Who am I doing it for?

Today's blog post is another pretty personal one, but one I need to write. It's a part of my journey that is going to make all the difference as I progress forward. It might not make a lot of sense and I'm trying to keep specifics vague when it involves other people. But it makes sense to me...and perhaps it will make sense to someone else who is traveling on their own path towards living fully.

There is something that I hope to make very clear as I'm writing out my story and trying to make sense of what happened in my past and where it is I'm heading. I want to make sure that anyone reading this knows that "D", the man I had spent a good portion of my life with, is an extremely good person. He hurt me more than I think anyone ever could, but he is still one of the most caring human beings I've ever known and more importantly, an amazing father.

I do not intend to disrespect him in anyway as I go through this process.  He made mistakes. I made mistakes. We all make mistakes. But it does not make us bad people. And it especially does not make us irredeemable.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way...more therapeutic writing time.

During our years of marriage, I found myself adopting a lot of D's habits and opinions about things. Many of these habits and opinions pertained to what he believed in a spiritual sense. I think a lot of my reasoning behind it was that I wanted to bridge some of the gaps between our beliefs so that we weren't so incredibly different. In the end, it didn't matter that I allowed myself to follow the path that he was choosing for himself in order for us to have more harmony in our marriage. None of it helped and we ended up growing apart anyway.

There is an analogy I learned a long time ago that has stuck with me. You can look at temptation like a dimmer switch. The light is dimmed just enough until you realize that it's gotten a little darker and the light stays where it is for a while. Once your eyes adjust to the new lighting, it begins to be turned down a little bit more until you recognize what is happening again. And then, again your eyes adjust. And then the process repeats itself until all of a sudden, you're in total darkness.

I feel like that is what happened overtime during the last few years of my marriage with my own spiritual self.

Again, D is not an evil or wicked person. He is an exceptional person. It's just that he was not living the life that I had always wanted to live and was not making the choices that as a young girl I had always dreamed of my eternal companion making.

But I loved D. I still love D. And at the time I wanted to make things work. So I began to accept the life he wanted to live. And eventually, once I adjusted to the life, the dimmer switch began to be turned down a little at a time. My values and beliefs became less important. Church attendance and high standards began to suffer. Eventually I embraced some of the choices that he had made for himself and found justifications along the way.

I don't blame D for my choices. The way he has chosen to live his life is not bad or wrong for him or for anyone else who makes the same choices. It's just that at one time I had wanted my life to be different than what it had turned out to be, but I lost sight of that and became comfortable and content. No one is to blame but me.

When D told me for the last time that he had no intention of trying to fix our broken marriage, I decided to get myself back on the track I knew I should be on. It was hard, and slow going. I began to wonder what it was I really wanted. Maybe I did want to continue living the life that I had become accustomed to. It would be easier.

But then I made a friend.

This friend was the encouragement I needed. He helped me see the life I could have if I was to keep my choices in line with the gospel. He helped me realize that I had another chance to have the priesthood in my home and take part in church service. The choice to get myself back on the path that I knew I wanted to be on had begun to become easier for me. It was an exciting time full of hope and growth and blessings.

But who was I doing it for? Why was I making the choice to change when it would have been so much easier to continue the life I had been living for so long? I told myself that I was doing it for me, but in the back of my mind I wondered. I had allowed myself to change for D in order to even out our playing field. Was I doing the same thing for this friend?

I now know the answer to that question.

This friendship was, unfortunately, short lived, but it impacted me in a huge way. That life that I saw for myself, the life I grew up hoping to have, really is the life that I want to live.

So, in some ways, it's a good thing that my whirlwind adventure with this friend ended. I know now for sure who I'm making these changes for.
I'm doing it for me.
I'm doing it so that my home can have the Spirit dwelling there; so that my children will be able to grow up with knowledge of the Gospel and build a relationship with their Savior. And because I've made the changes that bring me closer to the Spirit, I've been blessed with the ability to take the steps I've needed to continue on this journey of self-love and acceptance that I'm currently on.

Along with this new-found strength that my friend has helped me discover, the experience gave me another amazing blessing: the ability to forgive.

I am still coming to terms with the end of my marriage. I may never fully understand the reasons why D made the decisions he made. But if he hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to find myself again. I see much more clearly that my relationship with D was probably not the best thing for either of us. We both find happiness in different places. I didn't realize that before now. I have a long road to full recovery, but I'm headed in the right direction.

So, who am I doing this for? Why am I writing all of this here and now. Maybe I'm writing it to D as a way to say that I understand; that it's ok and I forgive him. Maybe its a message to my friend to say thank you for the time I was given and all it's taught me.

Mainly though, it's for me. I want to remember with clarity each step in this process. And I want to be able to be honest with myself as to where I've come from and where I want to go.

For the first time in a long time, I look forward to attending church on Sunday. I look forward to serving in my ward and taking part in ordinances that I had lost touch with.

I think that perhaps I will be even better off than before. It's a nice thought....I have a lot to look forward to.