Patience is something that comes and goes within my arsenal of virtues. Around this time last year, I dealt with an incredibly frustrating situation where I was asked to simply wait with no concrete end in sight.
I am the type of person who needs to just do things. Once my mind has been made up about any event or idea, I am more than ready to go ahead and move forward with little to no reservation. The main drawback I have dealt with is that other people do not possess this internal "not now but right now." My friends are sometimes forced to bear the responsibility of holding me back from making mistakes by rushing in to everything I want to do, or similarly, to help me put myself back together after a disastrous ending to something I have rushed in to.
I cannot convince myself that my quick reactions are entirely a bad feature of mine. In many instances, I have actually made good decisions in haste that resulted in great opportunities or the chance to build strong relationships with different types of people. Yet while there is a decent amount of happy endings to my habit of diving headlong in to things, it has also set me up for a higher susceptibility to heartache.
When my heart and mind come to an agreement on any topic, I am absolutely committed to a decision and it takes either serious argument or serious pain to get my heart and mind to mutually change. Being so quick to react leads to an abundance of stress on myself especially when other people are involved. Since others tend to need more time to make up their minds, I end up stuck in an odd place waiting on another to meet me there.
All stress aside, nobody can refute the statement that there are people or situations that are absolutely worth the wait. I originally wrote this blog entry with a specific person in mind, someone who had come to mean a whole lot to me within the weeks leading up to this post. He seemed to balance out the parts that I lacked, such as my disregard for thinking decisions through and moving at a slower pace.
At first, being forced to slow down when I had already decided I liked him had me on edge all of the time. I was anxious, not wanting to do or say anything that could jeopardize what we are in the process of becoming. As we have spent more and more time together, I have come to find out that my worrying was completely unnecessary. I now find his contemplative and cautious nature incredibly endearing.
I have been loving this man for a year and a half now, and that thought baffles me - has it really been that long? In this time, we have grown exponentially as a couple and as individuals. We have learned how to better communicate with each other, and we have have found all the way to piss each other off whenever we want to :) we argue about stupid things and about important things, but we have truly learned to forgive and move on in these frustrating situations.
Without Eric Ortiz, I am not sure what exactly I would be doing this moment, but I know that my life would be much different than it is today. I will never be able to say enough "thank you's" to compensate for growth he has brought out in me.
