November and December are notorious for being the hardest months for me. I'm guessing that's the same for a lot of people. But I've been learning a lot from the lows this time around.
I'm not going to lie, over Thanksgiving break I had a mini break down.
I drove my jeep down to Utah to spend some time with my family. As soon as I got to my house, I stepped out of my car and saw a couple from my single's ward who just got engaged drive past me. Right. Everyone's getting engaged. I kinda forgot about that while I was up in Idaho. Later the next day I'm talking with my dad about a close friend of mine who just got engaged when he says, "Oh, and by the way, I heard (girl in my home ward) is going ring shopping with her boyfriend." Great. I mean I'm super happy for them, they're adorable, but just another person who won't be around when I get home this summer. And then he says, "Yeah, Mary was saying, "Now Katie just needs to get engaged!""
Oh, I burst into tears. 'Cause if I could be engaged, you better believe I'd be engaged. I'm not one of those people that's just like, "Dating? What?" And it's not even that I don't get asked out, because I do. I do to the point that my roommates are convinced that I know everything about boys when I really don't and don't understand why I complain about being single so much.
And I'm so aware that I'm way too young to be this broken up about it. But I think the fact that I've had the opportunity to be engaged twice already and had both of those times crash and burn.....I'm getting a little fed up and bitter at my young age. I'm pretty convinced that as soon as I get away from BYU-Idaho that I'll feel a lot better about my situation, but we'll see. Maybe not.
But this weekend I ended some training things for new student orientation where we discussed a ton of general conference talks about service and what not, and there's where something awesome happened. So there's this amazing lady that I had the pleasure of working with when I was on freshmen orientation council last year who's in her thirties and still single. She's had a really rough dating life as well, so she shares some of my bitterness. Anyways, so she was speaking at one of the meetings when she decided to share a personal story with us. I guess she was at church and saw a lady walk in who just barely went through a divorce and this was going to be her first time sitting alone at church. Because this amazing lady is single, she knew exactly how it felt to sit alone at church, so she ended up going and sitting next to this sister to help her feel better. And while she was sitting there she heard a voice say, "You're the only person in this room who knows how she feels." And that moment made her realize God needed her to be single for moments like that, because she had that empathy.
I LOVED that! It made me take a step back and realize there has to be reasons I'm single as well. I know for sure there's things that I've done in the past few years that I never would have done if I was married, and that would have been so sad. Also just a few weeks back I was talking with my bishop about this too, and he reminded me that, "It may not be you. Maybe the guy you're supposed to be with is still being prepared." which was way comforting as well.
Anyways, all those realizations have been awesome! I'm so grateful for God's hand in my life.
And on a completely unrelated note: I finally tried sushi for the first time last night. Soooo weird, that's all I have to say about it.
