My Lights At The End Of The Tunnel

                               

I almost never get emotional but when something intense throws me off completely off balance, it hits me… hard. I have been going through a lot the past few days. Its been a little of an emotional roller-coaster with things coming at me from every conceivable angle. I would like to reveal a lot of what is going on at the moment with me but I will keep it under wraps for the time being. A lot of it is just personal emotional issues I have been suppressing caused by all that’s happening around me. Things I am not opening up to feeling. Things I really don’t want to feel. My head has been all over the place. Confused. Not really knowing what to do or how to feel. Today was breaking point, and I really couldn’t hold it all in. I just lost it when I got home and it wasn’t pretty. So I turned to the only people I thought would help me. My best friends.

I have grown around people of different mentalities and physical mannerisms. I mostly observed the people around me, how they acted and responded to many different scenarios. I wasn’t introverted. But at the same time, I took it upon myself, during my self-discovery phase, to monitor just how people really are. As I became more outgoing and comfortable in my own skin, I had interactions with all kinds of people from all walks of life. I came to realize just how different humanity is. Just how different the people I was calling *friends* were. Paying attention to who people really were or are now for that matter.

And in that way, I have changed my circle of friends almost four or five times within the last four years. With each new group of friends handing me a little piece of knowledge about life through themselves and their experiences, I learned exactly what I didn’t need in my life. Negativity. Pride. Egotism. Showing up when its convenient for them and disappearing when the friendship agreement didn’t serve their best interests. But in that way, through sieving through all the pathetic dirt and sorting through the rough grain, I found the diamonds I now call my friends. My best friends. With the same drive and vision for life. The same fiery passion for things they are going after. The same mindset about life and what it has to offer. A mature group of individuals I look up to especially since they are in fact older and more sharpened to what life has to offer than I am. So, ideally, it was them I turned to when I was going through this weird phase.

You never really appreciate friendship until you see it come alive in the people you talk to. I never had this before, not to this extent. It was a void that really hadn’t been filled by anyone. But with time, the right people did show themselves through the doorway and into my life.

So, having my best friends come out and tell me that sometimes it doesn’t get easier when it comes to what we have going on with us deep in there… That sometimes it just gets harder… To be alive to certain realities in life and just taking everything that comes as a learning curve… Having them tell me that being a student of life is the best way to create solutions for what it throws at you- to learning how to really live… Having them admit to me that emotional vulnerability doesn’t make me weak- that experiencing all these emotions and learning how to control them actually makes me stronger… And finally making me smile and laugh and forget a little of the burden I am feeling right now in my head… Easing the complicated and making it look like nothing… I couldn’t have asked for better partners in crime. It just goes to show what real genuine friendship is really meant to be like.

It just goes to show how special a certain group of friends can be, and the impact they can impose in your life. Now, I don’t care what kinda friends you have, but I think the most important thing is knowing if, no matter what, they have got your back. Through thick and thin, over a cliff and staring down the barrel of a gun, they are right there with you. What’s simply beautiful is that you would do the same for them.

                                       

So, in light of all this love I am feeling for my best friends, my weekly obsession is Not A Bad Thing by Justin Timberlake. It’s an amazing song, and it made me think about what real friendship/relationships really mean. Check this specific version out, it is my favorite.

Love You Special Peeps. XOXO.

A Journey Through The Real First: Chapter Two

When my exams were finally dead and gone… Yes, I just used a Justin Timberlake song reference… Don’t roll your eyes at me, he is awesome. And I love him. 🙂 . Anyway, when I finished my exams, I think John was probably the first person I called because I was so excited that things would go back to the way they were. However, I started to note a few things that just didn’t sit well with me as we went long. One worded texts. Shortly phrased sentences. He didn’t sound the same over the phone. It was like talking to a different person, someone totally new. This went on for a long while before I asked for advice about this situation from my closest gay friends. Now, we can argue that yeah, some friends just never like your boyfriend and would dig deep to find the craziest lies or rumors to get you to break it off, but in this situation, I knew it wasn’t the case. Deep down I knew for a fact that they were telling me the truth, even if it hurt them to do so.

At first, I refused vehemently to believe what they told me. It’s not that i didn’t want to, I was just incapable of believing it, of processing such information. I had sacrificed a year for this man. I had given all of me to him… Don’t tell me y’all didn’t just smile at that John Legend reference. 😉 But seriously, everything I had believed was genuine and good and pure had come crashing down. And all I heard in the back of my mind was that sombre voice of conscience saying, *You should’ve listened… They told you so*. Apparently, when the cat is away, the mice do play… and they play hard. John had been cheating on me. And not just with one person, but with a few different guys he had met at hangouts and parties and random meetups whenever they happened. I think the most shocking thing to me was that when I texted him- he wasn’t picking my calls to his cellphone- to end it, airing a bit of the pain of what had been revealed to me, waiting on what he had to say, his reply was “So are we over?” No defense. No explanation. No nothing. Not even a word to help me understand what I was hearing from everyone. Just a bloody Four-word question asking if what i had worked on for close to a year was done. It was almost as if he had been waiting for me to end it, and I couldn’t wrap my head around the reason why. 

I couldn’t understand why he didn’t care anymore, why he would go out and find satisfaction elsewhere when I had offered him all I had to give. Not when I had been genuine, honest, real. Not when I had been ME. It didn’t make any sense. But it was over. And I couldn’t do anything about it. The show had finally gone through its last curtain call.

For the first time in my life I was so heartbroken that I just put a huge brick wall and force field around all my emotions. I promised myself I would never open up to anyone moving forward from this. I was so afraid of being hurt, of feeling like such a pathetic loser again. I gave up on all thoughts of relationships. I mean, being alone wasn’t too bad. Besides, Katherine Heigl and Jennifer Aniston had my back with the corny Rom-Coms so I would right at home.  

It’s been two years now.  A lot has changed. I’ve changed. I am grateful for that experience to this day. Life isn’t all fluff and sweetness and filled with unicorns and rainbows. This isn’t an episode out of My Little Pony. It’s real life. And sometimes, real life needs to be a bitch for you to appreciate some people later in life. So, if you have been heartbroken before, this may sound a little mean but you need to suck it up, get your shit together and get back out there. Sieve through the dumb ass rock in the ground to find that gold you can call a real man.

 

WEEKLY OBSESSIONS

                               

                                            

My weekly obsession- which I happen to think will ride over to the next month, is the new Karmin album, Pulses. One word. Amazing. It’s different from what they have done before, it’s got more edge, fire, power, vocal ability and is just damn brilliant if I do say so myself. To think that I used to listen to them, three or so years ago when they were just starting out, pre-Look At Me Now/Superbass cover era and now to see how amped up their flare is… It’s pretty awesome. Listen to nothing else this week. Trust me, you will fall in love. #KARMINITE.

 

A Journey Through The Real First: Chapter One

                               

I had my first real love at seventeen. I also had my first real heartbreak at seventeen. My first experience dating a guy ended about six months before I met my second boyfriend-My first real love. With my first boyfriend, it was a learning process. I was still figuring out who I was even after I ended our relationship. Or rather, “What” I was, because at the time I didn’t fully believe I was gay. I thought I was probably going through a phase. I am sure almost every gay person goes through those moments, the “This-is-all-just-a-phase” period in the process of self-discovery. It took a long while to get comfortable with who I was then. Who I am now.

Six months down the line, I met *John. He was a perfect gentleman, sweet, funny, rebellious, kinda bad ass in a good way- pretty cool peoples to hang with. I had heard a few things about him before we had met from a few of my gay friends. One of my closest gay friends, one I consider a brother to me, actually went above and beyond to warn me about John. I didn’t listen though. In my head, I guess I thought that he was different. I was completely ignorant; I wanted to see the good in him. Or find it, whatever depths it had been lowered to.  

In the beginning we didn’t really have much in common, John and I,  but we still found common ground and went with the flow. I had hangouts at my house where I would invite my close straight friends and have him over as well. They got along pretty well, which I felt good about. He even hinted at one of my friends being gay which later turned out to technically be true. My gaydar was still in development mode. In a way, I guess I figured it wouldn’t be too weird when my straight friends finally found out I was gay and realized I was dating someone they had known for a while. I have no idea how I reasoned out that it would be less weird but meh, whatever, I was a kid. *Smirks* Look at me acting all grown up.

As our relationship manifested, we got really close over a short period of time. He was the first guy I opened up to on a deeply emotional level. I literally bared my heart out for him. I told him all my hopes and dreams for my life. I told him what I saw my future being  like . I let him see what I was afraid of and what made me happy. He knew what made me tick the way I did. It got to the point where I felt so free, allowing him to see my raw emotion. I revealed every little thing to him I had once said I would never tell a soul. I loved this guy. I knew I loved him. He knew I loved him. I wasn’t too sure that he loved me back. But I admitted I loved him anyway because I wanted so badly to be loved back. And I actually drew myself into this little world where I actually believed he did love me. Genuinely.

Eight months into it, my exam period came up. I asked him if he could give me some space to study for my finals. We had spent so much time together previously. We both knew this would be difficult, being away from each other. But at the same time he understood we had to sacrifice the time we spent together at least for the sake of my studies. My education was at the top of my priority list so we never saw each other for the next three months leading up to my exam. He even moved out to the country side just to have a breather and kinda escape his day to day life. We did get to talk often though and catch up on what was going on with ourselves.