For some reason, my thoughts lately have turned toward a post I wrote nearly 4 years ago when I was in a different place, in a different relationship with a lot of questions to answer.

My post “Reflections on needs and submission” is one I’ve read and re-read every now and again. It was written in what I consider one of the major crossroads of my life, as I was discovering and deciding who I was and who I was going to be. It was a time when I opened up an important internal dialogue that would carry on since then. It may be quite the coincidence, but that was also just around the time that Christopher and I got initially acquainted. Or I should say, Christopher got be be more acquainted with me through reading what I wrote and I simply discovered his existence. I never would have imagined then that we’d both end up where we are now.

It’s interesting how four years later, what has changed; what I have moved on from and what I have come full circle back to again.

There are a lot of parellels that can be drawn between where I am now, and where I was then. And yet, I realized, I’ve evolved if ever so slightly, and am not the same as I was then. You really don’t appreciate the growth and the change until you can look back.

Spring to summer of 2005, the last stretch of BYU-Hawaii before I moved to China was a time when I really struggled to be happy, though I couldn’t figure out why at the time. I had found what I thought to be the relationship that I would be able to keep for the rest of my life, someone who was exactly what I was looking for, what I never dared believe existed for me, and yet I turned into quite the social recluse, and found myself drowning in school, unable to get myself together for anything.

It didn’t make any sense to me then, but I understand very clearly now the kind of homelessness and bleakness that I was facing then, simply because there was a major emotional conflict between where I was and where I wanted to be. Circumstances deprived me of being able to completely build my life around the relationship, and it truly felt like an existence without sufficient air to breathe.

And now, here I find myself again, approaching the threshold of another major life change, and (if I were to be dramatic) torn apart from the person I want to be with the most.

It’s really been a challenge, this distance. This is perhaps the most courageous I’ve ever had to try to be in all my life. There have been other difficult times, but none have been a choice in the way that this one has been. I don’t really talk about just how difficult it is with anyone but Christopher because only he truly understands all the depths of what it means. I feel often that nobody really understands the kind of homesickness and lifelessness I have to battle without having him around. Few others have this fundamental emotional need like I do, and a need that is not understood and not shared simply comes across as unnatural or unhealthy. I find myself feeling like I have to justify my unhappiness to those who would not likewise struggle with the follow through in practical decisions like this one.

But you know, people can learn to function perfectly well underwater if they get creative, and there are lots of interesting things to see and do there once you get past missing being above the surface and in the sunshine. I have my little oxygen tank we call skype and as long as I know that I get to come up for a gasp of fresh air intermittedly (we’ll see each other again in just 2 weeks) before plunging back into the depths, I’ll be ok – we’ll be ok.

Comparing the Fei of 2005 with the Fei of today has really helped me see how far we’ve come. Though there may be similar extrenal challenges, my internal dialogue is completely different. The post that I wrote back then, was triggered because I had a major question about whether or not we could be what each other needed. I hadn’t really understood what I needed then, though I understood more about myself then than I ever had before.

Today, I am still discovering the extent of my emotional needs, but I find myself more trying to balance them out than to discover and understand them like I had been before -and I no longer need to question if the person I’m with is able to meet those needs. Compatibility was a subject I was obsessed with in conjunction with my search for that someone for me -or that someone I could be for. But that doesn’t come up anymore. There’s no question about whether there’s someone better for either of us out there. The searching has come to an end. There’s no one else in my life who has the ability to understand me in the way Christopher does (and put up with all of the emotional neediness), nobody I respect more, nobody else I want as the leader of our home who I would gladly submit to, and certainly nobody as weirdly perfect or as perfectly weird as the two of us put together. We belong together; it works, it fits. We fit. The only thing left to work on is constantly renewing my commitment to being those things that Christopher needs me to be.

These past few months, I’ve come to understand a little bit about the relationship between sacrifice and love. I’ve always been familiar with the theory that love breeds service/sacrifice and service/sacrifice breeds love. But in practice, I’ve seen that by giving up that which is hardest for me to give, for making what is to me, the ultimate sacrifice for our relationship, our ties to one another are more sealed than ever before. It’s not what he gives to me, but what I give to him – all the parts of myself that I offer up – that makes me more his.

Looking back to see where we are now has really helped me appreciate just how much I’ve grown. But it’s not just time that has brought this on. I think I’ve always taken it for granted that so most of this growth has happened during and because of my relationship with Christopher. I know I complain a little (ok, a lot) about the lack of extrenally visible movement in our relationship, but internally, there has been a strenghtening and fortification like no other.

It’s interesting to me how seamlessly Christopher fits into all parts of my life, how I can share it all with him, and how all pieces of myself, my past and past relationships seem to make sense and be resolved in our relationship with one-another.

Today, I taught one of my piano students about the tonic chord and explained how it’s the most comfortable place to be in a song, just like home, where most songs begin and end. Everything in between creates movement, direction, beauty, but you are never quite complete without returning to the tonic at the end.

Christopher is my tonic chord, my home, the most comfortable place for me to be. He is where all those questions I have asked in the past and will ask in the future have a place, an answer, a resolution. There are other chords that could do the trick of resolving dissonance, but none that work quite as well as this one does. It’d be nice just to linger in the safety of home forever, but it wouldn’t make a very interesting song. So here we are, going through the minor third, the diminished seventh, looking forward to the dominant, the fifth, little halfway point in the song.

And at the end, we have us to look forward to: a perfect cadence.