Experiencing Cringe to Courage, Reflecting on Love’s What-Ifs

"Freedom is being able to feel the painful emotions and thrive anyways."

Photo by Muhamad Iqbal Akbar on Unsplash

Experiencing Love Ep 141

Hello and welcome to Experiencing Love. I'm your host, Philip Joks, and I'm so glad that you're here. I'll be honest, directly before pressing "Record," I was in this state of full-body cringe. I don't know if you've ever done this to yourself or gotten into these states before, but it always happens when you're thinking about some memory, some memory that you now find so uncomfortable, or even so exciting, but in a goofy, playful kind of way that it just makes your entire body react. This time around, it was triggered by finding old messages on my phone. Obviously, I haven't seen them in a while, and if I'm going to be honest, and this makes me truly uncomfortable to say, but it was a message, a text chain, between one of my biggest what-ifs.

To be more specific, this what-if was this girl from a few years ago. And I want to make sure that I maintain privacy here. But I'll go as far as to say that this girl I found to be absolutely stunning. She was funny, she was courageous, she was adventurous. And from what I could tell, there was definitely some chemistry between us. The biggest obstacle that ended up getting between us happens to be this little thing called the Atlantic Ocean. This person lives in Europe, and I met them when they were on vacation in the New Jersey, New York area, and then continued talking with each other for however many months after she returned.