Inspiration Can Come From Strange Places

            I have a friend who also has a blog and she is participating in an A to Z blogging challenge which involves writing a blog a day with subjects that go through the letters of the alphabet. I didn’t find out about the challange until she was a few days into it and although I could have participated at that point, it felt lame to jump in at H so I haven’t joined in. However it has really inspired me. I’ve come up with of essay topics I normally wouldn’t have thought of while going through the alphabet & thinking of subjects I’d write about (just wait for the Ice cream essay coming soon!). The following story is from my past & I’ve always thought it was a good one but couldn’t come up with a way to share it or make it funny (which it is in hindsight). I think I would have put it under F for Faux Friend”.

            When I separated from my ex-husband, I moved in with a friend who had gone through a divorce about nine months prior. She was dating a guy at the time and after a few months he became an unofficial roommate. He was a pretty nice guy. Shortly after that I began seeing a guy who was a bad dude, however I just did not see it at the time. I moved in with him, against my better judgment, after only a few months of dating because my roommate was selling her house. I needed someplace to go and didn’t have a lot of other options. Things actually went okay for a while but it ended quite poorly. I’m pretty sure this guy had PTSD from being to Iraq and probably a drug problem I didn’t know about and definitely some anger management issues. Long story short it was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life and I left in the middle of the night out of fear. Thankfully I had a very kind friend who knew what was going on and gave me a place to stay. The next day I started the process of getting a restraining order. If you’ve never gone through that process, let me tell you it’s scary and horrible but a relief when it’s over. Less than a month later I moved to Montana.

            I hadn’t been in touch with the female friend who had been my roommate while all the badness was going on. She and her boyfriend had moved away when she sold her house. Not too long after I moved away I heard through the grapevine that she was dating the guy I had the restraining order against. Who the hell does that? She and I weren’t terribly close, but we were friends and roommates. Seriously, who dates a guy their friend got a restraining order against? I know she never heard my side of the story but how could he possibly explain that to make himself look good? I guess it’s possible that she never knew about the order but still…Who does that? It’s funny to me now because it’s so ridiculous. How could I have had such poor judgment that I was spending my life with these kinds of people?

I have no idea whatever happened to either of them and I don’t really care. It’s a chapter of my life that I’m not proud of but it definitely taught me a lot and made me who I am today. It has also made me a much better judge of character and has taught me that it’s okay to be picky about who I let into my life.