Is your relationship empowering or restraining you?

It is my great pleasure to share with you an inspiring and moving story submitted by Elliot from www.lossul.com. This narrative is about an intimate experience that propelled Elliot to question whether his relationship was empowering or restricting his destiny. Come along on a journey of personal discovery and self-realization.

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Throughout our lives we experience a number of different relationships. Almost immediately this conjures up images of friends, siblings, children, parents, and the most intimate partners in our lives.

Yet there is one relationship we all have which is often overlooked, it is the relationship we have with ourselves.
This relationship is the one that arguably needs the most nurturing because the depth of your own emotional health will determine not only your own levels of happiness, but it will also spill outwards and will impact upon the lives of those that are closest to you.
We shouldn’t expect people around us to bring us happiness that we crave because all this does is heap unfair expectations and condition-based love upon the people we are supposed to care about the most.
What we should actually aspire to become is a self-reliant being that radiates love and warmth and who is giving in nature, rather than being a negative drain who expects others to fill the gaps that exist within us.
Whether we want to accept it or not, we are the ones that are primarily responsible for our own individual happiness.
But what happens when we find ourselves on the negative end of an emotionally draining relationship? What happens when a person that we love dearly chooses to drag us down and hold us back from the person we believe ourselves to be?
Often when this happens we find ourselves trying to rationalize their behavior, and by doing so we slowly come to believe that the things they say and do both are acceptable and true. Yet if we are not careful we can be completely oblivious to the damage this does over time, and we can find ourselves ‘becoming a shell of our former selves’.
Many years ago I found myself in such a position. I was young, inexperienced, and I wanted to believe that the special lady in my life spoke from a position of love and sincerity and that she had my best interests at heart. And so when I told her of my dream to go backpacking for the very first time, she responded by telling me that I ‘could never do that’ and that I was ‘just a dreamer’.
The more I heard these words, the more I started to believe them. My dream began to slip away.
One Saturday afternoon when I was out on the town, I wandered into a bookshop and instinctively found myself walking towards the travel section. I picked up a Thailand travel guide and began to finger my way through the pages. I saw words written in Thai script, I read about different types of guesthouses, and I looked at photographs of white beaches, turquoise waters, and dramatic limestone cliffs.
The dream that I’d buried deep inside came rising back to the surface and I imagined myself wandering with a backpack through Thailand. My heart seemed to swell in my chest, glowing intensely in a bright and beautiful orange.
But no, I couldn’t do that could I. I’m just a dreamer. These were the words of a person who knew me well and who I loved dearly.
She had to be right. Didn’t she?
My heart stopped pounding and the glowing sensation disappeared, and after returning the book to the shelf I turned around and walked out of the shop.
For the whole of the following week, I felt numb and there was an empty feeling inside that I just couldn’t quite put my finger on. I sat eating dinner with my girlfriend one evening and told her once again about my desire to travel to Thailand, discovering temples in the north and hopping from island to island in the south. Once again she just laughed and told me that it wasn’t who I was.
But I was beginning to believe differently.
As a passionate music fan, I’ve always had a means of escape. Whenever I play key songs I can close my eyes and disappear to another time and another place, and no matter what my present reality is, I can always create another for myself. And so this is exactly what I began to do, and it so happened that I found one song in particular that when being played I was able to close my eyes and instantly conjure up a specific place in Thailand that I’d read about. It was a waterfall which was in the center of an island that was located in the Gulf of Thailand.
I began to listen to this song every evening and I would close my eyes and instantly be transported to those waterfalls.
For three minutes and fifty seconds of each and every day, I became a traveler. But the song would always end, drawing me back to my dreaded reality.
Several weeks later I walked past the very same bookshop and once again I felt the calling. This time I walked inside, I picked up the book, and I walked over to the counter and paid for it with a massive smile on my face.
Something was happening. Something was changing.
I was beginning to listen to myself and to my inner calling.
Still, I got called a dreamer. Still, I got told I couldn’t do it. But I kept reading that book and I kept listening to my song, every damn day.
Soon after this, my girlfriend had suddenly become an ex-girlfriend. How and why this came to an end is irrelevant, but what is relevant is that within a few months of the breakup I found myself on a plane heading east.
I touched down in Bangkok, walked out of the airport, and stood at the side of the road with my backpack leaning against my legs. My return flight was two months away and I had no plans, no destination, and no idea what I was doing.
But I was there.
I ventured north to discovered those temples; I journeyed south and hopped from island to island. One day during the fifth week of my trip I found myself on the island located in the Gulf of Thailand that had occupied my dreams for so long. I gave some money to one of the locals and he drove me out towards the center of the island on the back of his motorbike.
Half an hour later he was accompanying me up into the hills. He cleared a path using a machete, helping me avoid snakes along the way. Some time later we reached the top of the hill. I smiled at my new friend and asked him to wait for me. He smiled back and asked how much time I needed.

“About three minutes and fifty seconds,” I said.

I stepped into the running water and felt the cool and refreshing liquid wash over my feet. As I edged closer towards where the water fell gracefully from the cliff face and cascaded down onto the waiting rocks below, I sat down and pulled out a CD walkman from my bag. Adjusting my headphones into place, I looked out into the bright and beautiful late afternoon sun, and then I pressed the play button.
It was my song.
And here I was.

Only I wasn’t dreaming. And I did do it after all.

You can also connect with Elliot on all the major social media platforms including  Facebook/lossul Twitter/lossul and Instagram/lossul