to be on a pedestal, or to try to show me how I should be treated. I deserved to be treated well, I was going to claim that, no more needing someone to prove that to me. And I was looking for someone to walk with me, beside me, not in front of me or behind me. I realized the idea that I needed "rescuing" from a guy was an unhealthy lie. I just needed someone who would walk with me through whatever came my way. I also told him I wouldn't even consider engagement until we'd been together for at least 2 years. My thought at the time was that I had been with a guy (Frank) for 1.5 years, so I needed to know that I could be with someone longer than that and still happy before making any more serious commitments. So Alex and I started dating. Immediately I knew he was different, that the relationship was different. As time went on with Alex, I was always happier, I always wanted to be with him more. Two years came and went, and I was still happy. To be honest, I was shocked. I had about given up on that being possible. I no longer could imagine my life without Alex, but we still needed another year and a half before we were ready to be engaged. There were things we both needed to work out personally, not the least of which involved Alex needing to live away from home for a period of time. We had decided not to live together before we were married, but he at least moved to my end of town for 2 years with some friends while we were dating and engaged. Also, as someone with severe (and then undiagnosed) anxiety, any decision, much less a huge decision like marriage, sends me into all sorts of panic. It just takes me a lot longer to make decisions, and that's that.
About 6 months into dating. I just look so relaxed and safe with him even then.
Alex and I knew we were going to be together fairly early into the relationship, we just needed time, and that was absolutely ok. However, this was completely counter to how I'd prior felt, feeling like I had to rush into marriage because my clock was ticking. I finally stopped trying to live by these made up rules of when I should be hitting each "milestone" in my life and just decided to do what made sense for me and for my life, for us and for our life together. By that point I was already starting to see a lot of those "from graduation to the altar" marriages end in divorce. I don't say that insensitively, my heart broke for them, and I knew it could have been me in that same place. I was thankful the plan I'd had for my life in college hadn't gone the way I thought it should have, because I, too, would have also had my "graduation to altar" marriage end up in divorce had I gone down that path. I'd had these completely unrealistic fairytale ideas of what marriage was supposed to be when I was in college. By the time Alex and I got to engagement, I no longer believed marriage was supposed to "fix" everything, I no longer believed in the fairytale of being swept off my feet. I realized that marriage was just two people, two equal partners, who loved each other and enjoyed just being together, joining our lives together, walking through life together, figuring things out together. We were still two separate people with separate ideas and interests, and we needed to also have friends and things in our lives outside of each other. Neither of us could "save" the other, and marriage would only exacerbate any problems we had, not fix them.
Alex proposed at one of my favorite places, the pier at Waterfront Park in downtown Charleston (before the stupid cruise ships took over the beautiful views)
Because I just like to keep things interesting and keep him on his toes (that's sarcasm, by the way), sometime during Alex's and my engagement, I realized I'd been sexually assaulted by Xavier 11 years prior. There was some big news story at the time about a sexual assault on a college campus, and something about what happened to the girl and the way it was explained set this fire in my soul. I got angry. Livid. I remember thinking, "More than that happened to me, and I didn't want it either! But I wasn't believed, I wasn't listened to, and what happened to her is on national news?!" It didn't feel fair, but it also opened my eyes. Almost in an instant, I realized that if they were saying what happened to her was rape, then I, too, had been raped. It was a bombshell. I could barely say the word then, I still don't like it now. Not long after that bombshell hit me, when Alex was visiting, I just sort of blurted it out, "Xavier raped me, did you know Xavier raped me?" There was nothing new to my story, nothing uncovered, but it felt completely new to me, completely retraumatizing. Alex just responded, "Well yeah I knew, how didn't you know?" Well how in the world did he know? How did he have that language when I didn't? I didn't even know what to do with that realization then, and neither did he. We were in the middle of wedding planning, so it went back on the back burner. I simply couldn't emotionally handle anything else then, so I buried it again.
Marriage planning in itself was extremely anxiety inducing, and I didn't have any of the tools or knowledge I have now. We needed the entire year of engagement we had, specifically because I discovered that my "decision maker" completely breaks when my anxiety it too high. It took me longer to make all the decisions I had to make, then I simply hit a place where I could not make another decision, and I passed the reins to my Mom, who was happy to take them. We also quickly discovered that the wedding was just as much about our parents than it was about us, and the politics of who "had" to be invited and who "couldn't be" was just insanity. There are so many emotions planning a wedding to begin with, so much stress, and I hate made up social rules anyway. We ended up having a beautiful wedding, and I felt like a princess. It was such a blessing to see how much so many people cared about us and our future together. We so enjoyed spending time with everyone who came that we didn't rush away from our reception or rush away to our honeymoon, because we wanted to appreciate all the family and friends who had come from so far to celebrate us. I still love looking at our pictures and showing them off. I don't regret having the wedding we had, but there are of course pieces of it I would have done differently knowing what we know now.
I didn't have the words for it at the time, but I was having a complete panic attack going down the aisle. Fortunately I remembered to smile and not show it on my face. After all the wedding planning and preparation and excitement, I'd failed to think about just how many people would be staring at me. It took until about halfway through the ceremony to finally be able to breathe and be excited for what was happening.
Getting married is an adjustment, even though we'd been together 4.5 years when we got married. Alex moved into my house, and suddenly I had to share "my" space. At first I would just get confused when he was ALWAYS THERE (outside of work, of course). Like wait, you're still here? I loved it, but it was an emotional adjustment. Some days I looked forward to getting home from work to him there (his hours are different than mine), and other times I just wanted some space. So many people had told us how bad the first year of marriage is. That's part of why we'd waited so long, I was terrified of this dreaded "first year of marriage." So many people acted like it would be our worst year, so dang it, I was going to do everything to not have ours be that dreaded awful first year.
Our first year of marriage was hard, but it wasn't because of any of the reasons people had warned us about. We got a puppy in month 2 of our marriage. She was born during our honeymoon, but we didn't even know about her until the day before we adopted her. My guinea pig had to come with us on our honeymoon because she was very old, had Cushing's disease, and was on antibiotics for something else. She turned 7 not long into our marriage and then passed away a month later. The same month my guinea pig passed away, my last grandparent passed away, and I had to go to Louisiana for the funeral, leaving Alex with our then 2 dogs, and having family once again ask me when they were going to meet him. Then about a month later, still only 3 or 4 months into our marriage at that point, I had a dream about Xavier, and I woke up missing him. I have vivid dreams often, and Xavier would occasionally show up in my dreams. Sometimes the dreams were bad, and I'd wake up upset. But it was even worse when I wanted to be with him in the dream and woke up feeling a connection to him still. So the first time this happened after Alex and I got married, I was livid. Xavier had damaged enough of my my life, he WAS NOT going to ruin my marriage. I was going to fight for my marriage from the beginning, but I still didn't know what to do or where to go. I talked to some friends, and people starting mentioning counseling. That had been so bad for me prior that I didn't want to go down that road again. But more people mentioned it, and some started talking about a counselor at our church, Heather. Everything said about her was good, and some had even seen her themselves and could personally attest to how life changing their time with her had been. Fine, I would give it a try, but if she invalidated me, if I didn't feel heard or believed, I was out, and I was just going to bury that story with Xavier forever. That was my top notch plan at the time. And surely, if it did go well, I should be out of there in probably.....four months, six months, tops? I just needed a little help putting the past behind me.
How little I knew. Oh how little I knew.
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