313: What if you had to find your own salvation?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services.

Hi, listeners. Each week, our friends T and Ellie over at the Trauma Bonded podcast discuss and dissect the current episode of This Is Actually Happening. And sometimes they also bring back past guests for updates. This week, they've conducted an extended follow-up with one of our storytellers from last year, the anonymous spouse from This Is Actually Happening episode 290, What If Your Husband Entered the Void? In the episode, she shares a life update and answers listener-related comments and questions.

So if you want to hear the update, go check out Trauma Bonded. The episode is out now. Everything has a limit. Relationships have limits of how far you can trust somebody or the limit of how much you can depend on them. There's a limit to how much you can take. There's a limit to how much your brain will process. There is a limit to how much you can care. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening.

Episode 313 What if you had to find your own salvation?

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My dad grew up in the country and he was one of 11 children.

My mom grew up in the city, but probably about a half hour from where my dad was. My parents met because my mom's sister Sherry was going on a date, and when her date showed up, he showed up with my dad. But my dad was actually drunk, and he pestered her until she finally agreed to go on a date with him.

So my parents dated for a couple of years and then my dad was in the Vietnam War. Due to how traumatic that time was for him, he never wanted to talk about it with anyone ever again. After the war, when my dad got home, from what I do know, he was drinking a lot and he started doing drugs.

In the meantime, my mom had my brother and then my other sister. My dad was just kind of out there doing whatever he was doing, and my mom was faithful the entire time. And then when he would come home, he was usually drunk or hungover, and he would spend some time recovering, and he would be out again. And then there I came.

I was supposed to be a promise that he was not going to use anymore. When this promise was made when I was born, he took it seriously. He had cleaned up and for a couple of years everything was flying in the right direction.

My dad was a construction worker and he had a friend that was an architect and he worked with this friend, had him draw up some blueprints for what was my mom's dream house. He got a piece of land and he was working towards this dream for my mom and for us kids.

So, he's working on getting this house set up and trying to make this dream happen, and the financing fell through at the last minute with the bank. Now the dream was shattered. He went right back into his old habits of running around and being absent, and then when he was there, he was sometimes drunk or he was passed out on the couch.

So when I was about four or five years old, we had ended up at an old mobile home that was in really bad shape. My dad would take me with him on these trips with him, and who I called Uncle Dennis, it was my dad's best friend.

He would go to hardware stores in these different stores and run into the store and come back with armfuls of merchandise and they would put it in the trunk and then they would drive around the city and sell this merchandise out of the trunk. Eventually, I would be left in the car while they ran somewhere and come back and I actually seen them exchange needles and they were shooting something up.

At that age, clearly I had no idea what they were doing. The only thing I knew about shots was that my grandma was diabetic and I knew she took those every day, but I knew my dad wasn't diabetic, so something wasn't right.

I was abused from a pretty young age. My earliest memory of being abused, I was five years old. I was abused sexually, mentally, and physically by someone that was close around the household. And that was sort of the source of most of my turmoil when I was growing up.

My mom was always trying to work and keep food on the table while my dad was out doing what he was doing. So she had no way really of knowing that this abuse was happening.

At this time in my life, I tried to be as small as I could, just because I could see my dad was running around doing what he's doing. My dad and my brother didn't always get along, so there was kind of some turmoil there. So I always just tried to be the one that didn't cause problems, because it seemed like my mom had so much else going on that she had to take care of.

that I didn't want to be one more thing that she had to worry about. When you've got a parent that you can see is just stressed absolutely to the max, trying to keep everything afloat, and you've got just so much chaos going on in your life, it just seemed natural to try to pull back and just to try to not be a source of aggravation for my mother.

We're poor, I don't have nice clothes, and I was chubby, and I was different. So, on top of all the stressors that I had at home, I was being picked on a lot while I was at school. Besides the abuse that I endured from the time I was very young, I was abused by another person when I was about 8 years old. It was one of my cousins.

I can remember just feeling such disgust and guilt. I don't know what made this seem more traumatic in my mind than what I had already been enduring, but it seemed more traumatic. There's a lot that my mind just won't let me explore, and it's a really hard thing to describe how your mind can do that to you.

At this point, I'm about 13 years old. I'm still just a really awkward kid, and I'm still short, I'm still chubby, and I'm still different than everybody. And they were really cruel.

They would make fun of me, belittle me, call me gay, fag. One time my hair got cut. They tried really hard to shove my head in the toilet and I fought my way out of it. It didn't matter what I did. I wasn't going to make these kids like me. My parents noticed that I'm just coming home and I'm miserable all the time. I come home and I've got this weird glazed over look on my face.

I would do this thing when I was a teenager where I would just literally shut down. It was almost like my mind was completely blown and I couldn't process anymore at that time. So my parents are asking me, what do they need to do to make things better? I tell them how I'm being picked on. We went to the school and I got blamed for it by the principal because I'm a little bit different.

Maybe I should just learn to fit in a little bit better and choose not to let that hurt my feelings when people pointed it out. So my mom actually signed me out of school. There was a local Christian academy that had just opened, and one of the requirements was that you had to be a member of a church somewhere in order to enroll. So we started at a church, and it's a Pentecostal church that was local to us.

There were people speaking in tongues, there were people dancing around the church in the spirit, and I had never seen any of this before. It just seemed amusing, honestly. I couldn't help myself. I'd never seen behavior like that before, and I just found it hilarious.

I had always known growing up that I was different and I'm going through puberty so all of a sudden my sexuality becomes relevant at the same time that I start going to church.

I knew that I wasn't attracted to girls. I hadn't thought about it real hard, but I definitely knew that I wasn't. So I knew that that wasn't right and that, you know, this church and my upbringing and everybody around me all said that that's not the right way to be. It's not okay to be gay. I, of course, didn't want to be gay.

It would have made my life a whole lot easier if I could have just prayed all this away. So that's what I tried to do in silence for a few years. In the meantime, the Christian Academy failed. I had went back to high school and I still didn't fit in, but something in me had changed at this point and I really didn't care that I didn't fit in anymore. I really just felt defeated.

You know, being stuck with being homosexual when you don't want to be, when it would make your life so much easier not to be, I didn't want to be on the earth anymore. I can remember driving home from my friend's house and I really just wanted to drive my car off the edge of the road.

It felt like it would have made everything so much easier and it felt like maybe my family wouldn't have to deal with having a gay person in their family. So maybe it would make things easier for them too. I ended up becoming friends with a girl that I'm still friends with today. And just before I turned 18, I came out of the closet to her and I told her that I was gay.

And she was very loving, just letting me talk and express how I feel. And I offer the same thing for her. I had two teachers in high school at that time that I had a lot of respect for. One of them was my English teacher and he also was a preacher on Sundays.

I asked him what he thought about it. You know, I told him that I was pretty sure I was gay and his solution was that I should remain celibate for the rest of my life. That would be the way to salvation.

Something about that just didn't resonate with me. I knew that that didn't make a whole lot of sense. I wasn't going to be lonely for the rest of my life. So I talked to another teacher that was a friend of mine, and she was pretty accepting. But apparently somebody out in the hallway listened in. The next day, I go to school.

I am in that same teacher's class and this girl I went to high school with looks at me and she's like, are you gay? And I'm like, what? And she was like, you're gay. And she just started laughing and like calling me names. And then the classroom kind of erupted into a bit of chaos. And the teacher told me to leave and let her handle the classroom.

So I just got up and I walked out straight across to the exit, got in my car and I left and I didn't go to school for a couple of days.

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I really didn't know how to feel. My religion's pulling me in this way. My senses are pulling me in another way. And I feel like no matter what I do, I'm not accepted by my peers. So there was a certain amount of defeat coming from a family where nobody is openly homosexual.

It is hard for people to wrap their heads around, and I understood that because it was hard for me to wrap my head around myself. So I just, I couldn't bring myself to tell my parents. So I did the next best thing, and I told my sister. She reacted pretty well, but she admitted she had never dealt with anything like this before, so she didn't really know what to say to comfort me, other than to tell me that she loved me no matter what.

I didn't blame my sister for not really understanding. She showed as much support as she could. She did tell me though that I needed to tell my parents. To my surprise, it didn't go awful.

My parents tell me they love me no matter what. They're never going to abandon me. I'm always their son. But they don't love this component of my life. And they start asking questions about what may have happened to me when I was younger.

I admitted to them that I was messed with by my older cousin, who was 13 years my senior. I was 8 years old the first time. And he was actually in jail at that time for doing the same thing to his own children.

You know, I tell him this and it was sort of lumped in with the whole coming out conversation. Like, oh, so this person messed with you and that turned you homosexual. Kind of presented almost more like a disorder, a side effect of my abuse rather than what it actually was.

But I pretty much went along with it. I felt the same way. It made sense to me. You know, they kind of put things in this neat package of you were molested as a child and this caused your homosexuality. So it was presented in this way that this is all one issue. It would have made my life so much easier to be straight. So I wanted to go with that. That gave me hope.

We need to get this fixed. We can go to church, we can pray about it, and we can get this fixed. So I went to church. I went up to the altar to pray, and a bunch of people come up behind me. The people have their hands on my back, and then there's people with their hands on their backs, and so on. It's almost like everybody's connected to my shoulders as I'm praying.

I still don't have 100% explanation for what happened, but I did feel something overcome me and I did black out. Apparently I was kind of thrashing around during that time and I don't remember any of that. But the way that it was presented to me afterward was that I'd been possessed by the Holy Spirit

and that if I didn't accept the gift that was given to me, that this Holy Spirit had removed this demon of homosexuality from me, and if I didn't accept this gift, then seven more demons were going to come upon me. I'll be honest, I didn't take it too seriously. I think, looking back, that I wasn't really released of that demon.

I think I was released of the conviction that I was putting myself under and that that church was putting me under to try to be something that I wasn't. I think that that is what the Holy Spirit took out of me. It wasn't a demon. It was all that conviction that was being put on me unnecessarily. Something inside of me made me let all of that go. And I can't tell you that it was completely myself.

I was touched by the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit told me to let everything that everybody was telling me go. That I was already saved because I had the faith that I needed. That's all it took. I was able to kind of let go and let Jesus take the wheel, honestly. I was set free. I was washed anew.

I was set free from the guilt that was put upon me and the guilt that I was putting on myself for, you know, having these feelings that I was trying to push away. I had to find a way to embrace who I was. I decided that I, you know, this demon was prayed out of me. So, you know, I felt light on my toes. Life was feeling good. I was, you know, getting ready to graduate.

My mom somehow got a hold of a conversion therapist and she set up an appointment and I went and I met him. It was strange because I had never been to a therapist up until this point, but I'd only seen it on the movies and TV. And you kind of picture somebody laying on a couch or sitting down and just spilling their guts to this other person and telling them stuff.

But when I go and meet this man, instead of me doing the talking, which I imagine that therapy would be, this man would kind of ask me some general questions, but then he would do all the talking. Explaining to me how my mom is domineering, and because my mom is domineering and my dad was absent, that caused me to become more feminine somehow.

But my logical mind just wasn't buying it. You would think that I would have felt worse after all this, feeling like, you know, I've tried all these things and I'm still at square one and what do I do? But instead, I kind of let myself go.

I let go of being mean to myself for something that I realized I wasn't going to change. And I knew that I didn't understand how that fit in with Christianity and how all those dynamics worked, but it wasn't on me to figure out at this point. If it was, then God would have shown me through all the prayer that I had done. And if that was the way, then it would have worked because I did all the right things.

So I had to accept that my parents didn't like the lifestyle and that I wasn't really thrilled with it either. But I was going to have to figure out how to navigate it. My 18th birthday was in January of 2001. I graduated in May of 2001.

There was probably from that period until I was about 20, 21 years old, I was very assertive with who I was. Where I had suppressed who I was, I kind of went completely running in the opposite direction with it. I was unapologetically me, and I was loud with it. And it felt really freeing.

When I come out of the closet, I told my parents that I was abused by one of my cousins. My dad got a hold of his sister, which is my aunt, and my cousin's mom. He was already in jail at that point for abusing his own children that were toddlers. So my dad gets a hold of her. They plan this meetup for me to meet her at Cracker Barrel.

We sat down at Cracker Barrel and she asked me what was going on. So I had to reiterate to her that I was abused by him and when it had happened. She didn't really have much to say about it. She said she was sorry that that happened. She said she really didn't know what to say, but to let her know if she needed to get a lawyer or not to represent him.

There was less concern about what I had been through and more concern about what was she going to have to do to protect her son. I didn't really know what to say. I'm an 18-year-old kid sitting here in front of my aunt that I looked up to, and I felt just more confused.

I asked her, I was like, well, you've been to visit him. Can you promise me that he's changed? Because she did keep telling me how, you know, he wasn't the same man that I knew, that he had repented and all this stuff. He was really sorry. And I asked her, you know, do you promise that he's changed and that when he comes out, he's not going to do this to somebody else again? And she's like, yeah, I promise. He's definitely, he's a changed man.

He was in jail for about another seven or eight years after that. When I had come out and the word had got around to my family, the cousins that I did talk to, some of them judged me for being gay.

So it felt like, so you're, you know, you've got this guy that is in jail for molesting his own children. But when I say he did it to me, you're not sure. And then also some of you all are not okay with me being gay, but it's okay for him to be a pedophile. So that's fine. And we'll protect him. But yeah, we're not really sure about you. That's the way it felt.

I was just, you know, trying to be out there and be myself and just test my limits and figure out what it was that made me tick. I started going to dance clubs with some of my friends. I loved the music and going out and meeting people, just being myself.

So after high school, I tried a couple different jobs, and then I had applied for this one job that I kind of hoped I would get with the Internal Revenue Service. I got a call, and they were offering it to me. You know, prior to working for the Internal Revenue Service, I was used to just dealing with white people pretty much, like 99.9% of the time.

All of a sudden, I'm with, you know, workers of all different ages and races, and there were gay people that worked there. The world was just so much bigger than this small world that I had grown up in. So I was at a work function, and I went on lunch break, and I look up, and there's this bartender.

He smiles at me and he said, what can I get for you? And I said, I'll have an ice water with lemon. He said, you can have whatever you want, darling. He was 36. I was 22. And we hung out for the next several weeks solid almost every day.

We started dating and my lease was up the next month. And Dave decided I should come and move with him instead of moving back with my parents. So it seemed really fast, but yeah, a month into our relationship, I was moving in with him. A week or two later, we went down to my sister's house. My sister met Dave for the first time.

My sister had started talking to my mom and talking to my dad about, you know, Terry's with this guy. And so they invited Dave to come, you know, to the family Easter gathering at my sister's house. My mom really liked him straight off. Like, they got along really well. My dad was really sick at this point, pretty much ridden to just sitting on the couch or in his bedroom. So Dave had to go down there to meet him.

My dad told him he didn't really understand our lifestyle, but that he appreciated that Dave was, you know, good to me and that, you know, I seemed happy and to take care of me. And Dave made him the promise that he would.

There was something really tender about the way that he told Dave that he appreciated him taking care of me and that he recognized that he didn't understand how it all worked, but that he loved me anyway and he was glad I was happy. Having that acknowledged was really a big deal.

My mom invited me to go and have dinner with her. And we're sitting at dinner and she says, you know, I just want to let you know something. And I was like, well, what's up? And she's like, I want to let you know that I love Dave. And I was like, really? And she's like, yeah, I really, I love him. Regardless of how things go between you, I'm always going to love him. And I'm always going to talk to him and be his friend.

She finally understood that this wasn't just something that was going to be prayed away. It felt like acceptance on a level that I didn't know that we would ever achieve. I don't think I knew up until that point that I needed to hear that, but I did. She said it right on time because two months later she passed away.

In 2008, Dave and I were at our house. We got a phone call, and my dad had passed away.

There's really a lot of things that I wish would have been said or that we would have talked about that were never resolved. But I find peace in it and knowing that I know where my dad's heart was at and that I know that if we would have had those conversations, I can imagine pretty much what he would have said.

At the end of the day, I know what was in my parents' hearts, so that's kind of helped me to make peace with that. What kept me going more than anything was that I knew that my parents wanted me to succeed. No matter what that looked like, they wanted me to have a happy life and to keep going.

I put my energy into my work and started taking on more projects and kind of proving to myself what I could do. And I started moving up the career ladder with my job. So the best way that I could honor them was to keep living life and to not let their death ruin me.

When Dave and I got our house, I just really fell out of contact with all my cousins pretty much at that point. I kept distant contact with a couple of them, but one of my cousins kind of started coming over a little more frequently. So me and Dave had a party this one certain evening.

We're hanging out, having a couple drinks, singing karaoke, and all of a sudden, like, in walks my one cousin that comes and visits kind of frequently from across the street, his brother, my other cousin, and my abuser, our cousin. I immediately see that my abuser is there, and that's where my attention focuses on. Dave really hadn't met him, so he didn't know who to look out for.

I'm kind of over in this corner and my abuser comes over and he's got me in the corner at that point. He's like, I just want to tell you that I'm really sorry for what happened. You know, I'm really sorry for anything that I did to hurt you. And he starts crying and telling me how sorry he is for abusing me when I was a kid.

I'm like, you know, I don't know what to tell you. I've moved on and I've moved past it, so you've got to find a way to move past it also. I don't know what to say to help you. He's crying and I'm supposed to make him feel better. At some point, I guess Dave kind of realized what was happening a little bit. He kind of got between me and my abuser and then I told him, you know, we need to get them to leave.

We kind of gently got them out the door and told them they needed to go. They left, and when they left, they went to another one of my cousins. They went to her house, and they spent the night there hanging out. This cousin, she was one that didn't believe me back when I first told her that this person abused me.

So she calls me the next day and she's telling me how she couldn't believe what my abuser had told her. I was like, well, you know, what did he say to you?

He told her that I backed him in a corner and started apologizing to him and cried and apologized to him for making up a lie about him and for telling the entire family. She's kind of asking me, I guess, once again, what's the truth? And I'm like, you know, what do you want to believe? Because actually it's the exact opposite that happened.

I shouldn't have to continue to explain myself. It's not just me and his kids that he did it to. There's other people in the family that he has done it to that have come forward since I did. But somehow it's supposed to be some kind of mystery. Maybe he didn't. Like, what benefit would I get out of making up that lie?

I get absolutely no benefit and why would I pick him out of like 36 first cousins? Why did I pick him? I understand that ignorance is bliss, I totally do. But none of it makes any sense. I know she let him spend the night that night at her house. I know that's not the only night that he spent there. In 2014, Dave and I got married. We got married on what was our ninth anniversary. We were so happy.

We had been together for nine years at that point, but we were still in love. Dave was a very complicated man. Dave had a much different upbringing than I did, and as rough as mine was, his was even worse.

I had a mom that worked and loved and tried to protect us at all costs, but Dave didn't have either one of those. He never knew who his dad was. He had a very cruel stepdad, and he had a mom that was equally as mean from what I've understood. So he didn't have a pillar on either side of him.

As unfortunate as my childhood was, I could have been Dave. I could have had two parents that just literally never had my best interest at heart. Due to his upbringing, he had a very tender heart, but he had a very rough exterior.

He was lovable and hilarious and people just were always attracted to him. They loved being around him and laughing with him, but they didn't always realize that there was an underlying sadness there.

Because of the way that Dave was complicated, he wasn't willing to talk to a stranger about it. So I tried to get him to go to counseling a couple of times, and he really wasn't willing. Really, drinking was the only way that he had of self-medicating. There definitely were conversations I had with him, and he knew that I hated his drinking. So he got to where he would kind of hide it from me.

He was pretty headstrong in what he wanted to do and pretty bullheaded. So trying to talk him out of doing something is like talking to a wall. His problem was he beat up on himself. So when his mom passed, he went to live with his grandparents. Well, the four that stayed with the stepdad pretty much were living with the demon.

And Dave felt a certain sense of guilt because he was able to make it out, but his siblings were not so much able to. And a lot of them were repeating a lot of the same patterns that they saw growing up.

So I'm trying to be healthy during this time. He kind of followed along with my lead a little bit and he had slowed down with drinking, but still drinking almost every day. All of a sudden, COVID's a thing. Dave had lost his job because of COVID. So we kind of had him hunker down for the first several months when everything was still uncertain and we didn't know what was happening. He has asthma, so I was really afraid of him getting it.

We had met a good friend of ours named Joe. We had decided me, Dave, and Joe would go to all the different campgrounds we could about a four-hour distance from where we live. So we, throughout the summer of 2022, went to six different ones, and then we went to our seventh. And this weekend was Mardi Gras.

On Friday, they had a pool party earlier in the afternoon. So we decided to go to the pool party and they were serving up daiquiris. We had a couple different daiquiris, had a good time. Then we decided we'd come back for lunch and we came back to our campsite. And Dave says that he's not feeling very good. He thinks maybe he had like one too many daiquiris. They're a little bit sweet. It's kind of upset in his stomach. He's going to lay down.

Joe and I go ahead and, you know, we enjoy our night. We went ahead and went to bed and throughout the night he's still not feeling good and wakes up the next morning and he's like, you know, honey, you got to take me to the emergency room. I'm not feeling right. We drove to the emergency room. They're running some tests, seeing what's going on.

They tell me that they were flying him to another hospital, that he might be getting immediate surgery when he gets there, and that he's not allowed anything to eat or drink. I go in the room. He's kind of half out of it, barely conscious, and they come in and they say, you know, the helicopter's there and it's time for him to go. He looks at me and he says, I'm dying. And I said, no, you're not. And he said, yes, I am. I'm dying.

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I go to the new hospital and when I get there he is unconscious. They explain to me that he has sepsis. The next morning I get woke up to a phone call. It's the doctor and she's telling me that we need to come in as soon as possible.

I kind of wake everybody up that's at the hotel room and we hurry up and get to the hospital. And the doctor explains to me that his liver had dropped below 10% function due to excessive drinking. Because his liver function had dropped so low, he had encountered E. coli at some point and he was not able to fight it off.

It's pretty common for the everyday person to come across E. coli in their everyday life, but usually not in a quantity that would make us sick. But when somebody has a compromised liver, their immune system isn't fully functioning either. That's one of the symptoms. For him, there wasn't an immune system there anymore because of his liver, so it just kept spreading, and that's what caused him to go septic.

I sat there and I felt an emptiness. Even though he was on these machines that were keeping his body alive, I felt in a very deep way that he was gone. I felt alone in that room even though his body was laying next to me and breathing. The last time that I feel like I saw my husband was when he told me he was dying.

Losing him hurt on a level that I didn't know that I could comprehend. I cried on a level that it was painful. I immediately felt scared and really alone. I struggled for quite a while with trying to figure out just who I was and what the whole purpose in all this is.

I have this feeling of like, okay, so I've been through this lifetime of all of these different trials that I've made it through. And despite all of them, I was still able to be a responsible, successful human with a good career.

I've already accomplished everything and done even more than I thought that I could. So what is the point of all this? Like, what am I still doing here? If I've already done everything I need to do, then what's the point in this? I wanted to be gone. It was as if my mind was blown.

All of those things that had led me up to that point that were so hard that I felt like I had overcome and that I had beat, all of a sudden the straw broke the camel's back and no longer could my mind pretend like everything was fine. The trauma of him dying had taken away some of my mind.

I sometimes just start crying out of nowhere. I can go days being fine, then I can be in the grocery store and just have a meltdown and have to leave. I can't make decisions. I can't do normal things that were really simple to me before. And there's just parts of my brain that aren't functioning correctly. I can't do math anymore.

It's a strange thing for me. I'm an analyst for the Internal Revenue Service, and I've worked here for 22 years. So my job is and has been focused on numbers and doing math. And all of a sudden, doing math was like impossible. All of that started as soon as he told me that he was going to die. That was the moment that I broke.

You know, if you're in a relationship for that long, everything that you do, your spouse is considered, where all of a sudden, none of that matters anymore. I felt incredibly alone in the world. I tried a couple antidepressants. I tried some counseling. Honestly, I hate to say it, it didn't work. What kept me going was the same thing that kept me going when my parents passed away.

I would hate to think that if I passed away that it would stop any of my loved ones from continuing to live. So I found it important to honor him by continuing to go on. I had to start over. I sold the house. I bought all new clothes, new furniture, and moved into a rental. It's been a nice place to regroup.

I kind of went on this binge of just not telling myself no. If I wanted something or if I wanted to do something, I did it. It was about a month after Dave passed away. Joe, the friend that was with vacation on us, him and his husband were going to Las Vegas and they invited me to go along with them.

While I was in Vegas, I decided I would have myself a good time. And I met this guy while I was there. And he's an athlete. He's tall, really good looking. And we just kind of hit it off. We're having a lot of fun. And I'm just kind of letting loose, trying to just not think about anything at this point and just be present in the moment and have fun.

So I got back home and I went to the doctor and decided it would probably be a good idea for me to just get put on PrEP so in case I did become sexually active or was sexually active, I would be protected. I get up one morning and I see an alert on my phone from MyChart, which is like this app that I have that connects me to my medical care.

I click on it and I'm brushing my teeth and I see that I am HIV positive. So that little bit of fun that I had in Las Vegas really ended up costing me.

I had to figure out how to wrap my head around that because, you know, I immediately felt disgusting. You know, here I am just months out from my husband passing away and I went and contracted HIV. I had a really hard time not being disgusted with myself. I'm on treatment and I'm undetectable status, so it's managed. Otherwise, I'm fine. I'm healthy.

I can no longer see myself going into a relationship with a broken person like Dave was and trying to fix them like I tried to fix Dave. Because in the end, you know, it was up to him to do that and he wasn't able.

In some ways, a lot of what I did during our relationship and trying to get him to quit drinking or trying to be more conscious of how much or how often he was drinking or the different things I tried to take care of for him, it was all really in vain and a lot of wasted emotions because at the end of the day, people are going to do what they want to do. So really, I had no effect on him.

what he was going to do and how this was going to turn out. I can work on myself, but you know, you can't fix other people. Everything has a limit. Relationships have limits of how far you can trust somebody or the limit of how much you can depend on them. There's a limit to how much you can take. There's a limit to how much your brain will process. There is a limit to how much you can care.

Just learning those and trying to recognize them, that's been the most healing part for me and it's what's kept me going. I do have a boyfriend now. His name's John and we have been together for about a year now and he's going to be moving down here to be with me and we're going to move into a house together and start our lives together.

I still struggle a lot with what happened and still trying to wrap my head around it is hard. It does still get very lonely, but you have to lean into that pain sometimes and feel it.

I've often wondered, I've made it this far in my life with all the trials and tribulations I had to go through. So how far could I have possibly gotten if I wouldn't have had all those things holding me back? There's no way for me to find that out. So I can only ponder on that so much. But I do wish I kind of knew who that other person that could have been, what they were like.

I believe that I'm on this earth doing the best I can to be a good person every day. And someday maybe I'll be rewarded for that in some way. Maybe this isn't all for nothing and there's a grander scheme to things. I do believe that.

Today's episode featured Ransom. If you'd like to reach out to him, you can email at ransomnotes24 at gmail.com. That's ransomnotes24 at gmail.com.

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Welcome to the Offensive Line. You guys, on this podcast, we're going to make some picks, talk some s**t, and hopefully make you some money in the process. I'm your host, Annie Agar.

So here's how this show's going to work, okay? We're going to run through the weekly slate of NFL and college football matchups, breaking them down into very serious categories like No offense. No offense, Travis Kelsey, but you've got to step up your game if Pat Mahomes is saying the Chiefs need to have more fun this year. We're also handing out a series of awards and making picks for the top storylines surrounding the world of football. Awards like the He May Have a Point Award for the wide receiver that's most justifiably bitter.

Is it Brandon Ayuk, Tee Higgins, or Devontae Adams? Plus, on Thursdays, we're doing an exclusive bonus episode on Wondery Plus, where I share my fantasy football picks ahead of Thursday night football and the weekend's matchups. Your fantasy league is as good as locked in. Follow the offensive line on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can access bonus episodes and listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus.