The guy - the shoot the moon guy - he's here!
"Curse" may no longer be an appropriate word for this story.
This update is for those of you who wrote to me predicting I would meet someone special.
Guess what has happened ...
Listen to the Love Curse series in order to get the most out of this episode.
Love Curse: Part 1
Love Curse: Part 2 - Reversing the Spell with Åsa Poeche
Love Curse: Part 3 - Retrieving a Piece of My Soul
Get an intuitive reading with Slade
Two would’ve been great, as I’m trying to catch up after losing three weeks to jury duty. But I would be thrilled with one.
It’s Saturday.
I’m usually putting an intro on the episode going live, and editing the one coming up the week after that.
I’ve never gone this close to a deadline with nothing in the can.
Yesterday, I tried my fourth attempt at a half-hearted topic, and it was so lack luster and passion free I wanted to cry.
I kept thinking “Shit. Am I burned out? Do I have nothing left to say about anything?” How can that be. I’ve been blogging for 13 years. I’ve recorded over a hundred of these shows.
Why can’t I just share what’s on my heart, like I usually do?
I decided to sleep on it, and work out on it this morning, and see if something floated to the surface of my consciousness before the afternoon. I can steal an hour or two to put something out, even if it’s a heartfelt confession about being blocked. An apology. Sorry guys.
Granted, life circumstances have put me behind … But what’s really on my heart and on my mind is a subject SO TABOO it’s even more vulnerable than the sharing of the love curse story.
My happiness.
My happiness in love.
I have so many conflicting thoughts — ethical, magical, personal, professional … All those lines are a bit blurred by this, and to tell the truth, there has never been a moment in my personal life that I have felt more terrified about sharing.
I kept it from my best friends for months.
The guy showed up.
The partner in the astrological prophecy.
The Transit man.
Mr. Shoot the Moon.
Remember how Carrie Bradshaw had Mr. Big?
OMG, I am so Sex and the City right now.
I have never felt so Carrie.
I binged the entire Sex and the City series on DVD when I was recovering from my stroke in 2003.
I’m stalling. Sorry.
So, according to my chart, this Love transit, that inspired me to fix my love curse, started a long time ago, last fall maybe — it was already going on before I heard about at the end of 2018.
Dena DeCastro told me it would last into 2020. It would ramp up and then peak in the summer of 2019. There are two “tent poles” to this transit peak — one in May 2019, and one in August 2019.
Now, the first one is exact May 16 - and I remember that because it’s my dad’s birthday.
It is May 11, 2019 as I record this.
I don’t know if there’s a oracle at the end of this show yet or not. I’m really down to the wire, recording this on the fly. Maybe I’ll pull a card, live, in the moment for us. At the end, after the credits.
Because this is almost live. It’s a high wire act.
I thought NO WAY am I telling anyone. I don’t want to jinx it.
And then I thought — That’s some superstitious curse mentality bullshit.
I am not the same person.
Check out my springy colorful new profile pic on social media.
Proof of my glow.
Some of you guys told me you're binging the curse … how could I not share the biggest development?
And how could I chicken out and try to manipulate the outcome before sharing?
The spirit of this story is vulnerability and confession and maybe some good old fashioned sensationalized exhibitionism. Always good for infotainment.
As you can imagine, the last few months, I’m glancing at the calendar thinking “Okay … Is something going to happen?”
No, I can’t look. I can’t try to make it happen.
If I pay attention am I going to mess up the magic.
As I’ve found before with astrology — it is uncanny and no I can’t explain it and I wish i knew the secret to how these transits are true — but they always happen. And they don’t happen the way you’d imagine. They surprise you with their innovation, but they are always, in hindsight, kind of inevitable.
Now, knowing all that could mess with your head.
And a lot of you very sweetly wrote me and predicted that now I would be meeting someone. It was going to happen for me.
And being in the familiar curse mindset I was in for 30 years, I was both crossing my fingers and preparing to be disappointed.
But I wasn’t going to show it.
I would have laughed it off.
Oh, please. We knew Slade wasn’t going to have some Romance Novel worthy love story pop up out of nowhere.
That’s not real life.
That’s a dense thicket of hearts and flowers.
Well … so, be warned.
Spoiler alert.
This episode is pretty rich with hearts and flowers.
Now, ethically, I am not sharing his name. Because he has no idea he’s part of this prophecy or this on-going reality show series. He doesn’t listen to this show, so that’s not the issue. I don’t want him to, because I don’t want him to be psyched out. But he’s not going to be listening to this.
However, I did not get his permission.
And it’s well … I think I can tell this in a way that will protect his identity.
I’m actually pretty confident that one day should I mention these episodes, he’ll think it’s really rad. He won’t be angry.
This is me talking to my girlfriends. He’s doing it too. He’s admitted as much. Just not with a few thousand people like I am.
Am I going to F this up?
Well, now that is exactly the kind of thinking I am working to release.
No. No I’m not going to F this up.
I’m going to live my best life.
I’m working to stay present, stay happy, stay in the joy, bask in the results of my hard work.
I’m excited.
You have witnessed that I am going into this with a very fresh perspective.
Let’s see what happens.
Stay tuned.
Oh, yeah, and one other disclaimer, before I tell you about Mr. Moon.
I always try to make these personal stories applicable to your own life in some way.
I’m not sure I come to this episode as prepared to make this a teachable moment.
So, you have a few options:
You can find the wisdom here and apply it as you will.
Or you can simply hold space for me.
And support me in finding some joy.
Or you can listen to this juicy gossip because you’re part of my girlfriend tribe.
The guy. The man. Dare we say the One?
He showed up.
He freaking showed up. On schedule.
He’s here.
About two years ago this man messaged me on a hook up app. One that will remain nameless, because I don’t need y’all going looking for my profile.
I honestly thought Wow. This guy is kind of out of my league.
We started flirting, sharing pics, sexting, the whole thing for like a few weeks … You know how it goes. It starts on the app, and moves to texting if there’s something there.
Now, you may not know this about me, but, as a writer, I like to think my sexting is championship level. My love life has been dirty talking with virtual strangers for many years now. I’ve never met anyone from a hook up app in real life. I usually keep all that at arm’s length. Very compartmentalized.
And for the record, i have no shame about my sexuality. It’s very much a part of my spirituality, and I would do shows about it more, if it was something you could do A show about. I kind of feel like the only thing I could do is ask every single interview guest to share their thoughts on the subject. And I may do that at some point.
We both have iPhones. We were soon messaging every night. A little bit of FaceTime. We mostly did little audio clips back and forth. He is very funny and smart, clever, creative, intellectual, but also a big kid and a music lover.
And then we started texting back and forth during the day, like I do with most of my closet friends. Not sexting anymore. Long text conversations. He’s super communicative as I am.
We eventually started talking on the phone a little, although, as with all my closest friends, we actually prefer texting.
This went on for a few months. Several months. and then he started talking about meeting me in real life.
He lives in Dallas.
Which honestly is one of the only boxes on my shoot the moon list that he doesn’t tick.
But then, most of my closest relationships are long distance.
Most of my platonic relationships and all of my professional relationships begin and live long distance in the virtual realm.
You know what a big deal I make of it when I get to meet my peeps in real life.
Although I have never turned away a client or a friend or a work collaborator because they were long distance.
I do do that to guys that want to date me.
I had some sad experiences with long distance relationships.
And when he started to ask me all the time when we were going to meet
I finally told him about this man I was involved with long distance who lived in Kansas City. I invested two years in that relationship going back and forth, and when it came time for me to relocate, I left him at the altar so to speak.
I backed out just days before I was supposed to pack up and go for good.
I broke his heart. and pissed him off.
There was another one, who only lived a few hours away, but … None of them ended well. They became chapters in my curse. A pattern.
So I was very reluctant to meet my Texan because of the distance.
Or I blamed it on the distance. I was very pessimistic. Scared of being disappointed.
The truth is … I always adored him. From the very first message.
But it is painful being away from someone you love like that. Long distance relationships for me have been hard. And I didn’t trust they were worth it.
He was very open with his feelings. He wanted to do the whole thing, meet, see if the chemistry was all there in real life, if so … Try to do the long distance thing for awhile and figure out a way to be together.
He kept saying that “We’ll figure it out. Don’t worry about it so much. We’ll figure it out."
I was like “We’ll figure it out is not exactly a plan.”
He was like “We’re the real thing. I know we are, so we’ll figure it out.”
He’s a Sagittarius.
Which is my ideal Sun Sign for a partner … I love Sag men. Most of my straight male friends over the course of my life have been Sagittarius and I’ve always been on the lookout for a Sag on my team.
BUT this a very Sagittarian “plan.”
I joke that a Sagittarius birthday party is “Meet me at this address on a random corner” and then you just go from there. And you have a great time.
And everybody wakes up somewhere the next day and thinks Well, shit that was fun.
After about a year of wanting to meet me, and having me shut him down because we didn’t have a plan, he started to get upset with me. He was also between jobs and stressed about all that, which didn’t help
He told me the feelings were real for him, we spending almost every day together on the phone. Every night.
He gave me an ultimatum and said if we weren’t going to meet and try to take our relationship off line, then he couldn’t do it anymore.
He said he was really emotionally invested and it was hurting his feelings that I was keeping us in limbo.
I wondered how much I was compounding his stress because he was in limbo with his job too.
I didn’t want it to end. I was afraid to take it further. I was really blowing it with him, I knew he was about to stop contacting me ...
And then, … his DAD DIED. Unexpectedly. Out of nowhere.
….
…..
It was so awkward and weird. and horrible.
I didn’t know whether to keep texting him and calling him to try to be there for him, or just leave him alone ...
I felt so guilty. But I also felt like maybe the Universe stepped in, you know?
I found him on Facebook and Instagram and sent him a friend request. We’d weirdly never connected those parts of our lives. I kind of intended it as a way to say I’m still your friend, I care what happens to you. I don’t want to *not know what happened to you.
And I’m not abandoning you but I’m leaving you with as many options to reach out to me as you want. If you want.
I thought he might be pissed, but he accepted my friend request.
And that was the end of our contact.
I watched all the stuff about his dad from a distance … Just sending heart emojis and staying silent.
He would like my pics sometimes — he actually always likes a pic of me — but he never commented or messaged me privately.
I would scroll through and check to see if you saw my pics on Instagram. And he always liked. them.
He posts a lot on Instagram. He’s a graphic designer, so his pics are cool, and I always like seeing his cool Texas Sky pics.
Some of the things he would post — especially about what he was reading or watching on TV — I wanted to write him a fucking book because they were always so meaningful to me, we had so much in common. It was freaky. I fell in love with him even more as a real person, in his real normal FB life without me, from this distance.
That all happened about a year ago.
For the past year, we kept liking each other’s stuff. He’s not that interested in my spirituality stuff - thinks my job is cool, and he’s supportive but not invested in consumption of New Age stuff - but he does always like my pics of my fur babes and anything that has a pic of me, he always gives a “heart.”
It became kind of bittersweet, and when Beto was running for Ted Cruz’s seat, we did end messaging a little and we found that the one thing we could safely talk about — ironically — was politics. Like, that was our safe non-personal thing we could still go back and forth about.
So, the weekend of April 14, about a month ago, he posted asking if any of his friends automatically watch every episode of Veep twice - once to get the plot, a second time to go back and get all the little nuances you miss the first time.
Well, shit, I JUST POSTED THAT IN A PRIVATE MESSAGE to a friend of mine with the same time stamp.
It was such a synchronicity and I was so excited that without over thinking it
I screen shot it, and sent it to him.
He immediately messaged me.
We started right back where we were, texting, talking, every day, all day, every night…
He told me right away our relationship is not over for him. it is either us, or he’s single. End of story. He’s that sure. No amount of time and distance has changed his mind.
We tried to forget it, let it go, etc etcetera.
It didn’t work.
He looked me right in the eye (via iPad screen) and said “I am the one for you. I KNOW I am. Please, give this a chance. Let’s meet in person. Just come and spend one weekend with me."
If it isn’t there, we’ll know it. We can get it out of our system, and go our separate ways once and for all. We don’t have to take it any further.
I told him “FUCK. If I meet you, I’m going to fall in love with you and we are going to be in a long distance relationship before we even get out of the Dallas airport.”
That’s just gonna happen. We both know it is.
So — I asked him if it comes down to it, do you see yourself moving to be with me.
He says yes.
...
This isn’t my first time meeting someone online. A large percentage of relationships start this way. Some of you even wrote to suggest I use dating apps as a way of opening up the possibilities.
In the past, I just had this arbitrary red line about it …
In an attempt to heal myself, I am releasing all old protocols. They no longer serve. In order to be a new person, enter a new phase, I have to BE that new person.
Between you and me I am already in love with this man, I have been for a really long time — for two years. I was scared and wounded … but this is a second chance.
I just cannot picture myself with anyone else.
So, I’m going to fly to Dallas and have this honeymoon scenario with him next month.
I don’t see any other way around this.
If there is SOME chance there is something about him — or me — that is just terrible and awful and we’ve made a huge mistake here.
Okay. So be it. Won’t be the first. I can live with that.
But I can’t live with the thought that this is my Person and I let it go without giving it a real chance.
Long distance relationships can suck. It may be an inconvenience. I’m imagining I’ll be doing some pining away.
But he says he’s certain we’ll figure out.
He’s optimistic and willing and filled with joy about this.
And I’m finally ready to get on board with some joy.
Oh! And one little thing that just happened today. And it’s kind of the reason I tipped over into saying “Okay, I need to share this.”
Remember May 16 - the tent pole in the astrological transit.
So, I texted him that I need to get on the phone with him this week so we can confirm our schedules, and look at flight times, and finally make this trip official. I asked when is the best night for him to do all that? Because we both have workout schedules and busy lives …
He texted back — Not to put it off, but is it okay if we wait until Thursday?
I said Sure, even thought I thought, I’ll be doing stuff with my family for my dad’s birthday.
And immediately realized, duh — my dad’s birthday — Thursday is May 16.