Blessed

     So, it's 0300 and I just got home from a wonderful night, hyped up on 5 cups of IHOP coffee and good conversation. I haven't seen this friend in over a year, when our lives seemed to take us on different paths. We reconnected tonight, though, for a good five hours. It was wonderful to catch up on her life and catch her up on mine. Several interesting things came up. The first of those is how strongly she thought that I have Asperger's/autism. Her sister is autistic and she's worked with autistic kids and adults for years. She was shocked to find out that my diagnosis in that has been iffy and debated (not due to symptoms, but because I have no knowledge of how I behaved when I was little since my mom is convinced I'm perfectly healthy and ASD relies on childhood symptoms for diagnosis); since I really do think I'm autistic, it's always validating when others who have experience in it agree with me.

     The other really interesting point she brought up was related to how I always end up missing people who hurt me. I don't mean like missing exes or friends who I haven't seen, but rather people who have intensely hurt me, like an old best friend who groomed me to have sex with me and my rapist. Without fail, I not only grieve the harm they did to me, but I grieve losing them. I mourn losing them so much that I consider reconnecting with them. That ex best friend and I had a tumultuous relationship; I had intense feelings for him, which he took advantage of. He groomed me in order to have sex with me, while he did it to other people simultaneously. I lost that friendship the summer of 2011; while I know, logically, that it's better to cut ties with him, I still often think of him and wish I could reconnect. I still think of my rapist often and am saddened by the loss of our friendship; a huge part of me wishes I could just pretend it was all okay, take it back, and get my friend back. When I explained this to my friend, she pointed out that it's because that's the kind of cycle I had with my father. I would mourn him leaving, then have to stuff that aside when he'd come back to my life; lather, rinse, repeat and repeat and repeat. I still do that to this day, which has conditioned me into expecting that, even once someone breaks my heart, I'll eventually let them back into my life. While that's a decision that is worth it for my father, it's clearly one that wouldn't benefit me with that ex best friend or my rapist. I'd honestly never even considered the connection between all of that before she pointed it out tonight, but now that's definitely a dynamic, a feeling, a habit, that I really want to learn how to change. It's definitely a fascinating realization.

     I'm so blessed by the people God brings into my life, and I never fail to be awed by His timing. I'm looking to go to church in the morning for the first time since summer. I'm really excited for this, and for the ways God is really starting to move in my life.