august overshares

Look, it's not like I have to pretend to be doing something I'm not. The purpose of this blog is simple. Beat the dead horses, cry rivers, push the boulders up the hill to watch them roll down and go round and round enough times that my mind can hopefully go quiet. It's part loneliness, part desperation, part hope that if I talk to the void for long enough it'll share some of it's wisdom with me.

So here goes nothing.

tw: brief mention of suic*dal thoughts.

In the month of February, a relationship that defined six months of my life came to an end and with it came the rather unsurprising but instead deeply traumatizing knowledge that I was being emotionally abused for at least the latter half of it. She was playful and pretty and lovely and she hated me. She spent a month trying to love me and once she figured it was getting way too serious she spent the rest of it doing all she could do hate me. Being who I am, I assumed I could love her out of her need to push me away but reader I need you to know you can never love someone hard enough for them to want to love you back.

Love you back. I emphasize that for a reason. When I was in it, I didn't see it. but my ex loved the version of me she knew she could change. She loved my potential. Showered my future self in praise. Talked about how excited she was for me to be rich and successful. Talked about all the things I needed to do to be better. Was happiest when I dressed the way she liked, did my hair the way she liked. When I was being myself it bothered her. My quietness and peacefulness was seen as not caring and being nonchalant. My gentle acceptance and easy going demeanor questioned for being disingenuous and accused of self sacrifice to keep the peace. There's more things that happened that I'll likely share as I continue to process that mess but god I really thought she loved me. I told myself she was just nervous and didn't understand me yet (after 4 months of being together). I told myself that even though she was being avoidant and looking for ways to sabotage the relationship, she promised she was working on being better and so I should be patient and let her come to me.

In more words than I care to rehash she called me selfish, saboteur, self-centered, careless and uncaring. She never believed me when I tried to explain myself to her and would pick strangers sides over mine. If I did something to hurt her it would be brought up again and again. Even when she lashed out and took all her anger out on me, even when she made me cry for hours as she digitally tore into my heart on a train ride to another city, even when she accused me of using my autism as an excuse for everything. Even then I loved her and wanted to work it out.

I kept having the conversations, making the choices that included both of us, doing what I could to do better. I quickly started to hate the things about myself that she criticized because I thought it would make me love her better and it almost started to make sense.

You know....the only reason we broke up is because after our last argument she ghosted me for a month. Pure silence. It took two weeks of waiting for her to text back to realize that she didn't love me enough to try.

A part of me thanks her for it. We'd have probably stayed together much longer if she hadn't done that. I would have slowly killed myself to be what she wanted and she would have kept hating every version of me until I stopped existing altogether.

It's been months since that chapter closed. An ending concluded by a disjointed 4 sentence long accusatory break up letter dated 3 weeks prior to the day it was given, cold shoulders, passive aggressive messages and my personal items held hostage. It's been months and I still don't feel back to normal again. Sometimes I worry that my self-esteem may never return to what it was. I still remember how much I was started to hate myself because I was starting to believe what she said about me. I still remember crying as I asked my friends if I really am that awful of a person and they were too nice to tell me. I still remember wondering if maybe it would be better if I was dead because then I wouldn't hurt or disappoint anyone else again. I remember feeling so so tired of it all.

I put a lot of myself into that relationship. It was unhealthy and foolish. I handed my self-worth over to someone else when I should've held onto it myself. I let the louder voice win instead of listening to my own quieter one. I can't blame her for any of that, I trusted her intentions way too easily. I can't villainize her in the face of my combined naivety and penchants to date people a bit too much like my father.

For the last 4 months of the relationship she was manipulative and mean to me and I let her do it. She lied a lot, sure, but in a lot of ways she was exactly what she said she was. A perfectionist, avoidant and still smarting from her family trauma wounds. I just went ahead and assumed that she meant it when she said she was working on healing and that she would be mature about it all seeing as she was older.

Anyway, I got out. It took a minute but my survival instincts and years of therapy for finally kicked in, so all's well that ends well.

If you're reading this and can relate, I hope you got out too and I hope your life is happier now.

Thanks for witnessing.