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So I'm going to share a very personal story about an old friend of mine, and how this day, December 30th, changed my life. (THREAD - WARNING, EXTREMELY SAPPY)
13 years ago, I made a friend in Canada while I was on tour. I met her randomly at a bar when she made a casual reference to Star Trek TNG, one of my favorite TV shows. Meeting interesting people around the world was such a great perk of tour life, and she was indeed interesting.
She was in university studying psychology, she was a talented musician, she knew more than me about Star Trek, and she and her siblings (they were celebrating her sister's birthday) were fun to drink with. We became international buddies, for a while.
She was a young adventurer who'd travel around the world on her own (her Dad was a pilot so she flew standby for free, and she stayed in hostels), and I was touring, so our paths crossed a few times. We were like IRL pen pals. I saw her at pubs in Zurich, Toronto, Vienna.
We'd have drinks and talk about Star Trek, catch up on our lives, then go our separate ways. She moved to Ghana to study African drumming in the mid-2000s, and that was the last I heard from her. My career expanded, I settled down in LA, bought a nice house, and got married.
My life, as I understood it at the time, was perfect. I rarely thought about that old pal of mine. She wasn't on social media. One time she joined Instagram briefly, it synced with my contacts, and I saw that she was married with a great career. It was cool to see her doing well.
And then a lot of stuff happened in my life. Not all of it good. By late 2015, everything had changed for me. Everything I thought was perfect no longer existed, for various reasons. I was no longer married, no longer with my long-time job, and I wasn't sure what to do next.
It was classic midlife crisis stuff. I... wasn't doing well. At times it felt like I was stumbling through the dark, not sure what I was looking for. Then one day, I was sitting alone in my studio, anxious & aimless, contemplating my existence, and Star Trek TNG came on the TV.
It was a Data episode. It instantly reminded me of my old friend, the brilliant psychology student world traveler musician, bc Data was her favorite character. So on a whim I took a photo of the TV & texted it to her without context. I wasn't even sure if she had the same number.
She wrote back immediately. Turned out she was in the process of a divorce, and her life was in exactly the same sort of chaos mine was. We texted back and forth a bit, catching up on life, and then she said "I want to get out of here for New Years. Do you have plans?" I did not.
She flew down to visit me on December 30th, 2015, almost a decade since I'd last seen her. I wasn't looking for a romantic thing, and neither was she. Just a fun New Year's with an old friend. But when she arrived, some weird spark emerged. It was like magic.
We both knew, immediately, that everything was about to change - dramatically. We were entirely unprepared to fall in love, but... we did. Pretty damn hard. Suddenly, we both wanted to burn down whatever remained of our old lives, and embark on something new.
We spent much of 2016 figuring things out. We sold our houses, left the cities we lived in, bought an RV, embarked on an adventure. It wasn't planned, it wasn't practical, it wasn't smart, it wasn't easy. But it's what we had to do. And a year and a half later, we got married.
At one point I looked back to figure out what day it was that I first met her in Canada, when we talked about Star Trek. Then I looked at my text history to see what day I randomly texted her a photo of Star Trek on my TV. They were 10 years apart, TO THE DAY. I'm not kidding.
So today, December 30th, is a special anniversary for us, because it's the day we reconnected three years ago and suddenly became so much more than just distant friends, and knew we had to tear everything down to start something new.
The subsequent journey was long, difficult, incredible, sometimes absolute hell - but we made it, and now we've finally settled into a little life together.
It's never too late to discover the path you were meant to be on. Happy anniversary, @Steph_Sheridan_. I love you.
It's never too late to discover the path you were meant to be on. Happy anniversary, @Steph_Sheridan_. I love you.
(And you know it’s love because our mutually ideal anniversary date is staving off the flu by staying in at our cyberpunk Christmas house drinking Hot Toddies and playing virtual reality rhythm games in our underwear at 1:30am)
