a life a little more private

Recently I met somebody who I wanted to keep all to myself. If you've been following me for any length of time or if you know me personally, you'll know I'm an over-sharer. I absolutely love using my own experiences and learnings to help others fast track their progress and learn the lessons that they need to learn. And I know you guys absolutely love hearing about my dating experiences and stories.

But for the first time in what feels like ever, I met somebody who made me want to keep my love life private. I won't lie, this was a very new feeling for me and I don't think I really realized what the feeling was that I was experiencing until days after our last date. (I also appreciate the irony of me talking about him whilst saying that I don't want to talk about him)

Now I'm not sure if it was the fact that this guy isn't on social media himself (he definitely wasn’t the first guy I’ve met who isn’t online) or if it was something about our connection, but it made me feel like maybe, just maybe, I want to start making movements towards keeping certain aspects of my life a little bit more sacred.

To give a bit of context I only met this guy twice over a period of a couple of days. He doesn't even live on the same Island as me, let alone the same city, and I haven't heard from him since he left. But he stirred something up within me that I’ve been pondering since he came into my world.

You know that I love to really lean into how people and conversations make me feel. I love to unpack and dissect interactions and experiences to figure out what I am supposed to learn from them. I truly believe that there are no such thing as coincidences. And whilst not every single person we meet, every single encounter we have or every single experience we go through is supposed to teach us some massive life changing lesson, I do believe that we can choose to take something from everything. Sometimes that will be the tiniest little realization or mental note, and other times it could completely change the trajectory of our lives or how we see ourselves as people.

When I leant into how I had been feeling since meeting him, and how the time with him made me feel, I also acknowledge that there is a chance that it’s not even really about him personally.

Since my last long term relationship ended coming up to two years ago now, I have been on an explorative journey to figure out who Kylie really is. And it has been the coolest fucking journey ever.

But it has also been incredibly challenging.

Peeling back the layers and uncovering aspects of your personality that you are trying to determine whether or not a truly yours can be a heartbreaking process and grieving old versions of yourself is a real thing.  Challenging parts of my character traits, the way that I show up in the world, the things that I say, the way that I act, and whether or not those things are truly who I am and who I want to be moving forward is confronting. Ultimately, if you know me you know the real me, but I also know that there are characteristics of my personality that I have adapted and adopted over my lifetime and unlearning those and changing them can feel scary. But because I'm somebody who practices what I preach and I want everybody to be so incredibly happy and in love with their lives I knew that I had to fully commit to really digging deep on myself to stay congruent with who I really am. It's a constant process and I'm certain it will never end, but I definitely feel like in the last 12 months some pretty monumental shifts have happened.

So when I met this handsome stranger recently who shook things up in my own world without even realizing it, I had to acknowledge that there are some things that I do want to change moving forward.

I have really resented memes and quotes on the Internet that have suggested that the public sharing of a relationship takes away from the importance of it, or that it's a just a front and that the happiest of relationships are the private relationships, because I don't agree that this is entirely true. However, along the journey that I've been on over recent months I have really wanted to challenge myself as to why I do some of the things that I do and to make sure that I'm doing them for me and only me.

I have met some incredible men throughout my life; people that I've imagined myself being in a relationship with, people that I've been in a relationship with, people that I've dated briefly, but this was the first time that I've ever imagined what it would be like to keep a relationship on the d-low. Now of course I don't want anyone to think the fact that I'm wanting to keep a relationship secret means that this person was unavailable for relationship or that there was any need for it to be kept private, because that's absolutely not what I'm suggesting, but there was something about the time that I spent with him that made me want that to be just for us.
 

The nature of who I am and what my business is had almost begun to make me feel as though I had an obligation to share things with people. And whilst I'm not saying that I'm going to stop sharing things (because I absolutely love telling stories and giving people an insight into my world and to my experiences) but I do wonder what it would be like to be in a relationship that the interwebs knew little about.

I don't know if I will ever hear from this guy again or if I’ll tell him how much meeting him has impacted me, as he could very well have just come into my world to teach me this lesson. But for whatever reason and whatever happens going forward I'm incredibly grateful that he's cracked open this part of me that I have never given time or space to really consider. I have to laugh because it's not like it hasn't been suggested to me before, or that I've not had guys in the past request or suggest that I don't share so much, but he's the first person that's made me feel like that's what I would want to do.

I want to remind you that you are allowed to change any aspect of yourself at any time, for any reason at all. And simply “because you want to” is a completely acceptable reason. We are all humans traversing this earth, figuring out shit as we go, and we are allowed to change our minds and opinions on things at any point.

Don’t let anyone make you feel bad for changing or tell you that you should stay the same.

This is your life, not theirs.