Lately I have been thinking about how amazing hindsight is. I have been flirting with a boy recently and made a comment that would direct his attention to my myspace blog. Knowing that I use it to work through whatever is going through my head I decided to breeze through my postings so that I could delete anything that would completely scare him away. I forgot I had taken care of that earlier when I made a New Year’s resolution to delete all my dark & pathetic posts when I was depressed at the close of 2006.
Doing so caused me to have an epiphany and I’m so thankful I have had this one. Everyone close to me knows I haven’t really dated before because I was never interested in opening myself up on that level. I had sex like a man and tried to keep the hookups void of any emotion. Yet that very action is a complete hypocrisy since I am a very emotional person. After awhile I became tired of hookups and started to yearn for something more, an actual relationship where I could open the gates to the walls I spent so many years fortifying.
In May of 2006 my life would change. I met a boy: as so many stories of romantic angst start and immediately I felt comfortable around him, I was not nervous; there were no butterflies, no jitters. It was like we slipped in to a routine before either of us knew it. From the start I could never put words to what drew me to him. In general he is not my “type”, whatever my type might be. If I hadn’t been introduced to him through friends I never would have even given him (as cliché as the saying is,) the time of day. We had a relationship even though it was not called one, for almost 7 months before he ended things and I had to deal with what most girls experience in their teens. Looking back now I’m embarrassed about how I initially reacted because I’m a much better and bigger person than that.
I knew it was the right thing, and after the immediate shock I quickly stopped missing him or wanting him to knock on my door asking for forgiveness. Yet there was always something that nagged me in the back of my mind that I could never quite figure out. This nagging feeling stopped me from being able to completely move on and put him in the dust behind me. Don’t read too far in to that statement, I had been over him for a long time at this point but I would still slip in to reflection about what went wrong every now and then.
That is, until Thursday when I began to read all of my blog postings I wrote during the time I was with him. They started a little under a month in and they are shocking for me to read now. I was not happy - with him or the “relationship”, and I was seriously mulling over ending it. This baffles me, they are my words set down so I cannot misinterpret them or recall my feelings differently. I cannot deny what I wrote about how I was feeling in the moment. So why did I not end things then?
Part of it was that I was scared of choosing to be alone after so many years of not sharing myself with someone. After all, maybe the unhappiness would fade and it was better than nothing. Ha! I was a silly girl who refused to listen to her gut, the one thing she should know she could always trust.
I was also naïve, I had never been down that road before, and I did not know how to play the game. I knew at the time that I also wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, give him a chance instead of jumping the gun to find out in the end I was wrong. The irony is that that’s exactly what happened anyway – I was wrong. I was wrong to ignore my gut, I was wrong to not stick up for myself and stop the insanity of being in an unhappy situation. Hadn’t I learned anything from Shakespeare? “To thine own self be true.” Yet I was far from that – I allowed myself to be lied to by him and worse, by myself.
I assume the important thing is that the light bulb finally went off, not how long it took to do so. I do not regret being with him nor do I regret the situation. There is no point in regretting how I acted since I cannot go back in time and do things correctly; but I do wish I had listened to what my gut was trying to tell me. After a tumultuous home life I would have imagined that once I was able to decide who would be in my life and who wouldn’t, that I would kick those who were not good enough for me out. If someone hurts me (emotionally or physically) they have no right to be in my world. Perhaps I’m just self-destructive.
I wrote a blog back in August 2006 that’s ending was the catalyst to all of my current enlightenment:
How to save a life?
Warm hands, strong arms, and assurances that everything will be ok. The power of human contact and a calm voice.
In the end I am alone, now and probably forever. Because who in their right mind would want to love someone unstable like me when there are plenty of 'normal' girls walking around. But I still have a childlike hope that I am wrong and that it will happen, that I'm not a lost cause just yet.
"I am on solitary sand, but in parenthesis".”
I feel sorry for the girl who wrote that and other blogs that summer. Because the truth of the matter is that that one thing I couldn’t ask for would not have been the answer, for I was relying on someone who didn’t deserve that level of my trust. It’s like in an emergency calling your fair weather friend… it makes no sense at all. I know this now and hope I can recall this lesson in the future so I do not repeat mistakes I have already made.
Some people have commented about how they do not understand why I choose to throw all my emotions out there for all my friends to read in my blogs. I never had a real response other than it’s what I felt compelled to do. Now I have a reason. I am so thankful that I did write all of those blogs so that I could have this moment of reflection because without it I would still be lying to myself.
So consider this final closure to that brief chapter of my life. I see now that he was not worth my time then and he certainly is not worth any more of my time now. I was a fool to ignore what I was feeling and to quickly settle for unhappiness.
I will no longer be a fool… at least not in the same way.
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