CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE PAUSE.

Throughout the night, emotions visited me one by one and all together. A sadness settled in my chest. Disappointment hung her heavy hat on my heart. Confusion clouded any quiet corner of my head. The visitors melted into each other, into one: inadequacy.

My instinct is to slam the door on these feelings, shut them out, and postpone the reckoning. If I don’t acknowledge them, they don’t exist. I know that’s not true. I do. I just don’t want to face the things that feel hard. I would much rather numb with a vice, distract with an escape, than expose myself to the harshness of rejection.

But when we can welcome these unwanted guests in, these emotions we spend so much time fearing enter and exit with a surprising yet bearable force: a strong wave crashing into the shore before sliding away. The visit is intense, but they always leave quieter than they came.

And I’m not sure that I was taught that — that we always have a choice. That we don’t have control, but we can choose how we act and what we do with the things that happen to us. We can’t control the future, and we can’t change the past. We have only the now, and it’s our responsibility to do the best we can within it.

We can persist and resist, attempting to change someone or change ourselves. We can fight our own feelings, telling ourselves we’re fine when we’re not. We can listen to thoughts that arise from the pain and letdowns of our past and the worries of our future. We can let unhealthy patterns take over. We can allow the fear of what we may find when we stop to keep us running our entire lives.

Or, we can remember that we have a choice. We can remember that we are not those thoughts or those patterns, but rather we exist outside all of those things. We can watch our thoughts and emotions pass by like cars on a road, and because we can do that, we can choose whether to get in and go for a ride or watch them flow.

We can pause. We can notice.

We can notice what happens in that brief moment before we instinctively brush off or succumb to the feelings inside us. In that split second, we have time to disentangle ourselves from our thoughts or to talk ourselves out of being swallowed by our emotions. A pause gives us the space to learn that feeling bad does not mean that we are bad — it just means that we are feeling.

The pause, when brave enough to embrace it, holds our hand and slips us out of that overwhelming identification with and entanglement in our thoughts. The pause invites us to see the temporality of any situation we face, good or bad. In that split second, it reminds us that things came before this and things will come again. It whispers, don’t you remember that the sun is setting, the moon is rising, the air is cold, and you, a breathing miracle, are here to see it? We can remember that this is what we signed up for — to feel and learn and love and break. And do it again and again and again.

I try to practice what I preach. I try to pause and observe my experience, this rejection. Each time I feel a swell, I try to find the safety of a pause and remember that as surely as the tide finds the shore, it will also go. I try to find the bright side, things to be grateful for. Silver linings. I sit, gently holding the pain with one hand as I open the other. I think of all the things I experienced, secret concerts and stolen kisses, that brought me joy, and all the things I learned about myself in the process.

In the same way that I was a different person six months or six years ago, I was a different person before I met him. I learned and evolved and grew through the mirror he held up for me.

Now, on the other side, I am more aware of what I did and didn’t like, what I wanted, and most importantly, I am more aware of the exact areas in which I needed to grow in order to continue becoming the truest version of myself. I see clearly what I need to heal in order to receive the love I am working on believing that I deserve.

With all this, I realized, if I only had one experience, how would I really know what I liked and what I didn’t? If I only knew one thing and had nothing to compare it to, how could I really differentiate without contrast? How confidently could I say that I truly knew myself and what I wanted if I didn’t experience anything else?

I thought I was content before. I thought I knew what I wanted. I thought I was living a life that would fulfill me. But I wasn’t. The realization that I didn’t know myself, I just knew what I thought everyone else wanted for me, brutally shattered that illusion. I had no comparison and had lost my imagination. I had never experienced anything different, so my past life felt like my permanent one.

In many ways, James was the opposite of all I had ever known.

Everything about him was a contradiction — that alone captivated me. Any time I tried to place him in a box, I failed. I couldn’t define him with the one-word descriptors we usually use to sort people into boxes, the kind of people who don’t dare leave the box they’re given. He was never just this without also being that.

James revealed the part of me that wanted to be dynamic and evolve. He reminded me that personal growth was possible. I didn’t have to be one thing. I didn’t have to be the person I was at seventeen.

I got my journal and pen and wrote down what I was thankful for and what lessons I had learned. I tried to focus on everything I had gained rather than what I had lost, but intrusive thoughts stormed in, one after the next:

You’ve never met anyone else like him - how are you going to again?

What if there’s no one else out there who makes you feel like this?

You tried to let someone in, and then he left. Remember that. It will happen again.

To be seen is to be rejected.

When you show your true self, people leave.

Unanswerable questions nagged at me. If I had just done one thing differently, would it have changed anything? If I said more? If I said less? Was I too much? Was I not enough?

I noticed myself slipping into the narrative that I could have or should have done something to change this outcome, the false belief that the outcome that occurs is not the one that’s meant to. The noticing, the growingly familiar pause, guided me back, gently taking my hand and moving me in the other direction, helping me to rewrite the narrative I wanted to hear within my mind instead:

If I met someone like him on a whim, with little to no effort or thought, solely by chance through whatever magnetism operates such encounters, what other remarkable and unexpected people lie out there for me?

I wasn’t ready to be open and vulnerable with someone new. How beautiful that I trusted myself and tried but didn’t push.

I learned so many lessons in such a short amount of time. I’m grateful that the areas where I need to grow were clearly and kindly illuminated.

The people meant for me will not leave me.