Imagine this: you’re born with a desire to relate to others, to spend time talking and laughing with good friends who respect you and want to relate to you. But as you grow up, you find your confidence betrayed by false friends, derided by immature ones, or worse, you find yourself fending off unwanted advances from homosexuals who confuse your wish to socialize and relate to them as one human being to another for something else, something disgusting to you.

What do you do? You put up a wall. You become a loner. You choose to call yourself non-social. You make yourself believe you don’t need friends and you don’t need others. Alone, in the dark, you even start getting doubts about your sanity and sexuality, though you know better.

But then, after much prayer, you meet a girl who loves you for who you are. She respects you. She inspires you. She wants to be with you. She becomes your closest confidant, your best friend, the one you always go to for advice, and then, your wife. A dark, brooding veil begins to lift. You start seeing life through a different light. You meet her friends — decent, sociable people who enjoy good company the way God intended it, with laughter and talk and jokes and more laughter and help when you need it.

You begin to grow as a person. You start to make friends on your own now. People begin to discover you for who you really are, and the honest ones tell you that you’re a likable guy after all, that their first impression of you was wrong. All of a sudden, life is better. There’s more hope and joy in it. Friendship starts to take on the meaning you’ve always dreamed about. You find yourself.

This happened to me. I tell you, it feels like a long, dark night is giving way to breaking light. I doubt I’m alone in this. So what I want to say is, don’t lose hope. Hang in there. Pick your friends carefully. Don’t doubt who you really are for a minute. If you persist, you will succeed.

Thank you, Ligia, for making me see the light. It was through you that I grew and found myself. Thank you, and, though you already know it, I love you.