I have always believed that everything happens for a reason — it is something that I have carried with me through the good and the bad over the years.
This mantra of sorts came out of my faith growing up and it was something my mom always made sure to remind me of. It helped me learn to be okay with things that I didn’t understand at the time and it taught me how to be patient with myself and the world around me. In relation to my faith, I believed that God was in control of everything and he always had reasoning behind every detail of life. The ideas that manifested from my mom’s instillment of this belief was that you may not know the reasoning right away — you may not know the reasoning in a year, even — but that did not mean that there wasn’t a reason for it happening.
In the later years of my grade school experience, I was involved in an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship that lasted two and a half years. I was no longer my own person, I simply became an extension of her existence; I didn’t have a say in what I could do, who I could be around or even what I wanted. Paralleling this detriment, I was struggling with my sexual identity and had been for years prior to the relationship — the majority of my life, actually. Up to this point, I was in complete denial and did everything I could to try and avoid addressing this piece of me. After getting out of such a toxic relationship, I was able to come to term with my sexuality shortly after and gained self-confidence within it. This consolidation became a transformation that changed my outlook on a lot of things and allowed me to invest a lot of compassion in myself and others.
It was not until I reflected on this transformation that I realized why I was put through those dehumanizing two and a half years. I had been so far in denial about my sexuality before my relationship that I had convinced myself I could carry out a normal life without ever addressing it. But because of the vice that kept me from any piece of myself, once I was released from it the only thing I craved was being completely and entirely authentic to who I was. I frequently look back at who I was before that relationship and I wonder if I would have ever come out; if I would ever be able to be myself unapologetically.
I still believe that everything happens for a reason and there are a lot of reasonings that I have not discovered yet, but I am still searching patiently. There is always at least a lesson to be learned from any experience you have — and that might be the only reason something happened. It is a reason nonetheless and I feel empowered to know that I’m waiting for my reasons.