Rejection and Self Prophecy

It is nice to be unforgettable.

At least by one person. Or two including God. This weekend Sam and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary—a big day. Today I’m looking back on my journals and am seeing how awful it can be sometimes to be single and dragged down by the anxiety of unrequited love and lack of commitment. I feel very, very lucky to have found someone who is my best friend, who I love spending time with, and who shares in a healthy, reciprocal, and loving relationship with me. It seems so simple, so ordinary, and yet so phenomenal to have found my match. Our days pass one by one together and they are very good, so peaceful and satisfying. There is a completeness in our life together. I only hope that everyone will be so blessed as we are, but I also know that not everyone is so lucky in this life, and I don’t know why or how I find myself with such a wonderful companion as my Sam.

We’ve had a very good year together full of lots of adventure and change and goodness. That always what I’ve wanted in my life, underlying every other unfounded or impractical desire: goodness. There are so many other temptations, but it seems worth the sacrifice to have peace of mind and real joy.

Here’s another woeful tale following a rejection from two years ago, similar to the one time I went out and bought a new dress to go to the symphony with a boy I liked, and the night before the concert, I called him and he said something like, “About that . . . I have to do laundry.” Laundry, really? Did he think I was so dense?

This was the last entry in the journal of change that I talked about in My History of Writing. What I think is interesting about it is that at the end, I talked about how I felt ready to find my companion after years of fighting it—this was after telling myself at one point that I wouldn’t date anyone from BYU at all, and I had plans to graduate and be a traveling musician/hippie in the Northwest or something. I think life brought about a better option. And at any rate, we’re off to the Northwest anyway. I think the hippie part may continue to develop.

Sometime down the road I’ll have to publish The Story of My Life that I wrote this same summer; it was my prophecy of what I thought would happen in my future, and it’s amazing how many of the details have already come to pass in just the way I imagined them. There is real power in self-prophecies. So you can see at the end of this entry that I hoped to find someone, and at the end of the summer I met Sam. So there you go. It happens.

Monday - July 23, 2007

Things don’t always go as planned, I guess.

I woke up nervous and daydreaming about my evening-to-be with ___ and a movie. I fixed my hair and picked my clothes. I had trouble focusing all day. I was so excited I could hardly eat.

When the time came to call him after FHE I called and . . . and he forgot about me—he didn’t even call me to tell me he couldn’t make it—he didn’t even call.

I’m having a good day because I am so beautiful inside and out now—I feel so pure, so worthwhile, so beautiful, and yet, it’s still . . . forgettable to someone who hasn’t ever seen me that way.

“About that . . .” he said. The fateful line. The joke from last summer on the way home from Mexico. About that . . . .

I feel so ready to love and be loved, and I know that’s a big part of my being so eager . . . Being turned down yesterday really, really shook me, but not in a down-to-the-hole-of-depression-and-deadness sense, but in the really satisfying sense of having my feelings hurt in a real way. I don’t think it’s unnatural or abnormal for a girl to feel hurt that a boy forgot to call her and even let her know he had other plans. It’s like the night ___ left me waiting at the door for half an hour because he was playing a computer game. The game was more important.

I guess if I pretend or propose to believe that people are more important than anything else, I should practice it myself regardless of how I may be overlooked in any given situation . . . .

Anyway, it’s almost noon and I’m still in bed—I’ve been rolling around just thinking about everything. After the movie last night I just lay there thinking and lying on the floor in the faint glow of the “unusable signal” glowing in red on a gray TV screen. I felt so beautiful, like Harold Crick, with a life worth saving and filling and loving, and yet I felt realistically alone again, alone in a room after such high hopes of spending a few hours with one young man. . . . but I don’t plan to drop everything for someone who doesn’t remember that I exist most of the time, or so I see it . . . I’m not angry with him, just disappointed—I usually set my hopes too high. . . .

It looks like I’ll be ending a beautiful compositional journey on a cliffhanger. And at the same time, this journal, this single notebook, holds in it one of the most divine keys I’ve molded for myself—this has been a book of healing, the discovery of my own existence, and the renewal of my own ability to feel alive. And I do feel alive and alert. I feel. I see. I want. I dream. I hope. I believe. I try. I do. I become.

In no way have I yet seen a failure in the past five weeks. This has been the season of overcoming.

. . . So as far as my current thoughts on love, as I lie here on this holiday afternoon—I still believe in it and desire it with all my heart. I look forward to the days when I will lie down to sleep and wake up next to someone who will be familiar with my fingertips, someone whose eyebrows I can trace with my thumbs and whose freckles I will know. I look forward to something pure, something without selfishness or greed. No one will take advantage of the other and no one will be forgotten at heart.

. . . But here it is. I’m still writing my story. Last night as I lay in the light of the “unusable signal,” I found myself swimming again in the whirlwind of possibilities; it was as if someone ran across the room swiping a long, smudgy line over the chalkboard of my plans—my story outline, and it wasn’t that I was left with nothing, I was rather left with an infinite opening of possibilities—there was and is so much to come, things I don’t see. People and moments I have never beheld.

But I still know what I want, and one of those things right now, in this season, is companionship. I know people want it—everyone wants and needs it, but after a year and a half of fearing it, feeling so far from even the thought of having it, I’m holding onto this glorious feeling of being ready, being willing to give of myself, being willing to take risks. And I feel it coming. I can see myself in the next year finding whoever it is I’m looking for. It could really be anyone, and I’m ready to choose one among many. I’m not afraid of making the choice . . . That’s part of the trouble in these parts.

But I’m not from these parts. I’m a voyager from heaven and a veteran of hell.

I would love to marry at the age of 22, next summer sometime, perhaps at the end of the summer. I know I can’t just schedule a date like that, but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing what I want instead of floating down some wandering river past the unfamiliar banks of no man’s land. I’m sailing in my own land now.

“Something new, I’ve needed something new . . . what’s it to you if I’m going to take the tide and sail to somewhere new?” That was the song from last summer, and here I am. I have sailed around the world and through the depths since then. The sea storm is far behind me and I’ve set foot on unfounded territory. It’s time to venture forward, building as I go, planting and discovering. I feel strong at heart again.

Go on, Liz.

__________

I have gone on, and I’m still going. Looking at the time since, it’s been a whirlwind, and things have settled down these days. No graduations, weddings, honemoons, moves, and joblessness all within the span of one week. That was last year.

At this point I’m working from home, babysitting Owen, and feeling content with my life, but wondering what’s next for me, and for us. Will I make friends in Portland? Will I find a job there? Will I find success in a musical career there? Should I get more education? Will I ever get that MFA in creative writing? Will this stupid writer’s block and lack of creativity ever leave me, or did I sacrifice my insanity for a big fat block instead? Maybe I’m not mature enough yet. Someday a story will come—or courage, or absolute craziness, or old age, or whatever does the trick.

In the meantime, here’s to my one true love, Sam, and one wonderful year, and to many, many more to come. Huzzah!