Adventures in Synchronicty: What it was Like

When I was 25 I met a beautiful man; I loved him. I had never been in love. I know now it wasn't love. It was my need for male validation manifesting. How fortunate I was to have found a gorgeous, intelligent (drug addicted) man, who loved me for me. I'm not sure when it happened, but by the time our year long romance was over, I was a nothing. I was a husk, the remnant of someone who once lived, someone who knew how to thrive. 

Our breakup almost broke me; it likely would have if not for my family and supportive friends. 

Throughout my teenage years, I knew I was depressed. I tried to voice it, but my parents always wanted to know why, but I didn't know why. It wasn't their fault; they didn't have the tools to help me navigate what was going on. Unchecked and eventually ignored, underneath the surface of my effervescence I was slowly devolving into despair. It is shocking, I know, that it was unearthed nearly 10 years after I first recognized something was off. 

I spent much time after the break up cycling through psychiatrists and therapists. I had to move to Florida for 6 months to come out from underneath the weight of feeling unloved, unworthy. What brought me out of it was Cymbalta, Clonopin, and IPAs. I wasn't ready to handle or even try to dig deep into my emotions to process them. Drowning them in prescription drugs and alcohol was the only way. It was in this emotionless state that my rational brain said, the only way anyone will ever love me is if I'm intelligent. 

During that year of what I now recognize as infatuation I became a yielding mask of the intelligent person I didn't let myself know. I let this man become me. Little by little I lost myself in him. This was not something he did, it was something I did to satisfy my ego, to make myself feel whole. The resentments have long vanished, but they directed the course of my life and my quest to prove that I am intelligent and worthy of love. 

When I returned from Florida, I re-enrolled in school and decided to get the degree I always wanted: History. One of the requirements for the degree program is a class in non-western world history. 9/11 had just happened four years earlier and I knew nothing about the Middle East or Islam, so I took a Modern Middle Eastern history course. It was confusing, but I figured out that the crux of the problem was this disagreement between Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The next semester I enrolled in another Middle Eastern History course, Intro to Ancient Judaism and Arabic. During the course of that semester I had the brilliant idea that I was going to learn as much as I can so I could work for the United Nations and change the world. Who wouldn't love someone that accomplished? (eyes rolling yet?)

The only way to really learn a language, though, is to immerse oneself where the language is spoken. So off I went to Egypt for two months. 

A month in, sitting in a small tea shop, a book on a shelf caught my eye: The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. 

I had seen the face on the cover a few months earlier when I read one of the poems at my aunt's funeral. I didn't know that it had been translated from Arabic. I immediately bought it. It was a sign that I was meant to be in Egypt and that I was on a path of discovery and wholeness. As I related this to the girls I was with, one of them asked, have you read The Alchemist?