Though I didn’t know it at the time, his romantic pursuit of you while he was already dating me eventually led to a tremendous amount of personal growth. Your involvement in his life taught me a lot about him and how much he actually didn’t give a shit about me. Like the Fall Out Boy song, “Sugar We’re Going Down,” I now recognize that I was “just a notch on [his] bedpost.” Since then, I’ve really internalized that I am so much more than a sloppily scribbled name on the weathered list of girls he’s both fucked and fucked over.
Everything is a lot more clear to me now since I’ve taken several steps back and have taken a look at my past self. Ultimately, I forgive my past self. I hope you’ve forgiven yourself, too.
I hope you only surround yourself with people who lift you up instead of people who try to change you to fit their preferences. I hope you can now be yourself. I hope you meet someone who constantly encourages you to be yourself. I hope you feel like enough. I hope that you don’t feel the need to compare anymore. It’s not that I “won”. It’s just that I was more comfortable with how he mistreated me. I wouldn’t call my ability to stay as resilience. I’d call it stupidity.
His “love” for me was a way for me to validate myself. I don’t know how I ever got so low that I based my self-worth off of what someone else thought of me. It’s clear to me now that this someone didn’t really love me. He loved the power he had over me. I was a living, breathing target for him to practice his manipulation skills. I was a dartboard hung up on the walls of various bars—the bars where he met many different women while he told me he was “playing video games” at home.
I don’t hate him. We are all human beings—flawed in our own different ways. It just so happens that his personal issues bled into the relationships he tried to cultivate, including the one with me. By no means am I trying to make excuses for his actions. Delving deeper into the ways he’s hurt me, both intentionally and unintentionally, would just give his actions more power. And I am guessing that you already have a good handle on how he pushes people away and down in order to make himself feel better.
While I wish I recognized the signs of ongoing toxicity much earlier, ultimately, we only see these things when we’re ready to see and accept them. I have forgiven myself for my naïveté. I was so focused on the idea of forever with someone—anyone—that it didn’t cross my mind that there are better people out there more suited to me. There are people out there who would be happy to walk alongside me in this journey we call “life”.
While I once believed that my ultimate goal was complete self-sufficiency and independence, I now recognize that there’s a big difference between independence and solitude. Both are important to experience, but true independence does not require loneliness. As human beings, we are social creatures, and even from an evolutionary perspective, it has been advantageous to stick together with other like-minded people working towards the same goals.
I have a friend who has taught me to recognize what I want, to love selfishly, and to effectively communicate that. It’s definitely a process, but it’s something I’m putting a lot of effort into.
Friendship is the true foundation for great relationships, and shifting my mindset toward creating friendships instead of finding a soulmate has made all the difference. In the end, our friends are our real soulmates. With them, there’s no need to impress or be someone you’re not. You come as you are, and they love and accept you as a flawed being. It’s much too tiring to maintain a facade. Would you want to spend the rest of your life pretending? Actors do this temporarily for money, but would you want to do this permanently for free just to impress or keep someone?
I know we can’t always choose who we have intense feelings for. But I’ve learned that intense feelings do not equate to love. Love is more stable than that. What gives these feelings of intensity their power is the stark differences between the highs and lows. He meticulously ensured that the rollercoaster ride he strapped both of us into had enormous acceleration and stomach-churning ups and downs. Riding this same ride for six years made me numb to all of it. After some time, I no longer felt the trauma or nausea that it had initially induced. Initially, I stepped on for the thrill.
But, alas, the thrill is temporary, and we can’t live our lives long-term in a metaphorical theme park. Real life consists of mundane shit that we repeat over and over again.
That being said, it’s advantageous to have a partner and/or network of friends and family that will make this bumpy road of life just a little bit smoother. The expensive sports car he drove and the way in which he recklessly drove it is just another example of his disinterest in real-life. As he drove, you could feel every acceleration, every bump beneath you. Remember how he was always seeking the thrill of bobbing in and out of traffic? Yeah, it was exciting. But what about the danger he put you in as a passenger? What about all the other drivers on the road? Since then, I’ve sought safe metaphorical “drivers” who ensure that I get to where I want to go in terms of my life goals.
Since leaving him, I’ve deepened my relationships with friends and family, people who accept and encourage me to be my best self. They don’t expect or want me to be the best for them but rather to be the best “me” for me. When I was with him, I was missing the “me” part. Nothing I ever did was good enough for him, but frankly, I’ve accepted that nothing and no one ever will be.
Remember that whatever he did to you, however he treated you, is not a true reflection of who you are. Only you get to determine that. Rather, the way he treated you was a reflection of how he saw himself. Amidst all the mistreatment we both experienced, it’s clear he was stuck in a state of self loathing and contempt for himself. We were just bystanders. And our compassion for people saw him as someone we could potentially help.
Over the years, I tried to help him confront his fears and insecurities. But after much strife and struggle, I realized that that’s not my role. And he didn’t want my help anyway. People see things as they truly are when they are ready to see it. There is nothing you or I could have done to expedite that process for him. I honestly have no clue if he’ll ever get there. And I honestly don’t care. He never loved me. And since his perception of me was so important to me, I couldn’t love myself.
I thought he and I could grow together, but the other person needs to want that growth, too. I felt stagnant and lacked a clear direction of where I needed to go to grow. But now I’ve never felt more liberated in my life. I am strong, resilient, beautiful, intelligent, and loving. I wish I didn’t have to shatter myself into a million pieces and put myself together to realize the potential I held. But I suppose now, I appreciate myself and my journey so much more.
I still have a lot to learn, but I’ve grown so much since creating that distance between him and me.
I hope you’ve experienced healing and growth, too. I hope you never subject yourself to someone like that ever again. Life is hard as is without shitty people trying to bring you down in order to bring themselves up. Make it easier on yourself by surrounding yourself with kind people who make you feel like yourself. That is true love, my dear.
Take care, and I wish you the best.