Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Post-mortem of an unpairing

Last night was another round of nightmares about the end of my most recent relationship. After months of self-recrimination, my mind started playing back the comments and situations that hurt me most. And if I need to put this whole drama behind me, I need to 'fess up about it all. This falls under the category of "TMI," so please skip this post if you prefer.

First of all, I endured many rounds of being compared to someone else. I do not care if it was a positive or a negative comparison, you simply do not voice these thoughts to another human being. Feel these opinions all you want, but do not tell your significant other that they are better at something, more beautiful than someone, or even that they show you more attention and love. To me, at least, those things do not prove anything to me but that you are constantly thinking of that other person and that I am not respected on my own merits, just being judged on benchmarks you have developed through someone more important to you than me. Every comment was one more drop of pain, even if you meant it as a compliment.

Secondly, I grew up with a parent that suffered from severe and untreated paranoid disorder. My mother would befriend me and squirrel away personal asides to use against me in arguments and when she did, she used them with skill and serious poison. If you have someone in your life that has a serious psychiatric problem, perhaps you understand the hurt that is dealt in these types of situations. If you do not, you have no idea how much a single comment can destroy. In my relationship, I voiced one moment of self-doubt and, in true form of my deceased mother, that moment came back as a death-blow to a stable relationship. A self-doubt is a SELF-doubt and, like pillow-talk, it should never, EVER be used against the person who voiced it. I doubted the worth of my creativity. Then it got thrown back at me as, "I will not love you if you don't really stick with your art." How many writers, artists, and performers have lost the most important relationship of their lives because they were doubted? Probably every single one because I truly felt as if I could not have been shredded into more pieces. And I still do not even though I have come out of my depression and slump to a period of great creativity and all I can think of is, "Yes, he gave up on me. Wish he could have been there to see this. Too bad."

So here I am having nightmares about missed trains, lost grocery lists, misplaced books, forgotten phone numbers. They are figurative representations of the deep spiral of emotional undercurrents I try to hide from my daily work life and my personal interactions. They are glaring error messages of my failure. When I pinpointed the personal communication differences, I was ignored. When I begged to work the issues out through a counselor, I was abandoned. When I expressed a true emotion of regret and a wish for his happiness, I was rudely told to go away with a righteous indignity I never would have thought possible from the love of my life.

It has taken this long to finally realize that it is done and over. It has taken this long to stop crying for hours a day from a physical loneliness and an emotional destitution I have not felt since being a teenager. I admit defeat. I own heartbreak. I see that I am broken and I am picking up my doll-parts and threading them back together as best I can. I can't say that I will ever completely get over this, but I will get through it. Ah, the roller derby bout of life. Just keep skating. I am.

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