Well, that was painful...
I don’t even know where to begin today. I have so much on my heart and mind...and still somehow it feels like I have no right to share it. It is mine, but it also involves others and still even in as much pain as I am currently in, I feel protective of someone who has shown me through repeated opportunities that my feelings mean absolutely nothing.
What is this part of me that feels like I owe someone something when all they have done is lie to me, obscure the truth, intentionally go out of their way to cause me hardship, pain and perhaps the most awful thing he did was to make me doubt myself.
Let me start with saying that on some level I knew the truth from the beginning. And let me also own that while the truth proved illusive, the feeling that I was not living in it was not. I knew I was being lied to and manipulated from the beginning. I just couldn’t prove it...and so like a person who has a lot of growing to do, I stayed in some sort of misguided effort to prove my intuition wrong.
That took over two fucking years...
But yesterday morning in an Instagram message request from a woman I did not even know existed, I got my proof. Finally. The proof I prayed for literally every single day, finally arrived. And I am grateful. There is no doubt in my mind anymore about him and his intentions. That was all cleared up in a fanatical display of deceit, hurt and betrayal. I prayed for this, I guess I just didn’t realize how painful this revelation would be.
I think the most painful thing about this isn’t the loss of him. I had already left him, again. And being with him was really kind of like living without him because he was always coming and going and going and coming. There was the constancy of me leaving him and him coming back and me wanting to believe him so I did, one more time, to my own detriment repeatedly. I see that now. I placed myself in this position to be hurt. And hurt is the only thing that was ever going to come out of this particular union. I am not special just one of many who have fallen prey to this particular person’s psychopathy. And now there is another.
A younger woman, of course, aren’t they always younger? And she, like me is reeling from the love bombing, the lies, the manipulations and the feeling that while not really ever being love (I do believe he is incapable) at times really masqueraded for it.
Do you know how it all unraveled? This blog. This writing that I do every day where I own that which is mine and process all the shit that happens in my life that I do not like, understand, have a hard time accepting and dealing with...here, this place. This sanctuary of words and thoughts and feelings and ideas. This temple I built myself, this is the place where truth finally came to a halting, painful hard stop.
It makes me laugh that this blog that he would never read and largely put me down for is the thing that was his undoing. I wrote him several loving and heartfelt posts over the intervening two plus years. Ones that he could never be bothered to actually read. The only time, in fact, that he did read my posts was when someone, one of you, would direct him back to them because something I said made a vague reference to him. And then, he only read it then because I think he was more curious about what I put out there than he was contemptuous of me...a fine subtle line to be sure.
Well yesterday exploded all over the place. With me coming to find out that the last four months, four months that I spent in a relationship that I felt trapped in and unable to leave because of fear of what he would do to himself if I left him again, I found out that he started another relationship with someone he met in the rehab that I took him to, that I arranged for him with his family. So my payback for all the loyalty, love, commitment and sticktoitiveness I displayed every day, was to find out yesterday that he has been cheating on me for the past four months. And I am sure it is longer than that. I am sure there are dozens of women out there that think they mean more to him than they actually do.
But this blog isn’t about him. It is about me. And today’s post is an opportunity for me to own the level and degree of my own dysfunction by dating him, loving him and allowing him in my life to begin with...I see the lesson that I failed to learn, repeatedly. I see that I had to hit this bottom. I so wish I didn’t but I can see that all my relationships from the beginning until now were leading me to this spectacular dumpster fire. A massive conflagration of emotion, betrayal, deceit, pain and anguish. It was always going to end like this mostly because I refused to believe from the beginning that there was another ending possible.
I cut all communications yesterday and am doing what I can to insulate myself from his further involvement in my life. I am, in fact, done. I hate that it took this to get me over the line, but I guess in this life, it takes what it takes and we just have to be grateful that some things that are fucked from the beginning do finally and blessedly end.
I will not discuss him anymore. There will be no more blog topics about him (though there will likely be more where I sort through how this happened to me and why...that is a productive use of my time). But him, this is the last one. I will grant him no further space in my life, my heart, or my mind. He is a user and taker of the highest order and it is going to take me a very long time to sort through and untangle how I, a self made woman of some means, got myself fucked up with him in the first place.
The love I felt for him was real. I loved. I showed up. I committed. I gave. I accepted. I shared. I was honest. I was loyal. I was caring. I was loving. I was all the things that someone who loves someone is. And my one fault, my one fucking mistake was that I failed to see that I was trying to give all of that to someone who not only was not worthy, but one who could not and would not ever reflect any of that back. He is like some sort of human black hole that sucks everything remotely close to his orbit into the blackness. And I can see now, I just barely escaped with my life.
Where do I go now? How do I make sense of how much I gave to a relationship that was likely always a living, evolving lie? How to I ever trust anyone again? How do I ever trust myself again? How do I move on and forward in the wake of all the relational destruction I feel right now?
Slowly. Lovingly. With compassion and accountability. I was duped but I also volunteered. I see that. I see my part. And that, in the end is the part that hurts me most. The fact that I intuited from the beginning that he was this person who would do what he did. And despite all the warning bells going off hourly and then weekly and then monthly I stayed. I remained in a position to be hurt...I did that to myself. I am the one that continued to go back despite my belief that he was not safe. And provided me countless opportunities to be let down, hurt and belittled.
And that is the part that I am most angry about. That I fucking knew it and I just wouldn’t believe it. I projected what I wanted and needed all over him even when the thin veneer flexed and buckled under the weight of all my projections. And I lived for a very long time in the discrepancy of my projections and reality. And I suffered greatly. Honestly owning that this relationship is the worst I have ever had, hands down, not even a close runner up.
But I hope I learned once and for all that avoidant is always going to attract avoidant. If I am even a touch unavailable, that is all I will ever be able to attract. And my childhood wounds will always manifest this type of person who can lie, manipulate and obfuscate the truth with a degree of sophistication that is unparalleled.
I have been crazed, I have done things I am not proud of, I have allowed myself, my own self concept and ideals to be co-opted and destroyed by someone who is so far gone that it is unlikely he will ever come back to live in a reality that anyone else that is not totally delusional can share.
I am sorry for me. I am sorry for my daughter who loved him also. I am sorry for this other woman, and all the other women who are likely swimming in the same sea of denial I was just saved from yesterday. I am also sorry for him. Love abounds all around him but his only ability to experience it, is to kill it, maim it and then blame others for their departure when he really left no other options. Kill or be killed are hardly viable, living options.
I have a lot to unpack here...how I got here and why. I know that reason exists only on my side of the street. Sure I was lied to and manipulated, but I saw through it, always but kept coming back because I so desperately did not want to be right. Well, I was and am and now there is nothing to do except pick out the flaming debris of my heart and soul and sit back and watch the smoking embers die.
Today I am grateful for the pain, I needed it to be done. I am grateful for this other woman being capable to reach out when I was not ever able to bring myself to do the same. I am grateful to be done. I am grateful that I can write myself another story and another ending. I am grateful for all the excruciatingly painful lessons he brought, taught and left me with...I am grateful I will not ever make this same mistake again.
There is a long road of reconstruction ahead for me. And that is ok. I am ready for the change, I am ready to accept that which I was not before. I am ready to see all the parts of me that caused me to be susceptible and vulnerable to this whole shit show dumpster fire to begin with...
In short, I am ready to begin to heal that which has plagued me most persistently in my life. And while I hate how I got here, I am grateful to him for burning down the last remnants of my self esteem, they weren’t working for me anyhow. And now, I have a charred but stable basis upon which to rebuild my life, my love and my ability to participate in relationships. Endings are always beginnings...and today, I really am grateful to be walking away, wounded, but walking.
I am no longer dead woman living, I am now living woman walking...I rise up from the dead...I do it all the time. Thank you Ms. Swift, me too.
Again...still.
Fuck yeah I do.
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