June 12, 2014

On the butterfly effect and everything that came after.

[Note: This was written Thursday night. I delayed publishing it while I felt my feels. And then, I chose not to re-write the references to the date and the anniversary. It felt too important to leave it just as it landed on the page.]

Eleven years ago today, June 12, 2014 was also a Thursday.

I woke up to a series of events in the process of unfolding.

Those events aren’t mine to tell, but I do want to acknowledge that those events set into motion a change that not just impacted, but essentially created every single moment of my life that came afterwards.

Eleven years ago this Saturday, a message came through my old WordPress blog account from a friend of a friend, someone whose name had been mentioned a few times in conversation but ultimately, was for all intents and purposes, a stranger.

We were both significantly impacted by the events that had occurred two days prior, and he had navigated the world wide web beginning with a guest blog post I’d written for an organization that at the time, we both championed separately, To Write Love on Her Arms, and ending at my own personal corner of the internet. He reached out - to make sure I was okay, to ask for connection and to provide solidarity.

He had hoped we could both support each other.

I’m so damn glad he did.

A few messages back and forth eventually led to a 2 hour phone call, which sort of opened a door to continual all day texting - something that we still do to this day (well, when his apple watch actually alerts him that he has a new message).

That friend of a friend? He’s now my husband.

When we first “met” virtually, we were both living incredibly different lives… and, after that experience, it became undeniable that there are in fact no coincidences in this life that we are all living.

We were absolutely meant to find one another.

And at some point, we finally each worked up the courage to say what the other was thinking - do we go there?

Do we try to change our lives to make each other fit in the center?

We wondered if it were actually possible to change our stars.

We wondered, both separately and together, if we deserved to change our stars.

Whether our lives truly could be more fulfilling, more full of hope and ambition and more honesty and communication if we instituted change instead of staying in our own lanes.

It would take a significant amount of time, patience, and several iterations of heartache for both of us - and some of the people we were connected to at the time - before our worlds aligned, but when they did…

magic happened.

Today, eleven years later, I’m sitting in my office, in the home we bought in 2021, looking backwards at all of the moments, all of the events, all of the decisions and changes and experiences that have made up life as I know it now, each schism being more impactful at times or in some ways than others, but all ultimately writing the roadmap for what my life would continue to become.

I’ve thought about this a lot lately, in the midst of continual trauma processing work through ketamine therapy and laying the foundations for EMDR therapy. In my head, the narrative has almost all been in the context of the events that occurred in my life, to me, to my body, and to our family over the last six years, or events an moments and environments and structures that happened prior to my turning 18.

It’s like that section in the middle, from 2004 to 2019, hasn’t existed in my mind for quite some time. It’s almost completely been off of my grid. Which is surprising, given how much I’ve allowed to my body to re-experience and how much I’ve enabled my brain to accept and process and navigate and re-frame.

And maybe thats why tonight, this anniversary feels heavy, and important, and worthy of an honest reflection.

Eleven years ago, I was 28 years old, and I’d never been in a truly serious relationship.

I’d never found someone that could go toe to toe with me intellectually.

Someone who would laugh until they cried at some of the exact same things that brought out those feelings out in me.

& Most importantly, someone who I could easily, and without question or doubt, trust with my whole heart.

Two and a half years after that first phone conversation, he asked me if I’d marry him.

A little over three years after we began wracking up novel length text messages from eyes open until eyes shut, we got married (twice).

Five years after meeting in person for the first time, we brought our daughter safely into this world - something that circumstances and tribulations and trauma and chance left very much up to fate itself.

Seven years after we met, I delivered twins too prematurely to survive, and my husband and I became loss parents. During that season I asked him often if he regretted changing our stars, if he’d have done it differently knowing we would end up memorializing babies we didn’t get to bring home or watch grow up.

He promised he wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Eight years after our initial connection, I ended up back in a full-time trauma processing program because motherhood and bereaved motherhood became too much to bear.

Ten years after meeting, I lost another baby. Well, I lost a baby, an organ, and myself… and if we’re being truthful, I nearly lost my life - first physically, then mentally.

This past year marked year eleven of this story we’ve been writing.

Everything I’ve done in the last 12 months has been about surviving.

Not succumbing to the darkness.

Not listening to the things depression whispers in my ears at night.

Not walking out of my life when it felt completely intolerable to spend one more minute locked in this body, alone.

Choosing to do the hardest work of my life.

Choosing to emerge.

Choosing to stay.

Choosing to return to myself, my body, my marriage, my daughter, our family, and my life.

I only got those choices because we got to build this life, together, him and I.

Because the butterfly effect put us in direct orbit of one another after a series of independent but related events occurred.

Because we believed we deserved each other.

Because we believed that together was infinitely better than apart.

So tonight I look out my window at the small twinkles in the sky, and I think not just the babies we’ve lost, not just the moments and the seasons we’ve lost, not just what has come between us, and not just how much work we have committed to doing together to find our way back to good solid ground, but I also think about how we started.

I think about the loneliness and the fear and the shock I felt on June 12, 2014, and I think about how there’s been thousands of versions of those feelings over the last eleven years, but they’ve all been a tiny bit more bearable because he’s been by my side.

I think about how the day that changed everything also opened the door to possibility and wonder, to hope and healing, to the biggest wins and the most unbearable losses.

I think about how I don’t believe in silver linings, but I believe in time helping find a purpose from the pain.

& I think about the lyrics from Amaryllis by Shinedown:

Ask yourself now
Where would you be without
Days like this

I have no idea where I’d be without the cascade of events acting as both a turning point and a pivotal moment in our story - and tonight, I’m grateful I don’t have to know.

Tonight, I can just be.

Tonight, I can just sit with these feelings and remember what it was like before him, and what it has been like with him, and really, that’s all that truly matters on days life this.