Deciding For Myself

I looked across the room and discovered him there. Tall, just short of gangly, dark hair, a tad on the side of cocky; exactly my type. It immediately became clear that he was out of my league, so I contented myself with sly stares, blushing a bit when he caught me ogling him. My heart leaped to my throat the next day in an American history class when I spotted him there, a few rows back. I felt clumsy and out of breath the moment he approached me, saying “Don’t we live in the same building? You were at the gathering last night.”

To my shock and delight, we would occasionally walk home side by side and he soon initiated the idea of studying together. While I imagined my charm and stellar eyes were the draw, I think what he what he liked best about me were  my copious note-taking skills. We would spend afternoon – always in my apartment – poring over my extensive  notes and I’d thrill at the chance to sit close to him. When studying turned to kissing, it just felt natural. When he told me he didn’t kiss very many girls, I nearly swooned. This was something special.

We were BYU co-eds, after all. So, a serious make-out session was about as hot and heavy as it got. We’d study, he’d say nice things to me, we’d kiss, and I soon convinced myself that this meant something. He never did ask me out, never went on a date, we never “studied” in his apartment, but I was sure these things were coming. Until I realized that he was doing these things, just not with me. Sadly, while I wasn’t a new kid on the block to the dating scene, this wasn’t the first – or last – time I fell into this trap. With instincts as poor as mine, thank goodness I wasn’t having sex with anyone. Heaven forbid.

While this obvious cad taught me a lesson in heartbreak I’d rather have avoided, I actually remember him for a different, more important lesson.  He is definitely proof that important insight can sometimes come from the unlikeliest of places.

Listening to the teacher in our history class one afternoon, hastily jotting down nearly every word  he said, I started to feel myself go numb. As his words left his mouth and traveled to my notebook, they shocked me with their implications. I’d heard murmurings of it before, but never had someone so clearly laid out the failings and faults of the Vietnam War for me. The war in which my father served. The one that exposed him to agent orange and later caused him to die of a rare, terrible cancer before the age of 50.

The minutes until the bell rang became increasingly agonizing. I could barely contain my tears and made a mad dash for the women’s restroom. Once there, I found an empty stall, dropped my bag, and proceeded to cry my eyes out.  When I emerged sometime later, there he was waiting. He’d sensed my rising emotions and remained to share a story of his own.

His own father left the Vietnam War with immediate wounds and, paralyzed, lived wheel-chair bound all of his life. My co-ed crush shared with me his own struggles with a war that nearly everyone claimed was senseless, a war which required such sacrifice from his father.  He told me it was okay to struggle with this, even okay to make up my own mind about the war, even if it conflicted with my father’s. Doing so would not betray him. Service in a war eventually deemed senseless didn’t make the sacrifice willingly given less noble.

That moment, a passing experience for him I’m sure, had an enormous impact on me. The young woman I was at the time – insecure, uncertain, doubting, and searching – needed to hear those words. I longed for permission to own my questions, to review all that I’d been taught, and to decide for myself. I didn’t miraculously change, but it was a beginning; of coming into my own, becoming accountable for my choices, and trusting my own voice.