I love in the way that Jesus taught me to love. When I love, I love fully. I give freely of myself. Give my effort, my time, my emotion, I am patient, I am measured, I am considerate of the other person’s needs and feelings, I find joy in their strengths and talents, and I give grace where there are weaknesses and flaws.  The problem is when I love, because I am putting all that out, I expect it to come back to me. I expect the other person to love in the same way that I love, and not many people that I have encountered know how to give or put forth this kind of love. I expect someone to meet me in the middle, I expect them to meet me where I’m at. I expect them to evolve, grow, communicate, compromise… I expect the same level of effort in evolution that I am putting forth in order to be with them.

Instead, I am met with self involvement, lack of communication, lies, omitting information they think may ruin their chances of getting what they want, and often abuse and manipulation.  Every once in a while, I decide to try it again. God has been very clear with me that I am to spend my life alone. He has equipped me with great independence, a love of solitude, and a need for space and freedom. God has given me the tools that I need to spend my life alone. But sometimes, once or twice in a decade, I get the idea that God has put a person in my path who is for me. Of course, it’s always very very wrong, but at the time, there’s always plenty of evidence that this person MUST be hand selected for me.  This time, I was sure that this man was for me. He was my height, he had one of the same food allergies I did, he had a very similar family dynamic and upbringing to what I did, he also worked in a healthcare profession where he was helping people, often saving their lives in an emergency.  He also had troubling childhood memories and stories of patients he had helped that stuck with him.  He was also an introvert who recharged his batteries by spending time alone. He also enjoyed nature and the solitude it had to offer.  In his previous job, he had driven the same route between the same small towns in the hill country that I had worked for a contract job. We knew the same route to the same stores in the same small towns.  He had similar clothing habits to me, and was also of the opinion that making the bed is a futile waste of time because in a few hours you’re just going to get back in it and both of us lived alone so who would be there to see that the bed was made anyway?  He liked all the same stand-up comedians, TV sitcoms, some of the same movies that I liked, and our favorite rapper was Eminem for exactly the same reasons. He is a very clever lyricist, and in my opinion, a damn solid rapper.  He could recite all the lines of his favorite sitcom just the way I could. We even liked the same breed of cat. Maine coons are just the best.  We shared an addiction to twist of lime mineral water.  We were both night owls that had trouble calling it and going to bed, but could sleep readily during the day.  We both loved to listen to the rain.  He had just bought his first house and I had bought my first house seven years ago. He was now going through all the things that I had gone through seven years ago and I was able to let him learn from my experiences and pick my brain. He also bought his first lawnmower and happened to pick the exact same kind I did in the Home Depot. We literally had interchangeable batteries that could be used by either mower. He was now learning to mow a lawn the way I had seven years ago.  He was a firefighter. They are all trained as EMTs and most of their calls are medical.  Occasionally, he would fight a fire. Most of the time, like me, he was dealing with patients. However, he would see the patient in the middle of the emergency, and I would see a patient after they had been brought to the hospital and operated on.  It seemed perfect. I was a very independent person with a career that I loved which took up a lot of my time and mental bandwidth. I was also someone running a Homestead by myself who was not at the moment in the market to get rid of it and go play house with someone. He was someone who insisted upon working every overtime shift available, so he was doing about four 24 hour shifts a week. That meant that when he was home, he mostly just wanted to rest and nap and play his Xbox or watch TV. I figured he was on eharmony because as a firefighter it’s hard to find somebody who wants to deal with four 24 hour shifts a week. Most people want to sleep next to their boyfriend or husband at night, and as a firefighter you sleep at the station. Most people want to be taken out, entertained, go dancing, go to a movie; go do stuff. After being on call constantly for 24 hours or sometimes 48 hours, showing up to people’s emergencies and trying to save their lives all the time, he just wanted to recharge. I was also an introvert who did not enjoy going out and being entertained.  Napping, TV, recharge… That all appealed to me. I had my own less high-stress job, but still pretty high-stress. I also needed to recharge on my off days. My only days off were Saturday and Sunday, so two or three times a month those days off lined up for both of us and we could spend a day together.  In my opinion, this was the perfect amount of time spent together. He could have his separate life, I could have my separate life, he could have his family, I could have my couple close friends, he could have his career, I could have my career, he could have his drinking, and I could have my homesteading. We overlapped schedules once a week except for once a month when he would work both Saturday and Sunday.  He would text me “good morning”, text me “good night”, and ask me how my shift was going at lunch break. I would do the same for him. He initiated this routine but I loved it. As someone on the spectrum, my nervous system craved consistency and routine, and in him I found it. In the beginning, he was obsessed with the Spurs and wanted to watch the games but when he was on call, if the bell rang, he had to go climb into the firefighters version of an ambulance and make a call. So he gave me the password to his streaming service and I would take notes on anything that happened during the game. This was difficult to do because I was in the middle of the country, watching it on my cell phone, so to record it in the notes app, I would have to minimize the window and then type what happened in the Notes app…then go back to watching the game. But I did manage to record everything that happened in those basketball games and if he stopped texting for a while I would assume he was on a call.  When he said hello again, I would text him the notes so he could catch up on what he missed while he was on the call. So and so made a basket from midcourt.  So and so pushed the player from the other team in anger. So and so threw the ball to his teammate, but his teammate wasn’t there and he didn’t check before he let the ball go.  We both loved boxing so he gave me his password and username to another streaming service where I could watch boxing matches. He watched it at the station and I’d watch it at home on my cell phone. We would discuss afterwards. The sex was amazing. That’s all 

I’m gonna say about that.  He’s a caffeinated, testosterone-fueled, adrenaline-junkie firefighter; you do the math.  He would let me wear his clothes when I came over. When I left, he would give me one of his sugar-free energy drinks to keep me awake on the drive home, and he would put on one of his spurs sweatshirts so it would start smelling like his body wash and deodorant, and then I got to take it with me when I left so that I’d have something of his until I saw him again.  I loved him. I fell in love with the man that I met.  I’ll never know how much of the human being that I met in the beginning of our relationship was real. I’ll never really be able to decipher how much of what happened was self sabotage or just him taking the nice person mask off and showing his teeth.  It’s hard to tell in people with trauma. People with childhood trauma do really well while single and struggle to function in a relationship because when you are single, you don’t have to deal with any of the stuff that comes up when you are sharing your space or your body with someone. When there is vulnerability or any sort of attachment, fear and avoidance can come into play. Self sabotage rears it’s ugly head, and you can become a completely different person for several reasons. There’s also a thing called coercive control. Sometimes this stems from narcissism, and sometimes it is part of self sabotage. I will never know exactly which reasons my relationship fell apart and the person I loved disappeared, but I pretty much had to mourn the death of him, because the person I was left with was not the same person I fell in love with, and he did not feel the same way about me that the person I fell in love with did. At some point, I went from having a boyfriend who cherished me, tried to meet my every need, cared about me, anticipated my feelings, and wanted to know my thoughts….to someone who just wanted me to go away most of the time. When I was present, there were a lot of rules about my behavior, the amount of talking, the methods of talking, my clothing.  

I had to realize i was being manipulated.  I had to realize that i was playing a game there was no way to win because i was meant to be kept in turmoil and off kilter.  Every time he expressed unhappiness i changed what i was doing to try to meet his identified need, and as soon as i changed what i was doing to remedy the situation, he moved the goal post and wanted something else.  If he wanted more time with me i adjusted my schedule and got paid less, then hurried everything in my work day and woke up super early so that i could also come see him on a weekday after work in rush hour traffic.  He didnt want to leave any overtime on the table but he was okay with me not getting my full 36 hours a week because i had to shorten a regular work day to go see him.  As soon as i did that he’d say my presence was draining and suffocating him and he’d like just two hour visits 3 times a month.  So i’d agree to this new change and then he’d say, well now he wants two hour visits but multiple times a week.  He said he was too drained from work to go out and just wanted to stay in, so we stayed in.  Then he said i had trapped him in the house doing nothing and he wanted to go do something.  I gave suggestions and then specifically asked what he wanted to do.  He wanted to go to the zoo.  Okay, we will go to the zoo.  As soon as i was okay with going to the zoo he said it was going to be too hot and involve too much walking in the heat and he didnt really like to be around that many people at once.  

There was also this thing he’d do where he’d start doing a behavior that may be not enjoyed by most people and then ask me if i was enjoying it or not enjoying it.  He used to jump on top of me on the couch and lay on top of me.  Its kind of a bold thing to do with someone you just started dating.  Its a massive and imposing invasion of space and may be unwelcome.  But me being on the spectrum it was like a deep pressure hug and his body weight made the world feel bearable for a while, like i could breathe.  He asked repeatedly, “am i smooshing you?” And i thought it odd, because like yeah duh, obviously you’re aware of that if you are asking… but the strange thing i didnt clock until later is that when i said i enjoyed it, he stopped doing it.  After a while, anything i enjoyed….he stopped doing.  He seemed to be trying to do things i wouldnt like and trying to avoid ever again doing things i wouldnt like.  In the beginning he specifically said he felt we could handle anything that arose in life together and he wanted me to tell him anytime something was troubling me or on my mind because he wanted to be able to be there for me.  Then he said i needed to limit texts to 4 or 5 sentences each and no phone calls.  He originally started out holding my hand everywhere.  In the end he took away hand holding.  He initially started texting me the heart emoji and kissing face emoji.  In the end he refused to use either of those ever again.  He turned out to be a functional alcoholic who sobered up on his work days and drank 24 beers on his off days.  He couldnt have just one, and he was an absolute ass when drunk.  I expressed i didnt want to be around him when drunk so he started calling me on the phone.  One night he called me to tell me he wants to play father to some ex girlfriend’s teenage daughter who is not his because he doesnt have children and she always wished he was her dad so he’s gonna go have lunch with her and her older sister is pregnant and living in her car and the younger sister expressed she needed a place to stay and he thought that she was hoping he would say oh come stay at my house….it was a very strange conversation for me at 1 am.  I just listened.  I knew better than to talk sense in his direction when he was drunk.  He got upset that i wouldnt express any of my opinions and i told him that i was afraid he’d end up breaking my heart and that i’d talk to him tomorrow when he was sober.   Whenever he got drunk he’d do or say something unfixable.  One day he put his hand over my mouth and before i knew it my head was in the couch cushion.  I could not get his hand off of my mouth, nor could i move his arm that was holding me down.  They are literally paid to work out on the job.  He is way stronger than me.  I struggled to free myself but ultimately…he released me.  I was not able to get free of my own strength.  That scared me.  There was a thing that he wanted to do in the bedroom that someone had done to me during a sexual assault.  I had really negative memories attached to it so that was a no brainer on my part and i told him no.  He had so much more access to my body whenever he wanted but he wanted to do this one bedroom act that was his “favorite” and because i wouldnt let him do it, it ended up being one of the things on his list of “deal breakers” after i broke up with him.  He had been so emotionally abusive, manipulative, and just downright mean the week before.  I had called him on his behavior and told him i could tell he resented me for something and i wanted to know what and moving forwards we needed to have more open communication and share needs rather than hating the other person for not meeting unexpressed needs.  He and i made a list of all his needs and preferences and hurtful as they were, i agreed to try and meet them and set about altering my behavior to do so.  It was awkward between us for a couple days as i felt pretty wounded and he felt i’d called him out on his poor communication and past trauma and trust was broken between us.  But i bucked up and put my big girl panties on, swallowed my pride, and kept working on it.  He started trying to acknowledge it when i had gone out of my way to meet one of his needs and be a bit less downright mean.  We were having a good conversation, connecting intellectually, sharing humorous memes and jokes, and he sent me a clip of the office saying the situation i described made him think of that episode of the office.  I loved it and told him that the way back to my heart if we ever weren’t getting along, was definitely “the office” clips.   Everything was fine when i went to bed.  Then he texted me, “im going to start drinking.”  At 2 in the morning he texted me the most asinine dick-ish text you could send to another human being.  It was thousands of words long and it was just a big list of everything that was wrong with me.  He listed my autism, my adhd, my hypothyroidism, my food allergies, my infertility, the fact that i wear altra tennis shoes, the fact that i wear cotton clothes….. he listed things that he swore up and down he was fine with as possible deal breakers.  He basically said that he could see that i tried very hard for “us”, that i really really tried, but he had just started thinking about whether these things would be deal breakers down the road and he just wasnt sure i was good enough for him or he wanted to put up with all my specific needs anymore, the more he thought about it.  This was coming from a man who swore up and down to me that he was real and i could trust him, who told me i was beautiful just the way i was and didnt need makeup, who told me he didnt want children because if you find out you dont like them or cant handle them, you cant send them back.  This was coming from someone who also had food allergies and weird clothing preferences and demonstrated some serious symptoms of being on the spectrum himself.  This was someone who told me no one in his family finished high school so i’d be fancy amongst them because i had a college degree.  Now he wasnt sure i was good enough for him.  I wasnt sure if he was someone with multiple personalities, had a jekel and hyde dynamic with his drunk and sober selves, or was a narcissist trying to exercise coercive control but i was sure that this was abuse.  This text was glaringly out of line.  Especially because i’d spent the last week with a paper list of all his needs i was supposed to newly adhere to, because they’d changed once again, and he’d long since stopped caring to meet mine.  There were no more foot rubs, no more compliments, no more sweet emojis, and his texts came later and later every morning and got shorter and shorter.  He stopped looking at me with excitement and started looking at me with resentment or indifference, but he still took what he wanted in the bedroom.  Thats what bothered me in the end.  In the beginning he said “i really like you” so much and then in the end it was “im just not sure i like you”.  If you’re not sure you like someone you shouldnt be sleeping with them.  When i broke up with him he said “i really do care about you and loved cuddling you and just holding you and want to let you know that if you’re ever alone or feel like you really need someone to talk to you can talk to me, because i still care about you.”  So, its hard to know what was real and what wasnt.  He is a person who contradicts himself a lot.  He’s a hypocrite.  He’s also admitted that he outright lies when he thinks its what people want to hear.  He told me that i was spending too much time with him 3 times a month and then when he sent that massive list of everything that was wrong with me at 2 am, one of his complaints was that i was always busy.  If 3 visits a month is too much time spent with you, why would you seek to lower the amount of hours i can work, and the amount of hobbies and friends i can have?  I told him flat out i wasnt going to live a smaller life for him because he was uncomfortable with the one i had built, especially since he wanted so few hours of my time….that was a no.  

I wrote him back a very long text of my own, highlighting every contradiction and hypocrisy and listing all his unrealistic expectations and identifying why they were asinine.  If you want a girl who is not going to require a lot of your time, you should expect her to have a job and be hyper independent because if you find a girl that doesnt have a job or an income and has infinite time for you, they’re gonna be live in and want more of your time than 2 hours 3 times a month.  Its strange to me to judge someone for being lactose intolerant as an individual with lactose intolerance.  Its also pretty unfair to list genetic conditions as possible deal breakers when you had a chance to say no to that up front and said you were fine with them and now once drunk, you the alcoholic with lactose intolerance requires a genetic viking with no flaws.  We had had a conversation surrounding kids when he got drunk and called me about playing dad to that random ex’s daughter.  I told him i thought he had the capacity to be a good dad but he’d have to get sober.  He said, “no, you gotta be way drunk to deal with those little people.”  I had told him he was wrong about that…that babies actually explore the world by putting things in their mouth.  Kids explore things by climbing them and launching themselves off of them.  Small children are actually pretty suicidal little beings by default in the beginning of their lives and its kind of a full time job keeping them alive.  I said, “you cant be passed out on the couch with a baby.  You gotta make sure they are fed every few hours, their diapers are regularly changed, that they havent stopped breathing, eaten something poisonous, swallowed a battery, that they arent feverish, experiencing a medical problem, or rolling or falling off of something.  When they’re kids you gotta make sure they dont fall, stick a fork in the electrical socket, microwave metal, set the kitchen towel on fire, and bust their sibling’s head open on the edge of the coffee table.  You cant be 23 beers in for that.  He laughed and told me i was wrong.  That should have been a clue that he was not a good person.  I was just so enamored with the person i had been shown initially.  The comment didnt fit with the personality i thought he had.  So i filed it in the “strange things” folder and dropped it.  I would revisit it later when i realized that on some level he had lied about who he was and he was showing me a different version of himself now and i was not likely to see the other version back again.  There were other warning signs.  He wanted control of everything.  Especially my body.  He wanted to put me where he wanted me and he didnt want me to move.  He wanted to do to me, not with me.  But i was a leo and i didnt stand for that so i guess he didnt get what he wanted.  He wanted what he wanted, when he wanted it, the way he wanted it.  I liked to cook instead of order take out, for many reasons.  Less limited options, less risk of food allergies triggered, less money spent, less wasteful…he ate out every meal.  I didnt begrudge him that but he was very bothered that i chose to buy something at heb and make it when he ordered food to the door from a fast food restaurant each time.  I’d also be so overweight if i ate french fries every meal because thats basically what my options were on the menu with food allergies.  I cooked my own food.  He didnt have to expend any effort.  Sometimes i just got a microwaveable rice bowl or sushi at heb instead of french fries at mcdonalds.  It was pretty instant, but for some reason this was a “possible deal breaker” for him after i broke up with him.  He used to put my hair in my face a lot.  He would do it during intimacy and also when i was lying on the couch.  Id expressed multiple times that i did not like this and i always moved it out of my face immediately and each time he put it back in my face i’d move it again.  It was creepy.  He wanted me to be still, take whatever he wanted to give, and have my hair completely covering my face.  It felt like he was trying on for size what it would be like to have control over a dead person.  I dont know how to explain why i felt that way, i just did.  He would become angry, annoyed and frustrated when i would move my own hair out of my face.  If he were a loving partner he’d respect that i didnt want it there and let me have control over where my hair was but he didnt seem to care anout me when it came down to it and for some reason it was really important to him that i have all of my hair in my face.  When i moved it he would immediately put it back and hold it there for a second before letting go, as if that would make me not wipe it away.  It didnt start out like this.  This is where it ended up.  It was a gradual slide into this…with me searching earnestly for where the person i fell in love with had gone, the whole way down.  

There was another incident i remember where he asked me if i prayed every day that all the patients got sick or hurt and went to the hospital so i didnt have to see them and could go home early.  He had said, “i mean not to be mean but it’s just what i would do were i in your position.”  I didnt like the question.  My immediate thought was “good thing you’re not in my position” and then “why on earth would that be what you would do?  You told me you like to help people…”. I couldnt make sense of why he’d said what he said or what it meant, so i just focused logically on answering the question.  I had said, “first of all, no, because if all the patients leave and you have no one to see, you dont get paid.  Its pretty hard to pay the mortgage on zero hours of pay.”  This was an oversight on his part because he gets paid for his whole shift whether theres a call or not and he thought therapy worked the same way.  He thought you just got paid for a whole day even if there was nothing to do and you could just watch tv until there was something to do.  Nope.  I have to be working every single minute im on that clock.  There is no down time.  If the “to do” leaves, so do you and your on the clock time is finished for the day.  I said, “secondly, morally, thats awful.  I care about the patients and i want them to do well and progress, not get hurt and go to the hospital, so no, i dont pray all the patients get hurt or injured on my shift and go to the hospital so i can go home.”  That should have been a BIG clue.  But, he had trained me that he said things he didnt mean when drunk, and i assumed this was another one of those things.  When someone is so so so wonderful to you for an extended period of time and then they morph into another meaner terrible person…it takes a while to sort out if they’re ever coming back and whether its a vice, childhood trauma, personality disorder, or just the influence of the devil that is rendering this new personality front and center.  

He’ll always be a blurr for me.  I’ll never know what percentage of what version of him was real, but i did realize some truths after i left.  1. He is a person who likes total and complete control.  2.  There is no harmony or homeostasis to be had because when you do what is asked the goal post will always be moved and you’ll have to start over trying to do what he wants now.  3. He is a person who can lie convincingly with a straight face and you’ll never know the difference between lie and truth from looking at him.  4. He is an alcoholic and he’s a mean drunk.  5.  He is someone who likes to do things that make one uncomfortable and ceases doing things when he learns you like them.  6.  He does not believe in God even though he has a figure of Jesus on his keychain.  7.  He’s much stronger than me physically and has made sure i knew that a few times.  I would not win in a physical conflict of any sort.  8.  I dont think he’s a good person.  I dont think he works his career for the right reasons.  Some people want to help people and others are just addicted to clout and adrenaline.  

Unfortunately, he and all the personalities he told me about at the various fire stations he worked overtime at, have colored my view of fire fighters and i kind of look at them all warily now, as womanizing testosterone fueled jerks putting each others clothing in the sink and the freezer and using a whole roll of duct tape on each others bedding and putting their buddies personal items on the roof, and wanting to hurry up a medical call so they can go back and watch the spurs game.  I stay away from fire fighters now.  I see that there is a culture there at the station that i find toxic, childish, and unevolved.  Whenever his buddy would get divorced they’d all say good riddens what a bitch.  They would never wonder if maybe the amount of time the husband could spare and the emotional availability made her feel single within her marriage.  Their motto seemed to be solve everything with food, sex, and fire.  They love fighting fire and they’ll fight over who gets to answer an actual fire call vs a med call.  They dont care that the other crew put it out…just that they didnt get to do it.  They want some action.  I hope that there are fire fighters out there that do it for other reasons than chasing a high and wearing their gear around the community.  He told me his chief said to wear their gear places so they get royal treatment.  I hope there are less arrogant fire fighters out there who just want to help people, like i want to help my patients.  But im not ever gonna peek in that world again.  I will just hope there are and leave that to the universe.  

This is messy, raw and disorganized, and thats just how it has to be if im going to write about it, because its messy and disorganized in my head and we might be here many years before i sort it into an organized state.  I also dont want to think about it any more than i have to.  I went searching for a partner on eharmony because by january this year i was estranged from my dad’s family, my mom’s family, and my adoptive family.  My life was pretty quiet.  Holidays are spent alone in the tiny house with the dogs.  Sometimes i get all 3 of us a good snack to eat and sometimes i just ignore it all together and treat it like any other day.  Theres no one to update about your day.  Theres no one to talk politics or current events with.  No one to send something funny that you’ve just seen.  I couldnt deal with toxic and manipulative people anymore so i gave them an ultimatum.  Join me in recovery and go to therapy to change the insane dynamic between us or live without me.  They chose live without me.  I went on with my healing alone.  I will always continue to try to grow and evolve as i age.  I will always have therapy sessions when needed, and i will never stop assessing what im doing in this world and why.  I get that not that many people around me want to do this, but it will not govern in any way what i am doing myself.  I will make the hard decision if i know its right.  So i found myself utterly alone.  A coworker had been love bombing me for a year and so i decided to explore whether that was just someone using me as a daily dopamine boost or someone who really did like me.  I asked him if he would ever be interested in hanging out outside of work.  Initially he said yes.  We planned a couple possible date activities and he said that sounds like fun.  He was supposed to let me know when he had a free day and he came and waved at me excited on that first day, then pretended id never existed and turned his back or ran away when i walked by or came in the room.  He turned out to have a fearful avoidant attachment style.  I had politely let him off the hook and made a commitment to move on and be civil, and i kept my word.  He then flipped back and forth between holding doors for me and asking me how i was, following me everywhere to ignoring my existence and shipping me to tim-buk-tu.  But i went on eharmony to find someone who wanted a relationship…someone who was not avoidant or afraid of me.  I wanted someone who wanted to be with me.  And i thought i found it.  In the end, i just found one more person with a list of everything that was wrong with me, interested in doing a yoyo push pull thing of now i want you now i dont.  I ended it, gave him a piece of my mind, mailed his clothes and his would be christmas present back to him (it was a spurs potholder….he takes things out of the oven with a wash cloth and he’s a firefighter with burns all over his arms because he does battle with the oven every time he cooks), ended things initially civilly and then when he got nasty (probably drunk again), blocked him.  

I was devastated, but i didnt have time to hide from the world and cry about it.  The activities directors pulled me aside at work and told me i’d been quiet for a week, that they could tell i wasnt my usual self….well, i’d had my heart ripped out of my chest and put through a wood chipper and i was trying to learn to function as single again after getting used to being half of a couple and taking someone else’s thoughts and feelings into account with every decision i made and updating somebody about my day 3 times a day.  Suddenly things had shifted and i had to get back into the saddle of being single again.  I was also waiting for the results of a pretty scary blood test to see if i’d made a temporary mistake or a permanent mistake.  Lucky for me, the answer was temporary mistake.  But my point is, in such a time, you’re not gonna be your usual self.  You just have to keep fulfilling your responsibilities and put one foot in front of the other.  During this time i dealt with a dead chicken, trapping and killing my first raccoon, joining a new church, a snake problem, nearly bleeding out due to an allergic reaction to a medication but not having the money or insurance to go to the er for a blood transfusion so just staying home and washing the blood out of everything and laying on trash bags for less clean up, having to lower the dose of my thyroid med resulting in chronic fatigue like i cant believe, navigating another historic flood, learning to change a tire and then having to change one by myself at dawn on a saturday because driving through all the flood debris i kept getting flats and i had a full day of patients two cities away because i missed two days due to the flood.  Even when im hurting, even when im scared, im not useless and im not incompetent.  I will always handle my shit at the homestead and i will always show up and do my job for the patients and i will never be that person who yells or be’s snippy with coworkers because im going through something.  If me being quiet is the only way they know something is going on then i have succeeded.  My coworker could tell i was really sad one evening when it was just him and i doing paperwork.  He invited me to the church he and his wife attend.  I said no thanks.  I just never found another church i liked as much as the one i had when i lived in castle hills, so i still emailed that pastor with prayer requests, tithed to that church, and watched the sermons via podcast.  But i had no in person fellowship or church family because id moved too far away.  He asked me what i liked about that church.  I told him that i felt people subscribed to the “i stand in church so i am a christian” theory and it wasnt correct any more than the idea that someone standing in a garage would be a car.  How you live your life is what makes you a christian, not where you stand or what you wear or how much money you give or what songs you sing.  I felt like people in this city just went to church to compare their kids and judge each other’s outfits and life choices and everyone just wanted to see whose grass was greenest.  I told him the people at castle hills christian church were all going through something devastating.  They were all in genuine pain and they were seeking God, because they needed him, not there just to get their good person card stamped and come back again next week.  They were really genuine to one another.  Pain makes you raw and being raw makes you capable of empathy towards others.  These people were real and they didnt do anything fake and they showed up hungry for sustenance in the way of scripture because they were drowning and they needed that life raft God offered.  There was no judging or comparison, gossip or nonsense.  My coworker said, “Let me tell you about my pastor whose son took his own life, whose wife divorced him, and who recently lost his property and his goats that he loved.”  To be clear, i dont want any of those things to have happened to him.  But, when i heard that, i knew it wasnt my coworker inviting me back to church.  It was God, orchestrating an invitation to a place i was probably supposed to be.  I did accept the invitation and immediately i knew i was in the place where i was supposed to be.  There were jigsaw puzzles in the sanctuary, you could eat in the sanctuary, and several people told me i could attend church in flip flops if i wanted to…that God did not care what i wore when i came to him and there was no dress code or go between needed to speak with Jesus.  I immediately realized i was supposed to be here and started going to church with my coworker and his wife every weekend.  Ive been feeling so “less than” lately because this person in my life who called themselves my partner and lifted me up so much in the beginning then left on a note of “you’re not good enough for me because you have an autoimmune disorder, because your hair thins sometimes due to the hashimotos, because you are infertile and cant make babies, because you are autistic, because you have adhd, because you cant eat out at most restaurants due to food allergies…”. I left him because you dont treat people like that but his words still played on repeat in my head and i truly, truly felt worthless.  I made myself go to the fellowship event.  I didnt want to go.  I told myself i wasnt like the other people.  What would i even do there, socialize?  I hated to socialize.  I was an introvert.  A deeply flawed damaged unvaluable human being. What could i possibly contribute to a fellowship event at the park other than dragging them down with my recent weird quietness.  But the blood test had been negative and i had made God a promise that if it was negative i’d never again focus on men and instead focus on church.  This was church.  I needed to go.  So i went.  I got lost and couldnt find the right pavilion and even encountered a flooded road but i still made myself keep trying to find it.  Eventually i saw my coworker’s car and stopped and collaborated with him until we found it.  I immediately found all the dogs and said hi to them.  They were fluffy and friendly and balm to a bleeding soul.  Then i sat with some people wondering what i was doing there.  Slowly, slowly, i realized every person at the table was going through something huge.  This one was newly sober, that one just left the womens shelter after an abusive marriage, this one was trying to regain custody of their kids, that one had a rare autoimmune disorder and her daughter did too and they were both still loved and valuable people leading full lives.  This one was battling cancer.  That one just got a service dog and was dealing with a lot.  I realized that i had forgotten….God uses broken people to reach broken people.  Yep, i am not whole.  And neither are these people.  And they’re all so very valuable.  And the fact that they show up for each other, genuinely, when they are struggling to cope with basic life because of what’s on their plate….broken people are more effective at reaching broken people because you see God through them.  Because you believe the King or the Barbie is capable of great grace, great mercy, great wisdom, and when they display it, you become enamored with the human.  When someone utterly broken and destroyed has grace, mercy, and wisdom…you see God, because they themselves cant muster all those things in the middle of complete and total devastation and feelings of despair and worthlessness.  When those people crawl out of their own darkness on hands and knees to help their neighbor up from theirs…thats God showing up and doing what we cant.  I am broken.  I am flawed, but not worthless.  Just as these people are all their own version of broken in some way and they are incredibly valuable and genuine people.  One even wrote a book on how to dive into the bible for those who didnt grow up with it and does prison ministry.  These people can be broken and still have much to offer this world and each other.  Life is still very tangled and muddy for me, especially since the flood.  I struggle with “why” often but the message i am getting is we dont get to or need to know why…we can doubt and question and fully believe in God at the same time.  This pastor says doubt leads to deeper questions and deeper questions lead to deeper conversation about the bible.  He is not afraid of “why” and doesnt feel the question is a betrayal of faith in God.  I dont know the answers to all the “whys” right now but i do know that im supposed to be at this church on sundays, im supposed to see my patients, and im supposed to run my homestead.  Im going to continue doing those things.  Slowly, there are moments that make me smile now.  There are moments where i am able to joke or enthusiastically greet people.  There is still a great deal of despair, but there are moments where i forget whats been going on around me lately and my old self makes an appearance.  I think this heartbreak wasnt a complete loss….it led me back to church.