borderline.bunny

reality bites

July 11, 2008 at 2:02 pm (rants, recovery)

Well, it nibbles and it chews, but its starting to be a little less toothy. Yet, here it is.

I’ve known it for some time, but it really hit me this week that I was just not very in tune with reality most of my life. When I was young, I would actively live in a fantasy life – to the point that I would prefer to stay in my room by myself, then be outside. As I got older, I phased out that fantasy life, knowing that it was not quite a good idea, but I had a lot of difficulty connecting to people and the situation around me. Everyone was just a character in my life, not a real person. As such, I treated them in whichever ways I needed to feel better about things – and on the flip side, would get super frustrated if I couldn’t get them to do what I wanted.

More recently, the fantasy world morphed into more of a “fix it” mentality. While I acknowledged the situation as it was, I still didn’t accept it. There was always something I could do to fix it – or so I thought. I think that drove a large amount of the overanalyzing that I do, especially about emotions and actions of other people. If I could just pinpoint what went wrong, I could go back and change it… was how I thought about things, especially relationship-related emotions.

All of those things, I now see, were driven by my defense mechanisms. I simply could not deal with what reality was telling me: I had no control of the people around me or how they felt. Sometimes, things happen, and you just can’t do anything about it, no matter how sorry you are, or what your intent was. There may be good reasons – even understandable ones – but we still feel whatever it is we feel in response to the situation. Understanding that the intent wasn’t malicious might lessen the blow, but it doesn’t change what happened.

The Turning Point
I am finally getting to accepting the reality of my situation with J, and, dare I say it, my life. Its hard – believe me, I am struggling. But its not like when I was forcing myself to imagine him with his new gf, and just putting myself in the path of an emotional bulldozer. That itself was also a defensive reaction, much like not trusting someone in a relationship. Its like, if you assume the worst, you won’t open your heart and get trampled. I thought if I could crush myself, I could crush how I felt about him.

Unfortunately and fortunately, neither reality nor emotions are that clear. I am finally starting to understand why we’ll never get back together, and how he feels, simply because I am finally allowing myself to feel the end. Its like, duh – I get it. I hurt him, a lot. Even if I didn’t mean to, or if I did it out of my own fear or love for him, or if he contributed to it, it doesn’t change the fact that I really hurt him by cutting him out of my life so absolutely. I feel it now that he is doing it to me. I understand the burning anger of being blamed for the relationship, that comes with the other person treating you like you are a bad person that caused all of this to happen. I understand the shame and humiliation of hanging on and believing for as long as I did, for opening your heart and loving someone who tells you they want nothing to do with you anymore.

I am angry, and yet, I can no longer blame him. I am also conflicted about how I feel towards him. I don’t know if he still cares for me or wishes that I was a part of his life – maybe all that we have been through has put him past that. But while I am so angry sometimes that I want to peel the skin off his face, I also still care about him. I am so humiliated that I want every reminder of him gone from my life, that I wish that I had never met him. At the same time, I still hope that we can move forward, that one day we can reconnect somehow. I want to hurt him, and I want to comfort him and tell him that yes, I understand.

Now that my motivation isn’t getting back together with him, I am no longer blinded by what he has been telling me all these months: We just can’t get along. It didn’t hit me until this past Mon/Tues, when I got into the tussle with him. I had been so happy, so comfortable moving forward with myself, that it was a shock to regress back into that angry, vengeful, hysterical girl that took every word as him not caring about me, and wanted to punish him for it. It threw me for a loop, that’s for sure – even going so far as to doubt whether or not I’d really changed after all. Thankfully, I regained my ground later in the week, but I realized that its him that really does it to me. Whatever the reason, he pushes my buttons, and I hate the person I become when it happens.

I so wanted him to be the one that I created and kept a connection that maybe was no longer there. Maybe there still is/was some connection, but not the one that I imagined it to be. There were moments, these last two months, where I would take a step back and say to myself, “Huhn. Why am I making such a big deal of this? He’s not the love of my life, and I’m not going to die.”

And yet, I really wanted him to be. I stressed about how we were going to strengthen that connection, rebuild the love that we once had – the entire time, ignoring that, well, our relationship sucked. Yes, I care for him, and he is a good person. But the three months we were together was full of conflict, and even if we have the most amazing relationship in the world now, that won’t change it. I kept saying to him that I wanted to create something new, but what I really wanted was to erase what happened before and rewrite history. Sometimes, I really wish that I could have heard what he said when he said it.

Balancing Logic and Emotions
I am ruthlessly analytical; as a former history major, my natural inclination is to understand why something happened – what was the turning point, the key event. Just as my emotions are intense, so is my logical side – for a long time, I denied the validity of emotions as a motivation for people, including myself, because of how things “should” be. So, I find myself drifting into thoughts about why and how and this is how he feels and blah blah blah. The analysis is far more subtle than ruminating and obsessing, so it was hard to catch. For once, I am cutting myself off as soon as I recognize it going into my head. Right now, I need to just feel what I feel, regardless of rhyme or reason. It will never get out of my system until I let it run its course, even if that course lasts for the rest of my life. I want to feel and be, not understand and try.

I can feel compassion for him, and I can understand why. Its balancing that with still allowing myself to feel the anger and hurt that is really hard. This is how I finally realized that all that overthinking was a defense mechanism in disguise. Yes, it is important to see other people’s points of views, but not at the expense of invalidating your own feelings. Understanding can lead to healing between two people, but that’s only after our hearts heal ourselves through our emotions. When I apply the understanding and punt my own feelings, the rift between us can never close, because there is still a part of me that is open and raw. Its sort of like a pimple: all that nasty pus needs to rise to the surface before the bacteria can be outed from your skin.

I am a compassionate person, and I don’t want to hurt anyone. But again, I am finally valuing my own humanity, and my own feelings. I’m not a martyr – I don’t want him to be happy with someone else, I don’t give a shit about her as a person. I may not wish that they break up anymore so that he can be with me, but no, right now, I hate it that he’s happy where he couldn’t be with me. I don’t care that he felt this way before – I feel this way now, and I wish that he does too.

I can allow myself to feel and say all of those things because I can have my feelings, while controlling my impulses to act on them. No matter how much I want to hurt him right now, I won’t – maybe not even for him, but because I feel regret afterwards. I can allow myself to feel and say those things because I know that it will pass in due course. Its the more that I deny my own hurt and anger that resentment builds. I don’t want anymore emotional tartar

So yeah – reality is hitting me like a ton of bricks right now. And its not fun. But oddly, its not as bad as struggling to keep the fantasy alive. There is a sense of peace that comes from relinquishing control against an uncooperative current. I may think and I may feel, but I am not stressing about how to get back into his life anymore. Along with that, I’m not depressed because my plans are not falling into place. Its a huge burden lifted from me.

I am able to reconcile the compassionate part of me with the reality of how I feel. Being compassionate does not mean certain pain – I don’t need to make myself suffer just to prove to him that he meant something to me. When I am ready, I can still open my heart to him – being sorry for creating a rift, admitting my own pain, telling him that I care when there’s no guarantee that he feels the same way – but I don’t have to expose myself and go out of my way to hang my ass out there by accepting his relationship and inviting her to things. I mean, duh. I did that with my ex’s before, trying to be friends with them and act like I didn’t care that they hurt me, and look where it got me. I’ll be honest and open with them, but I don’t have to be a masochist about it.

Maybe one day, we can be something more than ex’s from a bad relationship. I do care about him, even if simply because he was a part of a huge transformation in my life. And I do think he’s a good person. But if we do interact, my goal is no longer to rebuild a connection with him. I think that if we can get to a point where we are not arguing or driving each other mad, it would be a huge win. I’m tired of hating the person I become whenever I am around him.