I truly believe that the greatest gift that you can give to another person is to genuinely let them know that who they are and what they do matters. It has been my goal in 2014 to become a more thoughtful person. A string of deaths to some individuals who positively affected my life led me to conceive this series. As the words to my favorite song go, “And for those who have stood by my side, you are the story I tell.” You are the words and pages to my story.
Over the course of the next several months, I will be writing open letters to those who have positively impacted my story. I’m not going to lie. It is my goal to make you cry, not out of grief or pain but out of the realization that you do truly matter. I am not doing this in order of how important you are to me. For the most part (other than birthdays or other important events), the letters will be done in a random order. I hope you enjoy, and I hope you come away from this with the realization that you are extremely important to me.
Dear Shannon,
Mentors come in all shapes and sizes. Mentors are not restricted by age, gender, ability, interests, or anything else. The one thing that makes a good mentor is the willingness to be there for someone when they most need it. You had that willingness, and I appreciate it every day.
If someone had told me in early 2008 that one of the people who would most impact my life would be a bus driver from Alabama with unnatural sensibilities, and that I’d meet that person on a message board on GameFAQs, I would have laughed a hearty laugh. Yet, that’s what happened. I still remember that in the beginning I thought you were trying to catfish us. I remember Ken and myself demanding proof that you were indeed a woman. Oh, I was silly (sillier?) in those days.
When we became friends, I was on the verge of an emotional breakdown. I was so down because of things failing with Stacie that it began to affect the rest of my life. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wasn’t happy with who I was. I was out of shape and had absolutely no self-confidence. I was so worried about student teaching and my ability to become an effective teacher. You helped to restore some of my faith in myself. You showed me that I needed to deal with things that I could control and not worry so much about the things I couldn’t. You did it in a way that really pulled no punches yet let me know that you still cared about me.
After a while, you clued me in about some of your sensibilities that most people don’t have. That helped me to see things in a different light. I don’t know how many times I’ve come to you over the years about dreams that I’ve had and you’ve helped me gain greater clarity from them. You told me about a sense that you had about me narrowly avoiding a car accident because my mind was so preoccupied by other things. That happened that day. During that period, my mind was so scattered that there were days that I made the 35 mile drive to school and had virtually no recollection of the ride at all. That was a wakeup call for me, especially since one of my closest friends had passed two years prior in a car accident.
You always believed in me. You gave me advice, but never tried telling me that it was what I HAD to do. You just offered it as a friend. You helped me move on in the summer of 2008. You taught me that what was meant to be would be, and if it wasn’t meant to be, there was no sense fretting over it. I needed to stay positive and appreciate life's blessings. That friendship and faith in me allowed me to shake a lot of the things about myself that I didn’t like in 2008 and become someone I had a greater sense of pride in.
Our correspondences slowed over the years, as I grew more adult-like (hah!) with my responsibilities and your time became occupied by a new exciting relationship and the responsibilities of being a mother of an adolescent. That said, I know you’ve never stopped caring about me and never stopped believing in me. I can think of a few times the past few years of some times that you slapped some virtual sense into me because I was back on a track that had the potential for present and future problems. I didn’t always like what you had to say, but I appreciated that you cared enough about me to say it.
I am so excited for the next chapter of your life upon which you are about to embark. I am so thankful for our friendship and the way you’ve mentored me these past six years. I hope I’ve grown into the person you’ve always known I could become.
Love always,
Jakob
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