Have you ever felt a thing but you had no idea what it was?  Have you ever felt that mysterious thing so pervasively you actively tried to figure out?  My problem is that I’m feeling so many pervasive things at once that I have the added challenge of unweaving (yeah, not a word and I don’t care) the complex emotions stretching my skin and invading my thoughts.

My go to has always been writing.  Since college, though, I’ve found that another go to has become reading.  I never understood why my aunt had so many self-help books and I almost felt sorry for her that she needed so many.  In my young mind, she was desperately trying to find something.  Now that I’m older and I’ve experienced the deep and dark of life I know that that’s not what it’s about.  In Rising Strong Brown talks about Ian Leslie’s study on the information gap.  As a teacher this information is obvious and important to understand, but it’s equally important to really think about as a human being.  It boils down to this: You don’t even know what you don’t know.

Sounds obvious, right?  But when you think about this on a deeper level, it also means you are missing the curiosity to find out what you don’t know.  You can’t ask questions about something you never knew existed.  Reading these books isn’t about finding some great mysterious answer, it’s about exposing myself to things I’ve never had exposure with and finding my own answers.

Other than an uncle who was one of the most amazing people I have ever known, I never had a father.  I had never seen a man cry before meeting the Boy.  I had never been exposed to what makes a man vulnerable or how they tend to treat the ones they love when they’re feeling vulnerable.  I also never experienced true sadness like when my aunt passed away and had never really been exposed to someone surviving that process in a healthy way.  So…to the books I have gone.  Some books I can skip pages and catch things here or there that speak to me.  Some books are like gold and everything feels like a revelation.  Here’s an example of one such revelation:

“-we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.  Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows.  Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed, and rare.”

Brene Brown Daring Greatly

When I first met the Boy I knew that he had incredibly low self-esteem.  Not outwardly, though.  Men aren’t really allowed to have gushing emotions and be weak.  What I can see now is how easy it is for anyone to be stuck in a cycle of perfectionism, guilt, and shame and how, because those emotions suck, turn them into judgement, blame, anger, and pushing away.  How incredibly hard it must be to constantly be disappointed in yourself.  How hard it must be.  The Boy clearly needs outside validation, not that we all don’t want that, but for him it is a need.  Anything less means you don’t really love him and you don’t really appreciate him.  That has to be a very hard way to live.

The Boy did some crazy things.  No joke, when I told people some of the things he was doing their response was, “What!?  No way! I never thought he would do that. Who does that?  That’s crazy.”  We are talking about a regular person who has a past with depression.  Nowadays, that’s not uncommon and now I can even claim the same myself.  What I came to realize is that he wasn’t just releasing his inner asshole that had been hiding all along- he was crying out for help.  He was begging, pleading, screaming (in the only way he knew how) to get me to see that he was in pain.  It didn’t work.  All it did was hurt me and push me away.

Is any of that my fault?  Of course not.  It’s no one’s job but his own to work on those issues himself and come to a place where he recognizes he is acting out of character and analyzes why.  It’s his job to figure out how to communicate in a healthy way.

What is my fault, and my shame that I need to wrestle with, is my part in our pain.  At some point, that I can’t figure out, I became unwilling to be the one giving first.  I stopped being okay with being the vulnerable one.  I became more reactionary, more defensive, and more argumentative.  I made unfair (and some fair) assumptions.  I didn’t take time outs when I needed them and I didn’t make sure my issues were being heard and resolved.  It became easier to just predict what his response would be and either work around him or just ignore my needs for the “greater good.”  None of those are how I want to have a relationship with anybody, let alone a husband.  It’s not true to who I am and it’s not true to who I want to be.

I was unkind and unloving to my husband.  That’s not to say that it’s not understandable- I was in a great deal of pain myself and was too protective of my own needs to even recognize and provide for his.  But still, it’s there.  Just sitting there like a dense rock in my chest making it hard to take a deep breath.  Here is the trap where you being to think of all the “should have”, “could have”, “If only” and these are some of the thoughts that sucker punch me in the middle of the day.  The other question I keep drowning myself in is, “why”?  Why was I unable to see what was really going on?  Why was I attracted and pulled to him in the first place?  Why did we try so hard to make it work when we were hurting each other so much?  Why did it have to end like this?  This is the bottom of the pit.  This barrage of questions and scenarios and imaginings of run-ins with him and his new girlfriend.  It reminds me of when I was little. I was hiding under a static-y sheet that covered my face and clung to every inch of me so hard that I couldn’t breathe.  I tried to fight out of it, but it kept wrapping itself to me.  That sheet and these thoughts are clinging to me and it creates a subconscious panic.

It really sucks.

The best I can hope for from my mistakes and guilt is to never repeat them, but let’s be realistic.  Knowing I can behave that way doesn’t mean I can automatically stop it all of the time.  I do, however, have a much better barometer for when it’s happening and what I need to do to step out of that space.  I might even have a way to communicate it.  Maybe.  Actually, I’m still working on that part.

So to the Boy:  I am so sorry.  For the many little things that added up to the big ones, I truly am sorry.  For your pain, for your self-love issues that affect your connections, for your loss.

To past me: We are looking into the initial attraction/pull but I can say this, “I’m sorry you are only now learning about the tools you needed to navigate that relationship.  We can’t change it, but we can learn from it.  That will have to do for now.”

-Self