This recent job at Yankee Candle not only provided material growth for me but also spiritual growth. I had come out of a very dark period in my life that was riddled with anxiety, depression and other struggles due to my situation at the time. Working at Yankee Candle helped relieve a lot of those issues.. but also allowed me to crack an issue that I had been having with relationships.
That dark period in my life was caused by the sudden loss of a beloved job that I had at the time and where I had found myself being emotionally involved with my boss. While working, I ignored my feelings because he was after all my boss and I couldn’t in no way shape or form express them to him. But I began to notice emotional undertones from him as well towards me. The relationship we had became very toxic and it wasn’t good for either of us. When he let me go, I had a heck of a time letting go, because I still felt so strongly for him. To this day, I do still feel strongly for him but I have, for the most part, moved on.
For him though, he couldn’t see past me as his employee and cared too much about his image to build a lasting, fulfilling friendship with me. No matter what angle I tried, he rejected me and my heart, leaving me devastated each time.
The last 10 years of my life, my relationships have been one heartbreak after another. I kept ‘falling’ for the same type of person over and over. This last one made me realize that this type was my ideal type of person for me, at least that’s what I thought. But I realized over time, while hard to come to terms with, these people that were MY ideal, I wasn’t THEIR ideal.
Idealism is linked to the ego. When we find a mate that fits our ideal, our ego is stroked and inflated to the point we are walking through life with rose colored glasses. Sometimes its’ hard to see us being with anyone else that is different from this ideal. Recently, I was faced with several options I met through work and one of them was an ideal, one that would’ve stroked my ego, and then another which completely surprised me as he wasn’t usually my type at all. But overtime, the strength of our connection and the way he treated me, I realized that while sometimes we may not end up with the ideal in regards to relationships, what matters is the way they treat you. The way your heart feels and how they act around you.