Author: TeaKisses

Make a move?

| TeaKisses

Okay girls, this one is for you.

You know the pressure that is always being put on us to act a certain way so guys will like us? We are encouraged to be light hearted and whimsical with not a care in the world but then at the same time play some sort of game to draw the guys in. I’m sure you have all heard of this illusive game; it is the one where the girl plays hard to get, not replying to the guys’ text messages or pretending to ignore him so he will try harder to get his attention. Well what if you aren’t that kind of girl…what if you want to go for it? Then go for it!

I’m always the one that is over thinking and reading into what the guy I like is saying. It is a pain in the arse and can completely distract you from everything else in life, but then when I am completely infatuated I am being told by society to play hard to get when everything inside my body is screaming at me to tell him, get it over with because otherwise I will be in agony until something defines the relationship. I feel as though I am not the first one to feel this way and I don’t think by an means that I will be the last.

The main issue I have with this though is that as girls we are expected to wait around and play coy so that the guy we like will come and catch us. It feels like some sort of cat and mouse game where the only real point for the mouse is to entertain the cat. What if I want to be the one to be bold and move the relationship on? I’m not saying I am against guys being chivalrous or taking the lead. (That is a topic for a different post) I am saying, however that I think as girls we shouldn’t feel trapped by this stigma of the “game”. Who cares about what society says and what your friends are encouraging you to do. If you want to tell the guy that you like that you like him, when then by all means go ahead. Guys also like girls are straight forward, so don’t try to do things that feel wrong to you.

In all of the “true beauty” campaigns out there we are told to not let other people or society decide what we do with our hair, our skin, our clothes, our music…etcetera. If we are taking a stance on all of these topics why are we letting society dictate our actions and the things we do (Within reason of course…please don’t break the law). I would encourage you to think about what you are doing in all of your relationships, be those friendships or romantic relationships. Don’t let people tell you what to do, that is only going to give everybody the wrong impression and turn you into something you don’t want to be. Because once you convince everyone else that you are something you’re not it is easy to get caught up in that lie yourself.

2:2:2

| TeaKisses

Will you regret it in two hours? What about two days? Two weeks?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions then you should probably not go through with said thing.

This little piece of wisdom I recently got from an episode of Glee. Now is not the time or place to go into the fact that I watch Glee, it is one of those things you will have to accept and move on with.

I have used this trick to make a couple decisions in the past two weeks and it has stopped me from making some pretty rash choices. I am the type of person that goes either all in or not at all, I’m not good at waiting for something I know will happen anyway. I also tend to jump into things with two feet without really thinking them through first. Due to this little piece of my character I have gotten myself into things that I really didn’t want to be involved in. Not that they were bad things but I should really have thought about them more.

Recently I have been seriously thinking about switching schools and going into the Red River College Media and Communications Program. My reasons for wanting to switch are that I have a hard time taking in information via reading it or being talked at in a lecture style. I am much more of a tactile learner and thrive when what I am assigned to do are hands on projects. I know that if I tried hard enough I could apply myself and really get some work done but I don’t think that I have learned really good ways of studying and taking in information. These weaknesses mixed with the idea of an almost completely hands on program made me very open to the idea of leaving my community, friends and all that is familiar to me.

Along with my weaknesses regarding school, I have always been the type of person that quits easily. Pain scares me, failing scares me as does disappointing people. Therefore quitting and making really good excuses for it seems to be a good alternative. Blaming it on the fact that “It really didn’t feel right and I don’t think this is where God wants me” is always an easy excuse to fall back on. I should know, I have done that countless times. Reality is, I’m just too scared of failing and when I am challenged to the point of feeling like I can’t take anymore I am very easily persuaded to quit.

Quitting has never been a good thing for me, yes I have made it through without scrapes and bruises for the most part but I think sometimes its good to fail and to lean on the people who are there to help you up. As cliché as this sounds, I’m not the first person to go through lots of these experiences and I won’t be the last. Sticking to something and not quitting is a huge accomplishment on its own, doesn’t matter if you failed along the way. You didn’t quit, you persevered. I can accredit most of the situations in which I haven’t quit to my faith, I know that God has a plan for me and that He will guide my path. All I need to do is look to Him and have faith and patience…Easier said than done.

So to pull this full circle; I am not quitting my degree and moving to a different school. I will push through and learn what I need to even though it will be really hard and I won’t like it. I will trust God and the plan that He has for me…or at least I will try. I will think before I leap because it is the times that I don’t look that I end up falling flat on my face.

Why.

| TeaKisses

I have started to come to the realization that being able to be honest with yourself and the people around you is a difficult but intensely rewarding thing. Over the past couple months I have grown not only as an individual but also as a friend, I have begun to see how amazing friendships can be when effort is put into them. There is one person in particular who has come to mean a great deal to me, we never used to get along very well but due to certain circumstances we have grown very close and she is now one of my closest and dearest friends. This poem is for her.

I have always been one for pretty words, and a couple years ago I tried my hand at poetry. I can’t say that I am very good and I may not be following all of the rules of poetry but for me poetry is what happens when my soul speaks with words rather than my brain. My brain likes to over analyze things but my soul knows exactly what it wants to say. So I present you with a poem that came together out of the blue. It captures some of the feelings that I have been experiencing over the past couple months. It seems a little more depressing that I had really intended but I think It gets a point across…so without further ado. Why.

Tears ooze a soothing balm
Over the fissured soul,
Bright eyes faded to grey
Clouded with misery,
Deep breaths come out
Cut. Up. In. Sobs.

A china tea cup in your palm
Gold leaf pealing at your touch,
Cracked from over use
And un-careful users,
The slightest movement causes a leak
Bitter tea trickles through your fingers.

Wind wanders lonely
Calling through forgotten panes,
Shut out of all that is love,
Voice of a vexed lover
Whimpers one word,
Why.

~ Bethany Epp ~

This blog is here so I can remind myself to be honest with not only the people around me but to make sure I’m not trying to convince the world of something I myself know to be false. Thank you for letting me be honest with you.

All the things.

| TeaKisses

As much as I would like to tell everybody in my life that I am completely over my past relationship and that I am fully ready and capable to move on…I don’t think that is completely true. My ex-fiancee is on his second “relationship” since we broke up and it will be 5 months in February. I am not quite sure how to read into this and whether to read into it at all. We have not talked since christmas and I know that is a good thing considering the last time we talked he practically tore me to bits. What confuses me though is how someone can be in a relationship and say that they are completely past their previous relationship when their previous relationship was so serious. He was prepared to marry me this last christmas and spend the rest of his life with me. I am the one who did the breaking up but that does not mean that I had it easy, there have been days when I have regretted my decision and wished that we were back together. I know it is best that we never got back together, but I miss having that companionship, that constant friendship.

I am now at a place where I feel happy that he could move on and is in a good relationship with someone else but I also know that I am not in that place. I still think about him often and I long for our friendship too much to get another man involved romantically in my life. Not to mention the school work and other things I have going on in my life. A relationship is not where I want to be right now.

I am slowly starting to find out that being single is fun and can be a really uplifting and growing experience after not being single for almost two years. As a teenager I longed for guys to notice me even just as a friend but it never really happened, I was always craving that relationship with a male. Only once I graduated from high school and gained a little perspective was I able to be friends with guys but under those friendships were always the awkward undertone of me being infatuated and them being uninformed. I was never fully able to be friends with a guy and not have any hint of romantic desire driving my friendship with them.

This is the moment that I discovered online dating, not a bad thing but definitely not a good thing…just a thing that happened. The first guy that I dated was four years older than me and the relationship only lasted approximately 3 weeks. I was much too clingy and over bearing, I wanted our relationship to move quickly because I felt as though I had missed out on so much relationship time that my friends had gotten. Needless to say, he was not a fan of a young clingy girlfriend so we broke up. I am glad that didn’t last long, he had much different morals that I did and it was not going to be a good situation if we kept dating. The second guy I met and dated online was the one who ended up being my fiancee and best friend. We dated for five months and then broke up because our relationship was getting too serious too fast. (see a theme?) We got back together nine months later and dated till June when we got engaged and then I broke things off in September. I do not have a fantastic record for relationships and I’m really good at pushing things and making things go faster than I really want them to.

I am the worst at being patient and need some help. But now after being single for almost five months I’m good with where I am, I have a long way to go yet before I am ready to be in a relationship but I’m on a journey. After all, the journey is what makes you who you are. This was fairly heavy and I’m not sure who will all read this but if I know you, just take this with a grain of salt and know that I am putting myself on the limb here and sharing with you personal details. If I do not know you, I hope you can take from my story something that makes you think. If you are a potential boyfriend, please know that you should talk to me and really get to know me before you judge me.

One day at a time

| TeaKisses

If you read my previous blog post you will know that my life has not been all that fantastic as of late. It has been almost a month and a half now since we broke up and I’m not going to say that I’m doing 100%. It is a struggle but I’m hanging on, moving one day at a time.

These are both amazingly strong women and I definitely consider them both to be role models. I wish someday I will touch somebody else’s life like they have touched mine. Sometimes God sends angels in the most bizarre packages.

How not to get engaged.

| TeaKisses

*SIGH*

So much has been going in my life lately…I know I haven’t updated this in a very long time but in the time that I have been gone I got engaged! I know this should be exciting and it very much is…was. I was not expecting him to propose so soon and when he did I was dumb founded! I didn’t know what to say, of course I said yes, how could I not?!? There was a handsome man kneeling in front of me asking to spend the rest of his life with me, it seems like a dream come true and as much as I wanted it to be it wasn’t. From the moment I said yes to his proposal I was second guessing my decision, I didn’t know if I was ready to settle down and I had not yet made up my mind whether I wanted to do it with him. (Now I know this seems really ridiculous and everybody said that I shouldn’t have said yes, but I couldn’t say no). He did ask my parents the day that he proposed and they said a tentative yes but wanted to wait until we could have a discussion together, they were not expecting him to propose that day. After he asked me we got home and I was overjoyed, after all this was what I thought I wanted. My mother did not talk to me for about a day and a half and when she did she was in tears the whole time and my father although he tried to be supportive and happy for me, I could tell that he was not completely sold on the idea of me getting married so young to someone I had met on the Internet only a year and a half prior. We continued to plan our wedding and discuss a wedding date which ended up being the subject of most of our arguments, we fought a lot in the two and a half months that we were engaged. We fought about the table arrangements, what kind of food to serve, where to have our wedding. Needless to say we were not in a very healthy relationship. Almost as soon as we got engaged he went off to camp to work there for two months meaning I would only get to talk to him on weekends and only for a couple hours which would be a huge stretch from our routine of talking a couple hours a day. While he was away at camp I had a lot of time to do some thinking and really figure out whether this was something I really wanted. In the last two weeks of us being apart something hit me, I knew for a fact that I couldn’t marry him. It was like all of the questions that I had ever had in our whole relationship just came and slapped me in the face. I was a complete mess for those two weeks, crying myself to sleep every night not wanting to admit to anyone or myself that this was something that I couldn’t do. There was one day when I had just had enough of pretending to be okay, I told my mom that I was having second thoughts about everything and that I didn’t think I could continue my relationship with him. She asked me why and this was the tough part, how was I supposed to put into words all the feelings that I had been caging up inside my mind and my soul. How was I supposed to show my inmost feelings and lies. I told her that him and I had to many major differences and that I had so many bigger dreams for my life then feeling like I was settling for something I wasn’t completely happy with. I knew that love wasn’t a fairytale and that love is not like it is in the movies, but I also knew that love had to be better than what he and I had.  I  then continued to call him and I told him that we needed to take a break so I could collect myself, I needed time to figure out how I was going to break up with the man who thought I loved him. I kept putting it off which only made things worse. He came to my house to surprise me a couple days after I told him we needed a break. He took me out for supper and we hung out a little bit but when he left I knew what I had to do. There was no option anymore, I was no longer in love with him and I could no longer lead him on. I moved into residence at university the day after and proceeded to catch up with friends and get back into the groove of school. The worst part of this was that everybody still thought that we were engaged and I wasn’t going to tell them otherwise until I had broken up with him. He came to see me the day before my birthday which was about five days after I moved to school, he had baked me cookies and brought me ice cream. I felt so bad because never in our year and a half relationship had he ever baked me anything. I sat him down on my bed and read him the letter that I had written out earlier that day because I knew when it came to it I would have a hard time saying what I needed to if I did not writhe it all down. He took it well but I was a complete mess, he held me while I cried then we talked for a little while then he left and I have not seen him since.

Many people ask me how I let it get that far, I don’t really have a good answer to that question but I do know that I felt as though if I let this go I would never have anything like this again. I didn’t want to give up having a best friend and someone that loved me for potentially being single forever. In our relationship I felt very put down and like all my dreams, talents and ambitions were being forced down so I could fit the square mold that he was trying to put me into. I am more than a house wife who will wait around for her husband and answer to his every beck and call. I am a loving person and I know I will make a great wife someday…SOMEDAY! If it is God’s will for my life I will fall in love again, but for now I am single and I am free to make my dreams happen one day at a time.

Fishing for Ice

| TeaKisses

This past weekend I had the incredible opportunity to go Ice fishing with the three most important men in my life; my father, brother and boyfriend, Shane.

Shane picked me up at about nine thirty because it was a two hour drive from the city to get to the lake that my father had chosen to fish this time. We had a really good drive down, we talked and listened to a sermon and some music; it was really good bonding time. We met my dad and brother about 10km from the lake and then followed them through some back roads till we got to the lake. We had no idea what to expect when we got there, we had only looked at it from Google Maps. Once we got to the lake we could see many other vehicles on the lake and people fishing, there were some huts as well. We drove onto the lake with our two Jettas…

This was our set up on the lake, we blocked most of the wind with the cars, built a fire in a metal pail and then set up our tip ups. If you don’t know what a tip up is, don’t feel bad. I didn’t either until I went ice fishing. Basically what a tip up is, is a contraption that has a spool on the bottom and a flag on the top, you place it over the whole in the ice and when the fish pulls at the bate attached to the hook on the string hanging from the spool the flag pops up. Thus eliminating need for sitting there freezing your
bottom off.
Tip Up
                                      
We only had four tip ups so we also did some rod fishing as well. Even though we did not catch anything we did end up getting a fish. My brother made friends with the people fishing next to us and they told us that they had caught some, so they gave one to him; he was ecstatic. We were out there for about four hours and it was only about minus ten degrees Celsius. It was a beautiful day.
Shane, Liam, Dad
                                     
We had a really good time out on the ice, it was good to catch up with my dad and brother because I live in the city for school so I don’t get to see them as often as I’d like.
God’s creation is so magnificent. We are so blessed.

Those Stupid Things We Do

| TeaKisses

You know how sometimes you do something that you know is wrong and that you will probably regret in the next few days? Like telling someone you have feelings for them, gossiping about someone, telling a lie that you know is going to come back to haunt you, even cutting your own bangs…we all do it. Why?

I don’t really have an answer for this question but I do have experience with it. I tend to make stupid mistakes as soon as someone is trying to get close to me, I have a really awesome way of pushing people away because I feel like I don’t deserve them or the attention they are giving me. I screw myself over and am left feeling pitiful and sad. I don’t want to push them away, I want them to love me and I want to be able to love them too but I can’t seem to stop doing stupid things to prove to them I’m not worth hanging out with.

I am a really friendly person, at least I like to think that I am. I don’t have many friends, but I am okay with that. I have a few really close friends and some extra people that I hang out with so thats all I really need. I just need to learn to be content with the way things are and to not push people away because otherwise I will soon have no friends. Being patient is also something that I would benefit from learning, I tend to think that things have to happen sooner than later otherwise they won’t happen at all and therefore I end up initiating everything and become the “man” in all my relationships and that is really not what I want.

I need to learn that God is in control of my life and that I need to stop thinking that it’s my job to figure it all out.

Good Morning World.

| TeaKisses

It has been about a month since my last blog post because I have been so terribly busy with all my assignments and tests and choir practices that I never had time to sit down and think about what I want to say. I only have one exam left and so I feel like I deserve some “me” time.

So, for the past week or so I have been taking a picture outside my window ever morning when I wake up hoping to see a change in the scenery after a while. I haven’t been seeing much of a change at all because even though it is close to the middle of december we still have very little snow.

Here are a few of my favorites:

The blue sky and the clouds are beautiful.

I love the golden light reflecting off of the “castle”

The hoarfrost is spectacular.

Clear skies, golden light…what a good morning.

The final picture was taken this morning before my exam. Talking about exams…I can not believe that this semester is over. Time has flown by so fast I can barely catch my breath. I think I did alright in all of my courses but I know for a fact that if I work harder I can be better; the problem is finding the motivation to be better and work harder. I really hope that I can do well next semester too, I hope that I have settled into the routine of university life by now.