Day 3: Something you have to forgive yourself for.
And again, here's another topic I feel I've already taken care of, so to speak. Well, maybe not entirely. I guess I hold on to enough self-resentment to make sure the infraction I'm about to discuss NEVER happens again, but, then again, life offers no guarantees, I suppose. I know I'll try harder, and that counts for a lot. Piss on anyone who says any differently.
Honestly? I've done some pretty messed up things that ultimately ended up damaging me pretty badly, but I'd have to say the number one worst thing... the one for which I had the hardest time forgiving myself is lying to myself.
The worst part is, when you pick apart the situation, I don't even know why I did it. All I can really come up with is ego and the intense desire to not be wrong. I guess I genuinely believed it was in the name of love, but I'm not even sure if it was. That is, however, coming from the perspective several years of "getting over it" has given me.
See... I was in this... "situation". It makes me cringe to refer to it as a "relationship" because it didn't really fit my ideal description of what a relationship should be. But... we'll stick with what it was for the time... I was in this relationship, or, as Dane Cook would refer to it, a "relationshit". BLAH... it's hard to break down and talk about it. It's like going through boxes that have been neatly put away in the attic. Ya know?
Literally and figuratively speaking, I gave up a lot for the sake of this relationshit. I gave up a lot of myself, who I was, I diminished the way others saw me, and I caused a lot of estrangement between myself and folks who genuinely loved me.
I let myself believe that genuine love was equated with the intense drama this person brought into my life. That's how it is on the soaps, right? Everything is so super complicated and there's all these convoluted story lines and people make mistakes and blah blah blah blah. The long and the short of it is that I wasted my 30s on an emotionally unavailable, emotionally abusive, lying, cheating, manipulative, sociopathic idiot. In order to be okay with being so hurt, used, taken advantage of, and abused, I rationalized it... he's just a victim of abuse himself, he doesn't know any other way, he really loves me... he's just not able to show it, yadda yadda yadda... What it all boils down to is this... None of this was on me, OTHER than the fact that I lied to myself.
It was his job to fix himself, to overcome his past and make the choice to either let his circumstances rule him and live in misery or to rise above and choose a happy life for himself, his children, and his significant other. He chose to wallow in misery and lash out at anyone who tried to give him genuine love. My fault is in refusing to see it for what it was, and when the truth was right in my face, I wanted to pretend it was something it wasn't.
"If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck..."
Yeah, I wanted to pretend it was a swan in a duck suit.
I guess, if I acknowledged reality, it would have meant, in my warped mind, that there was something wrong with me that I attracted this to myself. I know better now. I went in knowing full well what would probably happen, yet I went forth with an open mind. Being kind, genuine, and open is not a crime. It isn't my fault. I just have to be more willing to accept the truth when it's handed to me.
Generally speaking, I forgive myself for allowing all this to happen, and I did learn a lot from it, so I guess it was necessary in the grand scheme of things. I do hold a small amount of resentment about it, though, just to remind myself that these things do happen, and that I shouldn't allow such drama into my life.
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