9/13/2023 0 Comments Allison raskin fianceAll our lives are messy and filled with things that are hard to define. The difference is the shrinking numbers of both. Do I still think some things are abhorrently bad and other things are universally good? Absolutely. Now, I not only live in the gray, I flourish in it. Any sort of moral ambiguity was intolerable for me. I used to not be able to tell my parents I loved them because I didn’t “know” what love was and I didn’t want to lie. It's hard to overstate how big a transition accepting gray is in my life. And I can more easily forgive people from my past and let them back into my present because actions I once saw as “undeniably bad” are now “undeniably nuanced” in my mind. I don’t need to have the same connection with someone in the same exact way for it to be valuable. I also feel more open to the idea of relationships evolving over time. I no longer feel that if I stop being friends with someone at some point in my life, I need to keep that door closed forever. Talk about living in the gray! Living through this experience-which would have blown my younger mind-has made me far more open to less clear-cut relationships in general. But here was Gaby, a best friend who became a less close friend who became an almost sworn enemy who became a colleague who became a friend again but in a different way than before. I was either friends with someone or not friends with them. I had never had a relationship go through that kind of transition before and survive. But we still played a role in each other’s lives, even if, for a while, there it was purely a business one. We no longer told stories about us hanging out together because we no longer hung out together. We might not have immediately and publicly acknowledged that our relationship had drastically changed, but we no longer acted as though we were best friends. We just reframed it into a comedy variety show instead of a show about friendship. After some tough discussions following our falling out in 2019, Gaby and I didn’t abandon our creative partnership. How could we keep the brand and the podcast going if it was all a lie? Wouldn’t that make me a fraud? Turns out, not really. But then the friendship started to fall apart, and I didn’t know what to do. And for the first few years, we were best friends. We built Just Between Us on the premise of friendship. And it’s a bit scary to think that my need to be “good” and for things to be “clear” almost prevented my healing and our shared future.Īnother huge area of my life that firmly, and quite comfortably, lives in the gray is my relationship with comedy partner Gaby. I honestly don’t know what my recovery would have looked like without him. Because what was my alternative? To end this new relationship before it even had a chance to take off out of some well-intended obligation to have my feelings tied in a bow before moving forward in my life? My relationship with John helped me move on from my ex, not just because I was forming a new connection with him but also because he was my good friend during a really tough time. I let myself live in a place that might not have been morally wrong but felt morally yucky.Īnd I’m so glad I did. But for whatever reason, I let myself continue. John would have deserved “better than me” even though I was open with him about all of it and he was a consenting adult. In the past, this kind of overlap would have been unconscionable. Yet I was actively falling in love with someone else. I still missed my ex and I still loved my ex. I started dating John while I was in the midst of processing an often overwhelming loss. I didn’t start dating John once I was fully over my ex-fiancé. One of the first times I noticed my newfound ability (and appreciation) for grayness was during the highly uncomfortable process of dating someone new after my broken engagement. Like the rest of us, I lie somewhere in the middle. This makes it a whole lot harder to demonize my sense of self. By accepting the world as murky, I don’t have to fit all of my own actions into clearly labeled categories. In fact, I find freedom and self-compassion in no longer having to clearly label everything. And what’s most surprising is that I’m perfectly okay with that. Now, at 32, my life is one big ball of gray. While I wasn’t color blind, I did have a hard time accepting or even recognizing shades of gray in my life. Growing up with OCD, I liked everything to be clear-cut.
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