James asked me a few nights ago that knowing what I know now, if I had the chance to make a different decision regarding my last relationship, would I? Would I enter once again what was undoubtedly the hardest segment of my life to date, harder than all the difficulties I had ever faced in the rest of my life combined? I really didn’t know.

I know that there are a lot of things that weren’t all good that I definitely would go through again, because what those things did for me were well worth the few struggles. College, for example, wasn’t easy, but it is something I would never take back. But the last relationship? I don’t know that the ends justified the means. Even when I was going through the hell and people told me it won’t make sense until later why it was necessary for me to experience such pain and violations, I wanted to believe them and look forward to the day it’d all be clear. But at the time all I could see was, “Like I didn’t know that being lied to and cheated on and treated like crap wouldn’t feel good? I don’t need to experience all this to get this lesson!” And now, it’s been a couple of years. I guess if forced to examine how it changed me positively, it gave me a depth that I didn’t have before. It’s like growing pains, you’re being stretched beyond what you can handle and it hurts, but afterwards, you’re more, uh, stretchy.

I was talking to Mr. W about this last nite. I didn’t know when I was in the relationship that salvaging it would be an impossible goal to attain. The relationship was set up from day 1 to fail (the day after we got together, he went to a girl he’d been seeing behind my back when we were just “dating” and started what would become the “affair”). But the beauty of a situation in which the goal is impossible, is that it forces you to reach beyond where you’d ever reached in the past, it forces you to try everything within your power, make up new powers, combine old knowledge, test new concepts, attempt new combinations in the struggle to reach what you will never reach. If the goal were a hop, skip and a jump away, I would’ve reached it and not gone any farther. But an impossible goal that you don’t know is impossible forces you to keep reaching.

In addition to the depth I earned, I also gained perspective, and what Mr. W calls my “level-headed, loving communication style”. I think the depth makes me more able to relate to people and to be more relateable. I can counsel people with more heart in addition to the logic now. People have always gravitated to me for counseling, and I’ve always done what I could to offer them a new perspective. I was talking to a bailiff about this at work the other day and I think his orthodox Christian lifestyle made him a bit scared by what he thought I was saying. He asked if it was witchcraft or voodoo. I told him it’s not the occult; it’s just being able to get in someone’s head. He looked alarmed. I reassured him that I don’t do it to manipulate people; I look and see what’s in there, but I don’t move anything. All I do is add some flowers on the counters, and then I walk out. And I explained my opinion that tampering with someone’s free will is an absolute violation to me. He insisted that I could manipulate people and I gave my usual joking line of, “But I use my powers for good, not evil.” I could, but I don’t. Everyone is here on their own journey, and I can illuminate things for them, but no one is anyone else’s puppets. He still thinks it’s trippy that I can just sit there at a bar and strangers will tell me secrets and life struggles that they’ve not told their closest friends about. He thought it was trippy, at least, until he realized he’d just told me stuff about his relationship with his ex-wife and things he’d done in the past that he normally does not ever bring up, and that I’d talked him through that until he had a look of relief on his face. And then he walked out wide-eyed in a daze. “But don’t you feel better? And you don’t feel manipulated, right?” I called after him. “I fold,” he said, “All in.”

I told Mr. W in our conversation about this that if it came to just me, the last relationship wasn’t worth it. It challenged me in a trial by fire, and I’d almost died three times. So it gave me a depth, so what? But if that’s what I had to go through to help people around me, to use my experience to help lift their lives, sort of in a share-the-wealth type of way, then it would have been worthwhile. And that happened almost immediately after the breakup. People came to me really early to ask for help and advice on how to survive the aftermath, and I did what I could for everyone that was open to me. In a self-serving way, what I went though made me recognize Mr. W for who he is, whereas before, I wouldn’t have and actually did not give him a chance, and before, I was wrong.

I’d told James in another conversation some time ago that what I want to do with my life is to leave a mark of some sort, to know that my life made a difference somewhere. He told me that he just wanted to live well and be happy. I guess that’s a constitutional right in this country, the pursuit of the American Dream, of happiness. He asked, if I know that I’ve made a difference, would I gain “happiness” from that knowledge alone even without riches or the “perfect” material life? I think I would be satisfied.