Obstacles

Life isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. We don’t always get what we want and we don’t always get what we need. We try our hardest at attempting to get a life that we want no matter the obstacles that are in front of us. Yet, life doesn’t always seem to turn out the exact way that we want or expect it to.

I never expected to have accomplished the things that I have done. I never pictured that I would and could live the life that I have lived. I never knew I had it in me to truly be the person that I am and to be able to allow myself to share it with the world. I never knew how much I could pile on my shoulders before breaking or that I would one day know what it felt like to finally be able to let off most of that weight. I didn’t know that happiness was obtainable and all I had to do was get passed who or what I was.

Growing up, I always wanted to have a family of my own. I wanted to be a biological parent to kids, who I promised to myself, that I would never let down. I wanted to not make the mistakes that my parents made. I wanted to bring them up in environment that would provide them with the foundation to do or be anything they wanted and to teach them what a family is and should be.

Almost everyone in my family came from broken homes. Either their parents had divorced or there were problems that made their worlds tough. I wanted to be the one that changed all of that. Even at 5 years old I knew that I wanted to try to make a difference for my future kids and for my life. The only problem was, I didn’t know too much about myself before I started hashing out these plans.

When I was five I didn’t know about anatomy or the way kids were made. I didn’t know what it took to create a family or that it wouldn’t be easy maintaining a relationship. I didn’t know about gender and I didn’t know that I would one day be so far gone from the world I had imagined, that I would literally be holding my life in my hand, ready to make a choice that would never allow for me to experience anything close to it possible. I was one gun shot away from the finish line and I am continually grateful that I never participated in that race.

Although, I chose to continue living, I chose to live on terms that could make sense to me. I had always felt that what I did was for everyone else, that who I was trying to be would make them happy. That through everything, I was trying to make them proud and that excluded myself from having the chance to reap the benefits.

You see, I was never that person that everyone said I could be.

Growing up, people always told me I had the power to do great things, to make a difference in the world, to change it. They continually allowed me to dream big, to place my head in the clouds, to look towards a horizon that would never set. They never knew that with their words of praise and encouragement would only push me farther and farther from myself than I had ever imagined I could go.

I never quite liked the person they would see. Somehow he would be the one enemy that I would have to interact with everyday. He would be the one person standing between me and what I wanted. He would be the face of my pain and the betrayal that the world laid out before me.

I went many years trying to figure out that person that everyone told me I could be. I searched long and hard for him only to realize that he didn’t exist and every time I tried to become true to myself was I left with an even bigger mess to try to clean up.

The person I was searching for was far closer to a fairy tale character than who I wanted to be. No matter how hard I would try or struggle to make it a reality, the honesty was that he was never there. He wasn’t hiding deep down inside of me no matter how hard I tried to represent him to the world. His masculine demeanor, rugged exterior and strong will was something I could never understand. In trying to find him I completely lost myself.

You see, I was never that person that everyone said I could be. I was never the person they saw or could see. I was someone they never expected and something none imagined. I was me, only somehow I couldn’t accept it and never gave the world a chance to accept.

It took me a long time to come to terms with who I was and who I am. As a child I was tender, with a soft heart and prissy. I found myself more often drawn to a softer way of life than to a rough one, but I didn’t know that there would be a separation between the way I saw life and the way the world saw life for me.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I wasn’t meant to be in the life that the world had placed me in. I wished and to prayed for a miracle that could allow for me to be able to make sense of it all. It didn’t help that no matter how much I tried I could never find a place to fit in either in the world around me or in my own head. It took me very long, torturous years to finally get to a point where I finally had enough and had make the only right choice I could for myself.

Miracles do happen, only we don’t expect 18 years to happen in between.

It was hard coming to that decision. I knew that everything that I ever knew was about to be thrown out the window. That shit was going to hit the fan. That my world was over as I knew it. That I finally had to be selfish if I was going to continue to live life.

I could have made the decision years before, but I didn’t want to let people down. I didn’t want to let my father down, whom continually let me down. I didn’t want to let my mother down, whom continually pushed me to try to accomplish great things as him. I didn’t want to let my brother down, whom had always in some form or another looked up to me as a male role model. I didn’t want to let my sisters down, who I helped raise and shape into people of their own. I didn’t want to let my wife down, whom had invested in a life with me for better or for worse. I didn’t want to let all of the people down around me, who had given the person they saw the advice and wisdom to help shape into a person that I should have been proud of. Mostly I didn’t want to let myself down and give up after I tried so hard to make that life work. I didn’t want to admit I was a complete failure and that everything I had done was for nothing. I didn’t want to admit I was done, but we both knew there was no way out.

Everything I had done was to make this person that I forced myself to be seen as real. The sports, the attitude, the relationships, the life, they were all lies. I fought hard because I had only wanted one thing, a family of my own, that I could do right.

One failed marriage and 6 hears later I found that that life was one that I could never achieve. Even though I had tried my hardest and came as close as I could, it was never in my cards for me to be a biological parent. Each and every moment that I found out that I might be a father was one of the happiest moments of my life. And each moment that I found out that my wife had had a miscarriage was another deep gash into my already broken soul. These were the last attempts to salvage my miserable existence, yet I guess I should have realized that that person was never meant to exist in the first place.

That last day I held my life in my hand, I chose that I was going to die. The only choice that I didn’t quite make was if it was going to be from this world or from that life. Luckily we all know how that turned out. That day I said goodbye to misery, to pretending and welcomed maybe one day attempting to make a real life.

I didn’t expect for the changes to happen so quickly. I didn’t expect to be feeling so radically different that I had no idea why I had allowed myself to ever not feel this way before. Everything changed and it wasn’t a simple change. It was dramatically new and it was everything that I hoped for. Except I wasn’t prepared to give up the only dream that had been keeping me ticking throughout the years, creating a biological family.