Your Intuition Guided you Here - Part 5

Start from Part 1 HERE

Meanwhile, I’m sending emails home to Australia telling everyone about the absolute shit show of a relationship I appear to be in.

Remember, this is 2004.

No WhatsApp group chat.

No Messenger.

Just me sitting at a computer somewhere in kiosk in Canada, firing off emails to people back home explaining the latest instalment of:

What The Fuck Is Tall Guy Doing Now?

 

And the response from pretty much everyone was unanimous:

FUCK THIS GUY OFF.

Get out.

Walk away.

What are you doing?

 

And logically?

I could see their point.

Part of me was screaming exactly the same thing.

Just leave this guy, Larissa.

But when I stripped away everyone else’s opinions, including the loudest parts of my own mind and sat quietly with myself…

something still said:

Not yet.

Not forever.

 

Not he’s The One.

Just…

Stay a little longer.

And I did.

 

The strange gift of not knowing what the hell we were.

Ironically, Tall Guy’s complete inability to fit neatly into any relationship category gave me something I hadn’t expected.

Freedom.

Because I’d armoured my heart and refused to fully devote myself to this man, I left myself a little wiggle room.

If someone invited me to do something, I could say yes.

 

A guy I knew through work had a wakeboarding boat and invited me out with him and his friends.

I loved wakeboarding.

Tall Guy had tried it.

Tall Guy did not love wakeboarding.

So I went without him.

 

Another time, an older guy I knew through work offered to take me out on his motorbike with a group of riders.

My work friends knew him and assured me:

“He’s a good guy. You’ll be safe.”

So off I went.

We rode through the Osoyoos, down towards the American border.

It was incredible.

 

And looking back, I realise something.

Had Tall Guy and I fallen immediately into the neat little boyfriend-girlfriend box I thought I wanted, I’m not sure I would have said yes to those things.

Old Larissa probably would have thought:

I have a boyfriend. I shouldn’t do that.

 

Instead, I kept exploring.

Kept meeting people.

Kept having adventures.

Kept experiencing the Canada I’d travelled halfway around the world to experience.

 

Remember why I’d come here in the first place?

I wasn’t here to find a man.

I was here to find me.

 

Even the messiness of this relationship somehow left room for me to keep doing exactly that.

But that wasn’t he's  greatest gift.

Not even close.

 

The mirror:

Living with Tall Guy meant there wasn’t much hiding.

He saw my good.

My bad.

My ugly.

And I certainly saw his.

 

We travelled back to visit his mum a few times, and on one of the last visits, I remember being outside in the yard throwing a ball for her dog Ziggy.

I think it was around the time of his grandfather’s funeral.

Tall Guy had wanted me there with him.

Somehow the conversation turned towards home.

Towards Australia.

And towards someone I loved very deeply, but with whom I’d had a difficult and fractured relationship over the years.

 

I’d told Tall Guy stories about this person before.

Things they’d done.

Things they’d said.

Ways they’d behaved that had hurt me.

Things that absolutely pissed me off.

 

And Tall Guy listened.

Until eventually Brutally Honest Tall Guy, on this day,  apparently decided he’d heard enough.

He came right up to me.

Stood over me.

Made me look him in the eye.

He was so close I could practically feel the spit raining down on my face as he said:

“Everything you say pisses you off about them you are them.”

I froze.

He kept going.

“Everything they do that you hate, you do all of it.”

Fuck.

 

There are moments in life when someone says something and your mind immediately starts constructing the defence.

That’s not true.

You don’t understand.

It’s different when I do it.

 

Strangely enough, this wasn’t one of those moments.

 

It was like suddenly finding myself standing in a house of mirrors.

Every direction I looked, there I was.

I felt it physically.

A visceral shift in my body.

Something dropped.

Something split apart.

Something I’d been holding onto for years suddenly didn’t fit anymore.

I looked at Tall Guy.

And started crying.

“You’re right.”

Fuck.

He was right.

 

The person I was talking about was my father.

For years, there had been things about Dad’s behaviour that I couldn’t understand.

Things that hurt me.

Ways he reacted.

Ways he handled emotion.

Times when our relationship became fractured.

 

And somewhere along the way, I’d made those behaviours mean something.

Maybe he doesn’t love me the way a father should.

And then I’d made that mean something about me. My worth. My sense of belonging. 

 

But standing in that backyard in Canada, thousands of kilometres away from home, something shifted.

Because suddenly I could see myself doing versions of the very behaviours I’d condemned in him.

 

And that raised a much more confronting question:

Why did I do them?

Was it because I didn’t love people?

No.

Was it because I wanted to hurt them?

No.

Often, it was because I didn’t know what else to do with what I was feeling.

Rejection.

Stress.

Fear.

Unworthiness.

Hurt.

Whatever conditioning I’d picked up along the way, sometimes those behaviours were simply the tools I had available to deal with emotions I didn’t know how to hold.

And suddenly I could see another possibility.

 

Maybe Dad’s behaviour didn’t mean what I’d decided it meant either.

Maybe I had taken his behaviour…

attached a meaning to it…

and then spent years responding to the meaning.

 

That one conversation changed something fundamental in me.

It changed how I saw myself.

But more importantly, it changed how I saw my father.

And it changed our relationship.

Not because Dad suddenly became someone different.

Because I did.

 

And there it was again.

Meaning.

The thing my mind had been doing throughout this entire story.

 

Tall Guy doesn’t want commitment?

I’m not enough.

Tall Guy doesn’t want marriage?

He doesn’t really love me.

Dad behaves in a way that hurts me?

He doesn’t love me the way he should.

 

Again and again, something happened…

and my brain filled in the rest of the story.

 

Tall Guy, in his spectacularly unsubtle way, started teaching me to separate the two.

What happened?

And:

What did I make what happened mean?

Those aren’t always the same thing.

 

And perhaps that’s one of the biggest reasons my intuition kept saying:

Not yet.

Because there was something here I hadn’t seen, hadn't learned yet.

Love without making everything about me.

 

Something else changed during my time with Tall Guy.

Rejection had always felt deeply personal to me.

If someone didn’t choose me, my mind wanted to know:

What’s wrong with me?

Why aren’t I enough?

What do they have that I don’t?

 

But Tall Guy forced me to confront another possibility.

Maybe someone else’s choices aren’t always about me.

His fears around commitment belonged to him.

His family history belonged to him.

His desire for freedom belonged to him.

His attempts to understand relationships, sex, fidelity and what kind of man he wanted to become belonged to him.

 

I didn’t have to turn every one of his choices into evidence about my worth.

That didn’t mean I had to accept behaviour I didn’t want. I didn't.

It didn’t mean abandoning my boundaries.

I could still say:

That’s not what I want for myself.

 

But I could also say:

If that’s what you genuinely need, then you need to follow it.

Without automatically adding:

…because I’m not good enough.

 

That was new for me. I mean TOTALLy NEW!

 

And eventually, that philosophy was tested.

By November 2004, around my 26th birthday, we both knew my time in Canada was running out.

I was due to return to Australia in February 2005.

 

At one stage we’d talked about Tall Guy coming back to Australia with me.

But he had another dream.

He was deeply passionate about the environment and climate change, and he wanted to do something that probably sounded as crazy to other people as some of my decisions sounded to mine.

 

He wanted to walk across Canada towards Parliament and make a stand for what he believed in.

And this time, instead of hearing:

He’s choosing that instead of me.

I could hear something else.

 

This matters to him.

So I told him:

“You need to chase your dream.”

“You need to do what’s right for you.”

 

Did it hurt?

Of course it fucking hurt.

I loved him.

But loving someone and possessing their path aren’t the same thing.

 

So we made the decision.

Tall Guy wasn’t coming back to Australia with me.

We would continue living together until I left Canada.

And then…

our paths would separate.

 

At least, that’s what we thought.

 

And then winter came.

 

By this point, winter had slowly started settling over Penticton.

Snow covered the streets.

 

And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t visiting somewhere that happened to have snow.

I was living in it.

There was something magical about that.

 

The town I’d arrived in during summer looked completely different under a blanket of white.

But as the days became shorter and colder, something else started changing too.

Tall Guy.

Slowly, the person I’d met that summer seemed to disappear.

 

He became quieter.

More withdrawn.

 

The passionate guy who could talk for hours about nature, spirituality, the environment and the strange experience of being alive on this giant rock…

was disappearing.

 

Our conversations that once lasted hours started becoming sentences.

Then sometimes barely that.

It was awkward.

We were living together.

We cared deeply about each other.

And yet somehow, we were becoming strangers in the same room.

 

I didn’t understand what was happening.

 

My sister did.

Or at least she knew I needed to get out of there for a while.

There was something I’d wanted to do during my year in Canada, a month at Johnson’s Landing Retreat near Nelson, British Columbia.

It was part of the adventure I’d imagined for myself.

 

But money was tight, and somewhere amongst Tall Guy and work and life in Penticton, that dream had started slipping away.

When I told my sister what was happening, she basically decided:

Nope. You’re not spending your Canadian adventure sitting in a bachelor suite with a man who barely speaks to you.

 

She lent me the money.

Go.

Do the retreat.

Do what you went to Canada to do.

 

So I told Tall Guy.

“I’m going away for a month.”

He was devastated.

 

Which was confusing in itself considering we were barely bloody talking.

 

“I’ll be back,” I told him. “It’s just something I’ve always wanted to do.”

And I went.

And it was incredible.

For a month, I lived at the retreat.

I helped with the upkeep.

I learned.

I explored.

I had space.

 

And once again, I was doing exactly what I’d travelled halfway around the world to do.

Following what felt right for me.

 

I returned to Penticton just before Christmas.

Tall Guy didn’t exactly throw himself at me when I walked through the door.

That wasn’t him.

But I knew he was happy to see me.

I could feel it.

 

And then, somewhere in amongst our increasingly bizarre relationship-that-wasn’t-a-relationship, he mentioned that he’d kind of been seeing a girl from work.

“Okay.”

At this point, what else was there to say?

 

“Thanks for letting me know.”

His mum and grandmother wanted him home for Christmas.

But he decided to stay in Penticton to have Christmas with me.

Why?

I genuinely don’t know.

 

By then I’d stopped trying to decipher every bloody thing Tall Guy did.

We made it through Christmas.

Then New Year’s.

But things between us continued to feel increasingly awkward.

 

Eventually I told him I was thinking about leaving Canada earlier than I’d originally planned.

 

And when he invited me to yet another wedding back in his hometown, I said no.

“What would be the point?”

I was going home soon.

He wasn’t coming with me.

We hardly spoke anymore.

Why would I travel back and play whatever strange role I was apparently still playing in his life?

He was genuinely upset.

“Please come.”

 

Then:

“Mom will be upset if you don’t.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

So…

I went.

Of course I bloody did.

And actually?

I had a great time.

But this time it felt different.

Because I knew I was saying goodbye.

To his mum.

His brother.

His family.

To these people who had somehow become part of my Canadian story despite the fact that Tall Guy and I still couldn’t adequately explain what the hell we were to each other.

 

Then we went back to Penticton.

And something happened that finally pushed me over the edge.

 

Enter: Random Funny Builder Guy.

One day I went downstairs to put some washing on.

There was a builder down there doing some work.

He was hilarious.

We got on like a house on fire. My smile returned. 

Eventually he asked if I’d like to go out for dinner.

And I thought:

Why not?

Tall Guy had already told me he was seeing someone from work.

We weren’t together.

I was leaving Canada soon.

So I went.

I had dinner with another man.

And when I came home…

EVERY  photo of Tall Guy and me had been taken down.

I looked around the apartment.

 

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

“How dare you?”

Tall Guy looked at me.

“What are you talking about?”

 

“You’ve taken all our photos down!”

He tried to dismiss it.

“Oh, that’s not what this is about.”

“No. Don’t give me that.”

I was furious.

 

“It’s okay for you to date someone. But the minute I go out with somebody, you clearly can’t handle it?”

“That’s not what this is about. You’re leaving soon.”

“Yeah. Well…”

And then something happened.

Not externally.

Inside me.

Something changed.

There wasn’t another argument I needed to win.

There wasn’t another conversation we needed to have.

There wasn’t another explanation I needed from him.

 

Something inside me simply said:

Ok, Enough.

 

And this time, I listened.

The next day, I left.

I paid another two weeks’ rent.

Packed my things.

And moved back into the hostel.

 

Back to where this whole ridiculous Tall Guy chapter had started.

I went to return his key.

He looked at me.

He didn’t argue.

Didn’t give me some grand speech.

He just shook his head.

 

And that was it.

The line had finally been reached.

Months earlier, something inside me had said:

Stay.

Even while people I loved were telling me to get the hell out.

And I’d stayed.

Not forever.

Not because I was supposed to tolerate anything indefinitely.

Not because intuition requires us to abandon boundaries.

I stayed until something inside me changed.

 

And now the same internal compass that had once quietly whispered:

Not yet…

was saying something completely different.

Now. Now is the time.

And for the first time in months, there was no confusion.

I was done.

 

I called Tall Guy’s mum to say goodbye.

I loved his mum, and I didn’t want to disappear without saying farewell.

 

During that conversation, she told me something I hadn’t known.

“I think he has seasonal depression,” she said. “Maybe even some sort of bipolar.”

I wish you’d bloody told me that earlier.

 

Suddenly, at least part of the dramatic change I’d witnessed in him made a little more sense.

The man I’d known through summer, the passionate, curious, energetic man who wanted to talk about life, nature, spirituality and the state of the world had seemed to disappear as winter arrived.

 

I’d watched him withdraw until sometimes it felt like I was living with someone else entirely.

 

I couldn’t know exactly what was happening inside him.

And by then, strangely, I didn’t need to.

Because something inside me had become very clear.

This was complete.

Not wrong.

Not a mistake.

Complete.

 

And there was a difference.

I left Canada not long afterwards.

And despite everything that had happened with Tall Guy, I left with a full heart.

That’s the part that might seem strange.

I wasn’t flying home thinking:

Well, that was a fucking disaster.

Quite the opposite.

I felt an enormous sense of gratitude.

 

There was this quiet knowing inside me that somehow, for me, it had all been exactly what I needed to experience.

Canada had given me some of the best moments of my life.

And some of the worst.

I’d felt completely free.

I’d felt desperately lonely.

I’d made incredible friends.

I’d loved.

I’d hurt.

I’d explored.

I’d questioned almost everything I thought I knew.

And somewhere amongst all of it, the most important relationship I’d strengthened wasn’t with Tall Guy.

It was the relationship I had with myself.

I started understanding that other people’s behaviour belonged to them.

Their fears.

Their histories.

Their conditioning.

Their choices.

Their contradictions.

I didn’t have to turn all of it into evidence about my worth.

 

And equally, I had responsibility for myself.

If somebody behaved in a way that didn’t work for me, that was information.

What I did with that information was mine.

I could stay.

I could leave.

I could change my mind.

I could say yes today and no tomorrow.

And none of those decisions had to mean the one before it had been wrong.

 

Which brings me all the way back to intuition.

Tall Guy’s first ridiculous words to me that night were:

“Your intuition guided you here to meet me.”

I laughed at him.

Then for months I wondered whether he might actually have been right.

 

Then things became difficult and I wondered the opposite:

How could my intuition have gotten this so wrong?

More than twenty years later, I think I was asking the wrong question.

 

Because I’d taken the feeling

Go here.

Go out tonight.

Stay a little longer.

and my meaning-making brain had added the rest.

This must be The Guy.

This must become a relationship.

This must work out.

This must have a happy ending.

 

But my intuition never promised me any of those things.

I did.

And when reality didn’t match the story I’d attached to the nudge, I assumed the nudge must have been wrong.

 

That’s what I understand differently now.

 

Just because something felt right and didn’t turn out the way you wanted doesn’t necessarily mean it was wrong.

 

 

Sometimes the outcome isn’t the point.

Sometimes the experience changes you.

Sometimes a person comes into your life and shows you a way of being that is so different from yours that it cracks open beliefs you didn’t even realise you were carrying.

Sometimes someone mirrors something back to you that changes a relationship on the other side of the world.

Sometimes the relationship doesn’t last…

but what you learned within it does.

 

Tall Guy challenged my belief that love had to look a particular way.

He challenged my belief that marriage was evidence of being chosen.

He showed me an extreme version of truth-telling when I’d spent much of my life learning to be nice, agreeable and accommodating.

He held up a mirror that fundamentally changed the way I saw my father and myself. That GAVE me a relationship back. 

He gave me opportunities to practise loving someone without making every one of their choices about me.

And eventually, perhaps most importantly, the inner voice that had once said:

Stay.

became:

It’s time to go.

I trusted that too.

I think we sometimes ask too much of intuition - and too little.

We ask it to be a fortune teller.

Tell me if this relationship will work.

Tell me whether this is the right job.

Tell me whether I’ll succeed.

Tell me whether this decision will make me happy.

We want the nudge to come with a guarantee.

But perhaps intuition isn’t always trying to help us avoid every wrong turn.

Perhaps sometimes it’s inviting us to live the turn.

To experience something.

To discover something.

To meet someone.

To confront something.

To become something.

And we can’t always understand why from where we’re currently standing.

 

We’re judging the landscape from the few metres we can see in front of us.

But a life is much bigger than the moment we’re standing in.

 

Twenty-five-year-old me couldn’t possibly have known that some of the beliefs being challenged in Canada would matter in relationships I hadn’t even had yet.

She couldn’t see the man she’d one day build a life with.

She couldn’t see our children.

She couldn’t know that one day she’d be deeply loved, deeply committed and completely secure in a relationship that didn’t need marriage to prove any of those things.

She couldn’t see how one brutally honest sentence in a Canadian backyard would change the way she understood her father and love him for the man he is.

Her sphere of knowing simply wasn’t big enough yet.

And maybe that’s why intuition requires trust.

Not blind trust in every impulse.

Not staying indefinitely in situations that hurt us because “my intuition brought me here.”

But trust in ourselves.

Trust that we can listen.

Experience.

Reassess.

Change direction.

Stay when staying feels right.

And leave when leaving does.

Life isn’t black and white.

It’s this miraculous mosaic of people, relationships, experiences, contradictions, heartbreaks, joy, wrong turns, right turns, and turns whose meaning we might not understand for another twenty years.

We need each other.

We mirror each other.

We challenge each other.

We soften each other.

Sometimes we even piss each other off enough to show each other something we desperately needed to see.

And perhaps that’s why, when I look back at that 6-foot-8 Canadian telling a smart-arse 25-year-old Australian:

“Your intuition guided you here to meet me.”

I still laugh.

Because maybe the cheeky bastard was right.

Just not for the reasons either of us thought.

 

Larissa xx