More epiphanies:
When I was 16, I had a pair of Nike shoes I left in the locker room after gym one day. I was SO upset — my family wasn’t the kind of family who usually bought more expensive shoes like that but I had begged for these. I was so scared someone was gonna take them. When I woke up the next morning, I just felt this sense of peace and knowing that they would still be there, and they were. Someone had put them in the lost and found basket.
When I was 20, I went back to my hometown after moving states. I was unemployed, didn’t drive and felt generally very ashamed of myself for it. I didn’t want to run into anyone I knew. I didn’t grow up in a huge town, but it also wasn’t so tiny that you routinely ran into people you knew. Even when I lived there, if I ran into people I knew, it was usually just people I recognized from school or whatever, didn’t actually KNOW know. Pointedly, I didn’t want to run into my old friends, but I had the thought “that would be just my luck” and I figured it would happen, and then sure enough, it did. We pulled up in the middle of a weekday to grocery shop and who gets out of the car next to us but my old best friend - not just any friend, but my CLOSEST one, who I wanted to see the least.
When I was 14, after daydreaming for years about having a neighbor boy close to my age that I could fall in love with (lol), I did actually have one move in down the street and we did like each other. He was the first boy I ever really held hands with or anything.
I spent my entire middle and high school experience feeling like boys didn’t like me, only because every time they did, it never worked out. So despite the fact that it DID happen, my self-concept was that it didn’t. That that kind of thing just didn’t really work out for me. And yet, almost every boy I’ve ever had a crush on has liked me back in some capacity, it has just never come to fruition, or they would like me, and then like one of my friends. Which, you know, fickle teenage feelings, but it was being fed by my belief that I wasn’t good enough. In eighth grade, I had four different boys I liked that liked me at various points. Two of them ended up liking one of my friends (the same girl) after me, one of them I think hooked up with my cousin while we were all hanging out one night because they disappeared off together in the dark (I can’t swear that’s true but it’s how I felt at the time which is all that matters in this context) and the one who seemed to like me the most and actually asked me to be his girlfriend at the end of the year was moving cities, which I used as an excuse not to date him despite liking him. All of them, I was SO insecure and them liking me just didn’t make sense, especially when all of my friends were so pretty, and so I knew it wouldn’t last, and it didn’t.
My brain just keeps churning in the background now, recontextualizing my whole life like this, which tells me this a root-level change happening. Every new epiphany I have is reinforcing the idea that I was creating things, even when they were things I didn’t desire.
