I need nothing!

We need nothing!

"I know what you need," he said disgruntled, as I was expressing my sentiment over our short lived relationship.

Taken back by his comment, my mind quickly replied: "I don't need anything! What I would like to have is what I want." These words echoed loud inside my head as they sunk into my core to be digested. They created what I like to call an enlightened moment of "EUREKA!"

After he walked away, the tears that had been barricaded behind my eyes poured out. The days to come were filled with bittersweet moments of self-reflection.

I had been yet in another unsatisfying relationship, where I had been tricked into believing that it was what I wanted.

This was the final straw that broke the camel's back. "I'm tired of these meaningless relationships." I shouted at myself with anger.

I hired myself as a detective and started to analyze my current and past experiences. What surfaced next was a strange feeling of deja vu. The arguments, disagreements, defensiveness, and emotional detachment on their part were all too familiar.

It was as if every one of my relationships had been formed from the same mold.

All of a sudden, there were patterns that I was stringing together. These provided clues to solve the enigma that was hidden in my relationships.

I wanted the opportunity to break the patterns that were not working for me. Recognizing these patterns was not a simple task, as each pattern surfaced strong emotions.

After allowing myself the opportunity to feel strong sentiment, I stumbled upon "radical acceptance"-- the idea of totally accepting something with your entire being, soul, heart, mind and spirit. This brought me to a very important conclusion. Acceptance makes it easier to allow the sunshine of our true being to break through the heavy clouds of our thoughts.

Acceptance gifted me with a feeling of gratitude towards the lessons learned from those experiences.

I no longer felt ashamed of how my enlightened moment of eureka came to be, when I was magnetically pulled into the sheets of a stranger, one hot summer's night.

In today's extremely technological social era, we know how easy it is to download an app with the purpose to meet individuals that can easily shift into a hook-up.

It's easy to create a story for ourselves around the notion of "I'm bored!" Or to say: "I just want to find someone to hangout with and talk, maybe this could be the one."

We mask the truth with sugar-coated cow dung--to say it euphemistically--"Let's chill," instead of what we really mean: "I'm feeling lonely so let's hangout and probably have sex."

It's hard to accept these things! It's hard to accept that sometimes we want someone to cuddle with. But fear is telling us that we won't find them. It's hard to accept that we want someone to treat us with affection, but our own insecurity bullies us with ideas that we don't deserve it.

For me the worst thing to accept of all is the dreaded company that we know as loneliness.

Being alone! The sound of this phrase can truly be cringe-worthy at times. This was the first piece to the crazy puzzle that led me to "EUREKA!"

In my own experience, I had wounds that I had ignored. Wounds of abandonment and loss. I needed to do whatever it took to keep someone near me. This was masked as needing affection for pleasure in sex. But my pleasure was actually pain hidden away to avoid a truth that was too bitter to accept.

I felt that my parents had abandoned me at a young age, and since I had also been disfellowshipped from my religion, I had lost another family there as well.