This April marks the most important anniversary of my life.
No, the anniversary is not a wedding anniversary, which for some people can sometimes just be a marker of time, rather than a celebration of love or a work anniversary.
Instead, for me, this 25th anniversary marks something more important than a passage of time to me–it marks the year when unconditional love cracked opened my hardened heart.
A multitude of reasons, since I was a child, shutdown my ability to love unconditionally, which you will be able to read about in my upcoming book, Carpenter’s Daughter, but that is not the point of today’s story.
Instead, the point of today’s story focuses on the time and place of meeting someone who served as the final catalyst that thrust me into the life I was destined to live, rather than the life I was living to get and keep people’s approval, plus to feel safe and protected.
The circumstances; the timing, the place, and the person all came together perfectly. A self-discovery journey had revealed my passion, writing, especially to help, inspire, and motivate people to discover and realize their unique potential, healing them through the process.
A husband and other people in my life who did not approve or like the changes I was making to our lives, revealed a hunger for approval and to be liked for who I really was and was working to reclaim.
Admittedly, I was prone to running away from problems because when I was younger I had not developed the relationship skills I needed for healthy relationships, but that was changing from the personal work I was doing, in part, catalyzed by a year and a half working with a psychologist to deal with trauma resulting from my formative years and my determination to become the best version of myself.
How much work I had yet to do revealed itself when I met him.
An Easter Monday in April was the mark of passage. My first day on a new job, a three-day-a-week contract merchandising job for a souvenir company resulted in my standing in a line up of warehouse workers awaiting their direction from a small Asian man. Dismissed from the early morning meeting, we broke from our line, and that is when I saw him.
Well, it was not so much as seeing a tall, lean man walk in another direction from where I was stationed for my training, but a tingly sense in my gut, invoking the words in my head, “Oh no, I am in trouble.”
I had no idea what these words would really mean over time, how my life was going to be affected, and altered beyond expectations.
Of course, first came the final destruction of the life I had been living and knew in my heart I had to leave. And sadly the destruction of the good reputation I had established as a hard worker that previously exceeded expectations
In other words, I made an absolute fool of myself.
For a variety of reasons, healthy boundaries were not something I had learned or developed over the years. Plus, the traumas I had experienced made me very skittish, pushing me away from what I knew was an incredible thing because I was afraid I thought meeting might be my total undoing, while also compelling me to act compulsively, though not in good ways.
The net result was a lot of confusion and pain that clouded incredible clarity and joy. Suddenly, several years later, all the players in this drama were living their separate distant lives.
As time went by, the confusion and pain ebbed and faced, but not the clarity and joy. As if yesterday, I remembered, rediscovered and reclaimed the unconditional love I experienced during the times we spent together working or hanging out: the unconditional love I have finally learned to give myself and others, further made possible by the ever-present unconditional love I am experiencing these days as I study the Bible and accept God’s unconditional love.
No, the man, whose soul reached into mine and helped bring me back to life, is not with me physically, yet he always deep within me, which is why I am writing today to say “Thank you” for being the perfect person at the perfect time for my return to love.
So, Happy 25th Anniversary to me and to the man who was a crucial catalyst on my healing journey. I hope your life now is all your heart and soul needs it be for you to thrive too.
KAITLIN ANN TREPANIER
Specialist Writer Speaker Social Entrepreneur Founder and President
of Connecting The Dots With The Respect Principle
Smashwords interview @ www.smashwords.com
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January 18, 2020
