One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned in this lifetime came in a very hard way. It seems as if all the difficult lessons I’ve learned have come through some form of unbearable pain. Sometimes I wish that weren’t so, especially in the case of how I came to understand that it was best for me to always follow my own dreams and not anyone else’s.
Around this time ten years ago, I didn’t really have any dream that I was trying to follow. I was actively employed on a US Customs and Border Control contract as a Quality Assurance Engineer. While I may have been extremely bored and burnt out from the many years of computer based jobs I had worked at up until then, the truth was that I was quite stable financially and not really looking to change career paths any time soon. My then partner felt very differently. His company had just gone under and with that came a decision he made to head in a completely new direction for a career. He had always dreamed of owning his own business and after a few stays at various bed and breakfasts, he had decided that was the dream he wanted to pursue.
When he approached me with this new venture, I was less then enthused. I can honestly say that at that time, I had never, ever, thought about buying or running one of them. Bed and breakfasts were always just a nice reprieve for me to enjoy away from the busyness that motels and hotels had. After I accepted he was serious about this new undertaking, we began visit ones on the market for sale. With each B&B we visited, his dreams continued to develop while mine grew only more unclear. The last one we checked out was the 1848 Island Manor House located on Chincoteague Island off the Eastern Shore of Virginia. It was essentially in the middle of nowhere where the closest mall or movie theater was over an hour away. While it was love at first sight for him, I was skeptical but tried to keep an open mind. After an overnight stay, I received a pitch from him that I can only describe as what one might hear from one of those people working for a pyramid based company. He outlined a life he guaranteed I could have there, which anyone would probably find hard to refuse. He promised there would be a much closer relationship for us out there with lots of money flowing in. He insisted there would be plenty of time for relaxation on the beaches nearby. He talked of the many fun outings we could engage in if our home was there. He even said that having guests in our house would prove to be fun and alluring for the both of us.
While my intuition screamed no!, no!, no!, my brain responded exactly the opposite with yes!, yes!, yes! Within a few months we had sold my house and used that money as the down payment for the 1848 Island Manor House Bed and Breakfast. Six months later a descent into my own living hell began.
It started with the B&B’s existing owners not moving out at the time they were supposed to because of some contractual disagreements. This left my partner and I homeless for several months. He returned to his native home in Lexington, KY, while I rented a room for the first time in years not to far from my corporate job of which I was still employed in. At times there was doubt that the sale was ever going to pull fully through. For the longest time I reflected back on those days and wish it hadn’t. But it did and suddenly we were owners and official innkeepers of the Island Manor House. Over the next fifteen months, I commuted three hours every week on a Friday afternoon to the B&B and returned 48 hours later on a Sunday night back to where I was still renting because of my corporate job I remained employed at. During that time, while the mileage remained the same between my B&B and my rental, the distance grew more and more in my relationship. He began to fall in love with his new dream which was now a reality and out of love with me. Those quiet intimate moments he spoke of never came to fruition. There was always something garnering his focus and attention and it was rarely if ever on me or our relationship. On top of that, the B&B was is disrepair and needed a lot of work. There seemed to be things always breaking. There were drafts throughout the whole house with its old windows. The roof was falling apart and leaking in several places every time it rained. Mattresses, towels, sheets and other amenities were grossly outdated and needed to be replaced. The list of repairs went on and on and eventually, I began to compare the home to that Tom Hanks movie titled The Money Pit. I dropped thousands and thousands of dollars and continued to wait for the promises to come true from that sales pitch I had once been given. After enough fights had ensued, I quit my corporate life and believed that maybe some of those promises would come true now that I was living there full time. They didn’t.
Over the next few years, intimacy in my relationship dwindled down to next to nothing. It was rare that we ever even got to the beach to enjoy it. Guests consistently took a higher priority for him as compared to the love we had once shared so deeply together. I felt plastic and fake on some level every day I stepped out of my room and into the hallways of that B&B where I had to place a smile on my face and pretend everything was a-OK. When my mother died, I left for awhile to handle those affairs and upon returning, I received next to no compassion or support for the grieving that I was still going through. After four more years of going through this hell, that relationship ended and I moved up North to the Boston area. Three years later, the B&B went under and was sold off as a short sale with me walking away with only the shirt left on my back.
It took me a long time to heal from what had happened. I had so much anger and resentments for years surrounding it. Through a deeper relationship with God, I received that healing. Through that healing, I found love, forgiveness, and peace for that B&B, that ex-partner, and even myself for not listening to my intuition when it had clearly stated to stay away from that career path. I sat down with that ex-partner not too long after and made my amends with him for the things I did which had caused some of the chaos we had gone through. Sadly, he chose to remain resentful and has continued to this day to blame me solely for its demise. I’m not angry anymore about any of it and I’m extremely grateful to God because of that. But the biggest thing I have gratitude to God with over this experience is the lesson I learned from it. I encourage everyone today to know that following someone else’s dream can have disastrous results if its not truly their own. The good thing for me today though is that I actually have my own dreams now. Some of them are even coming true as I write this, and thankfully, none of them have anything to do with anyone else’s.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
