Hi!

Happy Sunday. ❤

I’m decorating for Halloween and reflecting on personal growth.

So you could say that this is about an awkward first date, but it’s really about all of the things that I realized afterwards. The things I that think I only agree to such dates as a mere means of attaining. This is about those things.

LIFE EXPERIENCE

Someone once called me a personal growth junkie. I thought that that was hilarious. I also knew that it was true. A lot of people have the issue of running from things, of not taking the time to process them. I have the issue of running into things, and taking my sweet time to process them.

Which I think is why I am always doing spontaneous things that I, by no means, have to do. It’s partly because I’m a writer and life experience is material, but also because I’m a human and life experience is currency. I make an effort everyday to go out into the world and do something, see something, feel something.

Hence why I went on yet another date the other night, despite having sworn the whole thing off after the last one. Not to even mention that I’m about to move across the entire country. Maybe I subconsciously knew it would turn into a story.

The date itself is not what’s interesting to me. It fell into that painful category of mediocre where it was good, but not great. What I really want to tell you about is how I felt after. He was perfectly lovely, but I left feeling utterly indifferent on whether or not I ever saw him again.

This, I have learned, is magical insight not to be ignored. Because, believe me, I’ve tried.

MY BEST DATING ADVICE

As a teenager, I went on a lot of bad dates. High school boys were, much to my generation’s disappointment, nothing like Zac Efron in High School Musical. By the middle of college, I was about ready to swear off the entire male species. But it was around that time that I went on a date that was not, to my surprise, terrible. It was nice. So nice, that it seemed like a miracle.

It never occurred to me that it should have been more than nice, only that it wasn’t atrocious. I dated him for months, hooked on that niceness, but wondering why I wasn’t in love. It finally occurred to me that I was never going to be and broke it off. It was then that I realized that someone being kind and smart and decent are not miracles. Not having to make up an excuse to leave a date as soon as possible is not a good enough reason to go on another one.

So now I have this new rule, one that, I’m not going to lie, kind of sucks, but in a liberating way. After going on a date or two with someone, if the thought of never seeing them again does not bother me, I listen to my gut and stop seeing them. That way, I don’t wake up in the middle of the desert with a guy I don’t love five months later, wondering how the hell I got there and how the hell I am going to get out. True story.

For no one ever told me that indifference, not hatred, is the true antithesis of love.

IN REAL LIFE

Learning this, admittedly, did not come naturally. Hope is a lethal thing that can beg you to keep giving someone chances, perhaps none the more than when it comes to the possibility of love. But I have to say, after this past date, I was surprised at how seamlessly I followed the aforementioned rule.

It was fun to grab drinks with a guy at a bar and get to know each other. It was fun to get dressed up and go out and flirt like a normal twenty-something instead of watching The Great British Bake Off or researching for term papers not due for another two months (though two completely valid choices). It felt very twenty-one and very needed.

But it also just felt like enough. I didn’t, to my own surprise, need it to be anything more. I was able to enjoy the night, and think fondly of it, while also knowing that I did not, by any means, want another date. My teenage self never saw these as things that could coexist.

Instead of worrying if he was going to call or if I should call or how exactly it went, I felt surprisingly calm and detached about the whole thing. Not in an apathetic way, just in a healthy, practical way. Which doesn’t often happen to people like me who feel everything in extremes. As a teenager, I probably would have spiraled down a tunnel of feeling that I would be alone forever. I would have seen a date that had no future as a “failure”. But I don’t see those dates like that anymore. They’re just experiences to me now.

GROWING

Which is to say, I cannot explain to you how liberating the whole thing was. Or how grown up from myself I feel. I don’t know when I got the strength to stop trying to force mediocre things to work, to be able to grab drinks with a guy one night and then simply move on with my life the next, without some emotional tug-of-war, but I did. That’s quite strange and new to me. Womanhood is becoming an increasingly separate experience from girlhood. I keep catching myself thinking and acting in different ways, seeing certain experiences from vantage points I have never had before. And that can be quite jarring, for all of the sudden, I am inhabiting spaces that I always reserved for myself in my adolescent mind, spaces that I might one day inhabit when so much older.

Now suddenly, I am so much older. Suddenly, I am sitting in a bar watching a man buy me a drink and I don’t quite know how to process that that experience was, in fact, my own. That this life, and the life I am about to step into, is, in fact, my own. When you enter a global pandemic as a high schooler and come out of it as an adult, your mind can have a trippy time believing in the world that is suddenly yours. It’s a bit like waking up and being told that you’re not a kid anymore, that the world is not closed to you anymore. You can do whatever you want. Even if that means many more awkward first dates and wrong trains and scary goodbyes.

I am, as it turns out, addicted to these things anyway. A junkie, really.

Have a sweet Sunday.

Love, m.

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