How I Met Her

This month marks five years since Janna and I “officially” have been together. The actual date and how long we were dating is honestly debatable, but we ended up celebrating our anniversary in May even though we had been hanging out for a few months prior.

 

I can say that I overly romanticize or make overtly dramatic our origin story, but to me at least on my side beings way back in the year 2006.  That’s 5 years before we even met mind you.  I am a big believer in cause and effect as well as the theory that everything happens for a reason.  I’m not getting into a theological debate here on well why do terrible things happen, is it because I did something good or bad?  I’m not talking about the butterfly effect or some moral crusade here, I just believe that life proceeds down different paths based on the choices we make and the choices of others that affect us either directly or indirectly and well… cause and effect. I believe that a lot if not mostly all things in my life happen for a reason.  I may not know or understand then or the next day or sometimes even years down the road, but that they do for something.  Case in point, my relationship with Janna and a lot of the disappointments and challenges I went through in order to get there. Again, this is long winded and probably overly dramatized but I don’t care. I’ll tell the story how I want to.  She’s got her own path to what led her to meeting me and should she choose to believe it’s as zany as mine that is up to her. But as for me, this is what I think about.

And it’s going to be long.

Let’s turn back to 2006 shall we? Or maybe even a bit longer just to set the stage.  In late 2005 I returned home after spending two years in Mexico.  I was on a weird track system at BYU Idaho, so I wasn’t able to return to school until the summer so I spent the spring semester at UCA.  Then, in June I traveled out to BYUI for the summer and fall semesters.    A lot of things happened during those 7 months and I made new friends, learned a lot of things about myself, and just experienced life in a different way than I had when I went to school previously in 2002.  During that time a friend of mine from Conway was also attending school out in Idaho as well, so from time to time I would drop in to say hello.  What I can only assume was to play match maker, she attempted to set me up with one of her roommates.  Or that roommate thought I was cute, or she just didn’t want me hanging around anymore. I don’t really remember. Anyway, that roommate was Sarah.  At the time I was 21 turning 22 that summer and Sarah had just graduated from high school earlier that year and was 18.  Remember back when you were in your early 20s and started to notice a big difference in your age and how you acted and folks in their late teens? You probably also noticed this as you progressed through your 20s and started into your 30s.  You didn’t want to hang out with 20 year olds because now it appeared that you were a lifetime apart.  There was nothing wrong with Sarah and in fact was pretty mature and fun to hang around. I just wasn’t particularly interested and had my eyes set somewhere else.  None the less, we hung out from time to time and had fun while doing so.  She’ll come back into play later.

                As the summer semester ended and the fall semester began I made attempts to date another girl, ironically now her name was Jenna and sometimes when Janna and I meet new people they mishear and think she said her name was Janna.  Anyway, I can skip over this part of the story mostly.  It didn’t end up very well after a few dates and the only reason I bring it up is because it was on the pile of things I had grown to be upset about while being out in Idaho and decided that school out west was not for me and that I wanted to go back home. And so I did. While trying to decide what step to make, I figured that I would at least attempt to continue to take classes at UCA since it was there and I could, so I did. I attended the spring and fall semesters at UCA and another one in the fall of 2008.  Now, sitting around on my butt was not an option as I had bills to pay, I needed a job.  After a lot of searching I ended up at Target on the flow team, which essentially is the team that re-stocks the shelves at 4am.  This turned out to be one of the most beneficial jobs in my life. I met so many new friends there and while working there is where the genesis of T3 as we know it came to be by working with Nick, Josh, and Derek. And while T3 is also important to the story, I’m going to gloss over that too. In the summer of 2007 I also worked with a girl named Paula, whom I really started to like.  We became good friends and hung out together along with a lot of other people from work and it was a good ole time. Paula and I started dating in September of that year and life was pretty tiring, but good. Things started to fall apart for a number of reasons the next spring, but we held on until early summer when she broke it off with me.  I’ll be honest to say that I was a wreck for far too long after that. I learned a great deal of lessons that summer and fall including the fabled “you can’t be close friends with an ex and get over them”.  That was part of my mistake.  Now we stayed friends and still are, that’s not a bad thing, but the fact that I kept hanging out with her and couldn’t let go is what caused me to get pretty depressed and try to do what I could to be happy.  All through the fall of 2007 and all of 2008 I started spending more and more time on T3, because in the sad times that really kept me going.  After Paula and I broke up, my full time job other than school…and well my full time jobs that I had, was T3 and that was ok with me. T3 helped me to find my smile again and grow my confidence. And while I didn’t want the music party to end, eventually I knew that in order to really move on, I needed to get out of there for a bit.  Through a couple of experiences and dreams that I had, the idea of going back to school in Idaho came popping in there. Sometime that summer, so did Sarah again.  I don’t remember if I wasn’t friends with her on Facebook, or she didn’t have one, or I just took notice again, but we reconnected through Facebook through the summer here and there and into the fall.  Eventually she ended up being the tip of the scale in returning to Idaho.  A lot of things started to click into place with the idea of moving back there and to have a friend waiting on me that I could escape all of this with was icing on the cake. So it was decided, I re-enrolled at BYU Idaho for the winter semester of 2009.  Upon arrival my friendship with Sarah went in a few different directions that to this day sort of baffles me. It went from friendship, to a little more, to I don’t know what I want, to me hurting her feelings, to me walking away from her one evening and avoiding talking to her again.  I felt awful about it, still do but I’ve since apologized and its all good. Just at the time I thought I knew what I wanted, but as far as I can tell I just wasn’t ready to move on yet, or didn’t I’m not sure. Either way, what felt right before I got there suddenly didn’t as soon as I did. So, I found myself now mostly friendless and alone in the freezing tundra of Idaho. I’m not kidding. I had a 7am class that semester and one day my professor sent out and email saying that the forecast for the next day was -20 degrees and that you need to make sure you bundle up really well when you go to class. Go figure.

                When it did feel right however was just around the corner and a few weeks later. Another reason why I felt like such an asshole by saying that I wasn’t ready and suddenly I did start dating someone a few weeks later. That someone was Virginia.  She and I dated, save a month or so, for the next year and a half while I finished school and beyond.  I graduated college finally in the summer of 2010 and had gotten engaged to her a few months prior. While struggling to figure out how to proceed, I ended up moving back home temporarily while I looked for a job. She wasn’t going to graduate until the next spring when we were planning on getting married in 2011. The months got frustrating as I couldn’t find a job nor figure out where to live as well as keep up a long distance relationship. There were other things going on, but again here’s a point of it not being important to the story.  She broke off our engagement and relationship in November of 2010 and I was at the lowest point I think I’ve ever been in my life for obvious reasons.  It’s a real challenge to be moving towards a certain unwritten future with someone only for it to get pulled out from under you and you now have absolutely no clue as to what to do.  I was even at a point of preparing to end T3 on my end. Not sure if anybody knew that, but I was.  Not because I wanted to, but because I knew that I would put more time into T3 than to get motivated to getting a better job somewhere outside of Arkansas and move forward.  Then all that jazz happened and suddenly there was no date in the future I was working towards, no reason to move out of Arkansas, and no need at the moment to do anything really. So instead I went back to work at the UCA bookstore where I had worked off and on part time for a decade and threw myself into T3 instead. I must have written the entire album of Don’t Just Stand There over a few days during breaks at work, but again, that’s another story.

                Now here’s where all of this is important to point out where I was with myself. My self-esteem was at an all-time low and I was more depressed than I had ever been in my entire life. Even to the point of wondering if life was worth it anymore. Anybody that knows me, knows that I kinda like living and have a lot of optimism in life, so this was obviously a bad time. There are a few other bits to the story here of various friends reaching out to me and trying to cheer me up and while successful in bringing me up a bit, it was still incredibly lonely and hard to face life. I love to spend quite time to myself. It’s a shared family trait. I like people, but I also love my me time. During this period, I wanted none of that. I wanted to be around people as much as possible, but at the same time I didn’t want to be around anybody. I’m sure somebody knows what I’m talking about. I might agonize about an invitation to hang out with someone and would most likely decline eventually even though I didn’t want to be alone. I lived in my room and slept a lot. On the rare occasions that I did go out, I just wouldn’t talk much. I’d sit in the corner and just be there. Well the point of all this, is that in January of 2011, I had started to come out of my funk ever so slightly that I was at the point I just mentioned, that I would sometimes start to go out, even though I wouldn’t really interact. I just wanted some human contact and not be so alone.  Well, one of these fateful Saturdays a friend of mine had invited me to a friendly get together in town. He encouraged me to come out, have some food, and just observe. This time too I agonized about going out or not and eventually I did. I sat in the parking lot for a bit however thinking that I really didn’t know this friend super well and most likely wouldn’t know anybody there. Did I really want to feel even more alienated? I remember thinking, well just drop in and say hello or walk by and if I didn’t feel up to it, I’d excuse myself to the bathroom and just step out. This was in a public place after all. It was a get together at Ryan’s in Conway. The restaurant, not my loud friend. I went in and was spotted immediately by my friend who is the sort of guy to be loud in public and cause a scene. Now everyone knew my name and that I had arrived. I guess I couldn’t just slip out after all. Anyway, as fate would have it, while he wasn’t a friend of mine that I’d hang out with very often, he was a good friend of Janna’s and she was there.   And the happiness started to come back from that day forward.

And that’s how it all started. The rest of what happened is another story all together, but on today of days, I like to think about the journey to how we got there and that today while we’ve been “officially” together for 5 years, we’ve been married for nearly 2 and that’s just fantastic. Not at all what I expected that day when I finally decided to leave the house and go hang out with friends.  So some might say, well none of all that nonsense could have happened and you might still have ended up at that get together and met Janna. Yeah maybe. But had things not gone the way they had I wouldn’t have gone back to Idaho, nor come back home to live after getting dumped, nor have been in the mindset that I was at the time.  Again, I believe in cause and effect and that things happen for a reason. I don’t always know the reason, nor do I like it sometimes, but it’s something I believe in. And when I think about my super long ‘How I Met Your Mother’ sort of story with Janna, this is how I think of it. It’s a wonderful event 5 years in the making and is just getting started.