First off let me just say a couple things.
The content in this post may be disturbing to some. Please exercise caution. It is not mandatory that you must read it. If at any point you’re uncomfortable, please stop once you see the first graphic.

On January 17, 2016 country music artist Gary Allen release a song titled ‘Life Ain’t Always Beautiful’ shortly after the death of his wife. The song opens with the title and continues on to depress its loyal listeners with lyrics paralleling his emotional state following his late wife’s suicide. To be completely honest, I fucking loath this song. It reminds me of pretty much everything I am going to take a week to decompress here, and slams it into full petal position emotional breakdown mode.

This week I am challenging myself to ‘flip the script’, and what a better way to tackle the first day than utilizing the song that razes everything in me.

In life coaching, this kind of writing is typically done in a shadow journal. A way to express your emotions at the height, and then mirror or reflect once you’ve balanced back out.

Again, these are stories of my life. I am not doing this to look for sympathy or empathy. Rather, let’s flip the script.

“Life ain’t always beautiful
You think you’re on your way
And it’s just a dead end road at the end of the day.”

Gary Allen/Tommy Lee James/Cyndi Thomson ‘Life Ain’t Always Beautiful’ MCA Nashville 2006

Have you ever been in a situation where you felt completely lost? I don’t mean as in trying to find the closest grocery store after moving to a new city. I am speaking of the questioning of oneself to a point of damaging self confidence.

Clearly I have, or I wouldn’t be writing this in my blog.

As I soak in the hot tub on a Sunday evening, I reflect upon the experiences I have endured in my 40 years above ground. It may seem like 40 years isn’t a very long time for most. For someone that started life abandoned, was internationally traveling at 16, then turned around and joined the Military. I was married by 19, divorced by 23, and stupid enough to marry again at 26. It took 15 years, but that one ended in divorce as well. By 2017, I was single with children. Keep in mind this is the first time I’ve been Single as an adult.

Learning how to ‘relationship & friendship’ during the golden age of romcoms does not translate well to dating in the superhero era.

Online dating is the conductor of the shit train. It’s steaming hardcore through the virtual wasteland straight to your smartphone. Sure there are individual ‘creators’ that provide content solely based on utilizing dating apps for content. Some readers really enjoy that kind of thing. POV: It’s really just low key whoring around for attention. Gross. I personally cannot understand how some of these females don’t have at least one child or at least one uncured STD. I suppose nabbing the entire fish bowl of rubbers from Planned Parenthood could prevent air from getting there. Not to mention with the current forecast on Women’s Reproductive Rights, that may be the only option left.

Everyday, millions of Americans open their preferred app of choice and start swiping. Those who aren’t 17 time night cap champs will spend the rest of the evening judging each picture and poorly written about me sections. Again, personally does not compute.

I don’t know how many readers are old enough to remember Yahoo Chat or Facebook Dating. Holy fuck 😂 wasn’t that some shit, y’all!

Yahoo is where all the cool kids with dial up connections meet and pretend they are adults. Welcome to the birthplace of ‘To Catch A Predator”. The series followed the watchdog group Perverted Justice across the United States conduct sting operations to catch individuals hitting on minors. Online. The show was cancelled, after 4 years because a Assistant District Attorney down in Texas shot himself. He was being served papers after being caught exchanging lewd photos with a Perverted Justice volunteer posing as a 13 year old boy. No one ever said the show was above depicting a perfect example of how to violate every entrapment law under the Geneva Conventions.

Then there was Facebook dating. It was only available on the mobile app prior to January 20, 2022. I theorize that Facebook Dating is one of the leading causes of a rapid increase in stalking cases. It was so popular amongst the oh-so-dehydrated Facebook population, they created a group as soon as the official announcement was made.

Just because I don’t get the concept completely, doesn’t mean I wasn’t ignorant to try it all myself. Admission, I was talking to an adult man from virtual Italy via Yahoo Chat when I was 15. Although, I never was one for the whole “show me your boobs” scene. Not to mention the burning urge to stab out your eyeballs with a rusty spoon about 4 seconds after you opened the unsolicited dick pic. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

The one thing that remains the same across the board though is…Every interested person will shoot the shit with you. Hell they might even offer up a one night stand in the first 5 minutes. Yet, no one is going to openly state “I will ruin your fucking life, and leave you with nothing because I am an overgrown child with serious aggression issues.”

Short of a government level background check and a DNA sample, you don’t know who your dating anymore. Simply telling someone your name bears the potential of extreme doubt.

I’m not above admitting that I have used a couple of these services during my life. After my second divorce, I was raising two kids and I wasn’t interested in going to the club. Online dating was a way to stay in my PJs and still attempt to have a social life outside of my home.

The first man I met thought that Winston Churchill was brown. Strike one, am I stupid? How could I allow myself to be this trashy girl that spent a year in a relationship because the dick was good. In fact, it was so good his ex best friends boss needed to experience it at a I64 Rest Stop. His shit was on the lawn by the time he got home from that “birthday party”.

Then there was the guy with a serious womanizing problem. Thankfully Covid did me a favor and shut down the state. Had that become something more than was… well it wouldn’t have lasted.

How about the one that moved in with me and couldn’t pay his child support let alone $300 in rent. I ended up losing my home, living at his parents house and exactly 5 days later being left of the side of the road. That pussy couldn’t be asked to even show his face, he had told me we were over by text. Then had his parents help load my stuff out into the yard.

That brought me right into the fresh hell that was January 2021- April 2022.

Never in my life have I felt so worthless. So incredibly useless, and filled beyond the brim with self doubt. Sleeping in the floor because you didn’t want to wake up to another kidney bruising. Afraid to speak for just your presence pisses him off. Giving 3 hour blow jobs while he watches porn with headphones on because he can only get off to other women. “You’re pussy is so stretched out. You’ve been out sleeping with those *******, because having children can’t damage you like that.” He was more than willing to do about anything to put me in the hospital to get the answer he wanted, only to pick me up and scream while punching me in the arm the 30 minutes back home. Everything is a lie, and it’s all your fucking fault. He will steal $6000 from you under the false pretenses that it’s in savings for a new car, and spend it fixing a house you’ll never live in.

Can you see it in my face? I can. When your deprived of food because you aren’t worthy of eating what he paid for, you can lose 192lbs too.

It took 1 year, 3 months and 8 days of hateful words and being recorded on camera… 24 beatings, 18 days living in my car, 8 hospital visits… and a gun to my head to break me. By the time I drove away on that April evening, I was so incredibly damaged I drove non stop to the Mississippi. Beating myself around in my head, why the fuck did I allow that.

I arrived to Arizona completely defeated, and fully believing I was unloveable.

I was lost.

Alone, broke and homeless… still healing the two broken ribs and a second degree burn on my calf. At one pissed off point, I became an ashtray. I can only hope he’s still got a sore spot in the place I firmly planted my heel to kick him off me.

Instead of reveling in my pain and hate, I set out to first rest. 2,900 miles in 68 hours is exhausting, especially when it includes the I-40 all the way across Oklahoma, Northern Texas and New Mexico.

Side Note: Fuck Oklahoma… I’ll never do that by choice again.

Once I had rested, I got to work. Legit, I started a new job. From there it was no looking back. Of course I managed to fall too quickly for a fling, who also turned out to be a womanizing piece of shit. Then there was the unhealthy co dependent one.
Shit, I had one who showed up to meet me at a bar. He though he was hot shit because his daughter was Navy. We didn’t even order drinks before he had to go to the bathroom to think up the world biggest excuse. He came back to the table and told me his sister OD’d. I was not at all upset, infact I had a better time watching TV and finishing yet another celebratory Tinder failure.

The final Tinder contender was so weird. I snuck to the gas station under the excuse of buying Vuse pods. What I negated to tell him is that I had called my brother to pick me up. Call me petty, but I was not about to date someone who literal shack is an hour out in the desert somewhere. Thanks for the beers!

I made the choice to leave the dangers and fallacious social consequences of online dating. Instead, I disconnected and promised myself I wouldn’t settle for anything less that what I deserved. I completely stopped dating. Who would have known I would find my ideal match doing the one thing I committed myself to instead of dating.

As a woman who has failed in ever relationship, it was time to flip the script. Instead of jumping into another situationship, I remembered what Charlotte York of Sex and The City said.

“It takes half the total time you went out with someone to get over them.”

Charlotte York – Sex and The City.

Although the statement itself is a gross oversimplification of true heartbreak, it offers a simple mathematical equation for the healing process. So…

1 year, 3 months and 8 days = 464 days
464 days /2= 232 or 7.5 months

15 months and 8 days of damage should have taken 7.5 month to heal. April 12, 2022 all the way to November 22, 2022.

I was skeptical at first. How the hell could a TV show have such advice? But it worked. By the time I met Biggie on November 23, I knew my heart and soul was ready.

Although I flipped the script, I still suffer from the occasional post traumatic relapse. I am by no means completely healed, but I am 100% stronger and never looking back. I won’t answer the call, because the past has absolutely nothing left to say.

The point to all of this is… you can believe that first date is going to be forever. More than likely, it will just lead you to another intersection. Or it could be the end of the road. But so long as you generate your own happiness and heal your mind, you have the power to flip the script.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read today. I appreciate all of you. -🍋💋