#whatmakesmeme

Assignment 4 - Personal Narrative 

Ever since I was young I always wore my heart on my sleeve. I am a very emotionally invested person in things that I care about and that I am passionate about, and also people. Since I can remember, I have always seen the best in people, before I was exposed to their worst side. I have never judged a book by its cover and I have always fallen too hard, too soon, for people who don’t have my best interest in mind. All I ever wanted was to find someone who was emotionally available for me.

I met my high school boyfriend when I was fifteen. He was also fifteen, but he was your stereotypical “bad boy” and for me, unfortunately was emotionally unavailable. He pretty much put me through a year of bullshit – one day we’re together, one day we’re not (dramatic for the lives of fifteen year olds, I know) but for somebody who was so emotionally invested in him, each time he would kick me to the kerb, I would come crawling back. Was I stupid? Was I pathetic? No, I don’t think so. An outsider looking in would probably say yes, but I knew the reason why I kept going back was because I could see something good in him, not all of him was bad. We called it quits at the end of 2005, he dropped out of high school to go to TAFE and I continued on so I could graduate. Because he wasn’t at school for the year I was there, it got a bit easier to forget about him because I wasn’t seeing him everyday. The year went past and I didn’t have another boyfriend, I would occasionally hear rumours about him from my friends that he had another girlfriend, or went on a date, and on the exterior I would brush it off “why do I care? We broke up so long ago” but on the inside it crushed me. I knew that I was still holding onto that possibility that he would come back into my life and we would actually have a “real” relationship.

The end of 2006 came and he rang me. Out of the blue, completely unexpected – but I answered. We rekindled our friendship and started hanging out again (much to my friends and mother’s disgust) and then we decided we would try again. This time it was actually a real relationship. We were both turning seventeen, getting our drivers licence, starting to have some freedom as adults. We went out on dates, went to the movies, went to party’s together, cooked dinner, and went away on the weekends – what couples did. It was February of 2008; I had graduated high school and was working full time at my dad’s company as a receptionist. I was still with my boyfriend, but we were having some issues. He was very over protective and smothered me quite often. I started going out a lot with my girlfriends now that we were out of high school, but my boyfriend wasn’t into that, so he didn’t go… but also didn’t want me to go. I felt as though I was growing apart – I was starting university that year, and he was working as a brickie. I wanted to travel; he wanted to stay at home. I wanted to do exciting things on the weekend; he wanted to stay in bed and watch movies all day. We just weren’t on the same wavelength anymore and it was starting to show. On Valentines Day, I got to work and went to sit at my desk when I discovered there was a rose on my keyboard. I was convinced it was from my dad, so I went it to thank him – but he had no clue where it had come from. I started to do some investigating and through the grapevine, found out it was left by a man who worked upstairs, in our building, but for another company. I approached him (via email) and he confessed, so then we started chatting. One thing lead to another and feelings developed which caused me to end the relationship with my high school boyfriend.

A few weeks after I ended it with him, Mr. Romantic asked me out to dinner. After a few dates, we started dating officially… which would then lead to a seven-year relationship. Five of those seven years were amazing. We were the perfect couple – people envied us, they wanted what we had – and I was so happy that I finally found who I thought was “the one”. In the start of the sixth year of our relationship, things started going downhill a bit. We started discussing moving in with each other, buying a house – what you would normally do in a long-term relationship. I still had desires of travelling, and I was one year into my double major at university and that was becoming a very big priority to me. He never had the same desire to travel that I did. He was very much focused on his status (he was a CEO at an Insurance Company), he was probably the most money hungry person I’ve met, and as each year went by, he got more and more self conceited and drifted further and further away from the person that left me that rose six years prior. He very rarely told me he loved me. He struggled to express his emotion. He was very much a closed book and I could never read him. He was so up and down and side-to-side – dealing with him was like being in a car accident and getting terrible whiplash – it was exhausting, it was painful, it was unfair. He was, emotionally unavailable to me and it took me a very long time to figure that out. I think I let those two years drag out because I was so convinced in my mind that he was the one I was supposed to be with, we were just going through a rough patch, we would sort it out – I was continually sticking up for him and holding onto the hope that we would get through this unscathed – we didn’t. April 5th, 2014 is when we ended our (just short of) seven-year relationship. We both agreed that it wasn’t working, and we had gone past the point of being able to salvage what we still had. We both wanted different things – I wanted to travel, I wanted to work and live overseas at some point, I wanted to live my life – I was only twenty-three, I didn’t want to settle. He wanted a family, he wanted to be married with kids, the furthest he wanted to travel was Bali and he had no desire to see the world. We weren’t meant to be for each other. I wanted everything from him, I wanted his heart, I wanted his soul, I wanted his commitment – but he couldn’t give me that. He wasn’t emotionally available to do that.

The weeks that passed after we broke up were horrendous. I didn’t eat for weeks, I slept all day. University suffered a little bit, but I soon got back into the swing of things. You kind of feel like you loose a part of yourself when you have been with someone for that long and then you suddenly aren’t. Its like “well what do I do now?” you feel lost, broken, dead inside. It was a difficult month post our break up, but I just tried to go on with my life as much as I could. I had my down days, and I had my up days, and all those in between. It got easier, but it took so much time. I remember when I was finally at the point of being okay to change all of my passwords to my accounts online because they were either a combination of his first name or surname – it’s those little things that you don’t realize when you are with someone, of how that’s all going to change when you’re not. I got through it though – and I still, two years later, consider it to be a life changing moment for me. I feel that is when my life actually started. Before then he was holding me back of the person that I really was, what I really wanted to do in my life, and since we broke up, I started to be me again, which was nice.

Since we broke up, I had a few small relationships with guys that never worked out – that was ok, it was all fun and games, nothing too serious. In May 2015, I met a guy. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, I expected that it would just be a bit of fun and nothing overly serious. We started chatting and hanging out, we started doing this on a regular basis and then we started dating. He was different from my other two boyfriends, and also from the guys that I had been dating in between. He was an open book like me. We could talk for hours – about anything and everything and we would never get bored. We could open up to each other about our deepest, darkest issues and desires and there would be no judgement. I had finally found someone that was emotionally available for me, and who was just like me. It was like we were each other’s mirrors. We complimented each other, we worked. He was very much a socialite, like myself, so there would always be an event or party on that we would be going too. Every weekend was something new and exciting, it was thrilling. It didn’t take me long to realize that his party nature was his life, so naturally I tried to keep up. I was so overwhelmed with the fact that I had found this “perfect” guy that I went above and beyond not to lose him. I found myself partying with him until 6am in the morning, then not being able to recall what even happened the night before. I found myself delving into cocktails of cocaine, acid and MDMA multiple times a week, and every weekend. Each day was melding into one and it started to become difficult to identify what was real and what wasn’t. University suffered and my grades slipped, my friends started to get worried about me and they didn’t know who I was anymore. I remember one Sunday afternoon, my mum sat me down and told me she didn’t know who I was anymore… and that broke my heart. And I think what broke my heart even more is I had no idea how I got to that point and how I hadn’t realized what I was doing to myself.

I remember one Saturday night when we were out; he told me that he had been seeing his ex girlfriend behind my back and that he was “no good” for me. I was hurt, as you would expect, but I stayed. I stayed because I didn’t want to let go of the connection I had with him. I was so absorbed with being with someone that I had an emotional connection with that I disregarded what he was doing to me was unfair and undeserved. I strived to find that person, who was emotionally available for so very long, and I found him, but it came with these consequences. I persevered, I tried to make it work, but it just wasn’t. I told him one day that I couldn’t do this anymore, I couldn’t be second in his life to his ex, who he clearly still loved. I ended it. It broke my heart because I do think that I loved him.

I thought by doing the “right” thing by me, by ending it, would make me feel like me again – but it didn’t. Instead a spiralled down into emotional despair and for the first time in my life, I hit rock bottom. I never hit rock bottom when I broke up with my boyfriend of seven years, but I hit rock bottom, hard with this one. I started not caring about anything in my life; I was drinking every night, skipping classes all the time, not showing up for work – who was this person? This person wasn’t me… it was like I was standing outside of my body watching this “stranger” destruct my life – when in fact it was I. All I wanted was for someone to be on my level, someone who would tell me they loved me and actually mean it, someone who wasn’t afraid to reveal their secrets to me and talk to me when they had a bad day at work. Someone who wanted to be with me and valued the time they spent with me. I wanted that emotional availability that I strived for from such an early age.

I started to get out of my rut around October/November of 2015. I started going back to the gym, I was doing really well at University and I had applied to study on exchange in Canada. Things were finally looking up – and they have kept looking up since then. Since I agreed to make a positive change in my life and not strive for emotional availability within someone else, but more so just myself. A light switch suddenly came on in my head and I realized I was heading down a path of self-destruction and I know I needed to change.

The more I look at the years that have gone by with the men in my life and my desire to obtain emotional availability from them; it has made me realize where it all stems from. My father was never there for me, in the emotional sense. My father has always given me anything I ever wanted or needed and has supported me throughout my education and my life, but has never given me the one thing that I have always wanted from him – his love. I know that my father loves me, I have no doubt in my mind about that, but the first time he told me that he loved me was when I was seventeen years old. I am the stereotypical girl who chose men that represented the exact person that her father was - emotionally unavailable. I never had that relationship where I was “Daddy’s girl” and I wanted it when I was younger. I wanted that relationship between a father and his daughter that is unbreakable, but I never had that. Now that I am older (being twenty-five) my relationship with my father is a lot different. We both are very open with one another and both tell each other we love one another regularly, which has taken nearly twenty-six years to develop mind you. I have found since I have become closer with my father and he has expressed his love for me, my desire to find emotional availability from men has lessened – because I have found it within my father, which after all the years of heartbreak and hurt, is the only place I ever wanted it in the first place.

Post-Script

Writing this personal narrative was hard for me. Not because I don’t like writing (because I love writing) but because it was hard for me to express into words certain events that have happened in my life. You will never really get an understanding for what one person has been through by reading something on paper. When you talk to someone, you see it in his or her eyes. The love they have felt, the hate, the hurt – all of it – you see it in their eyes.

I found it difficult to try and express myself that didn’t sound like I was coming from an angle where I was just obsessed with being with a man – because that is not it at all. I am very much happy by myself, and the struggle I have always had was with finding someone who I could connect with.

It was also hard for me to write this because it brought back a lot of memories and moments in my life where I lost myself which makes me really upset. I got upset writing this, because as I wrote the words I remembered the exact way of how I felt and it made me sad. It made me so sad that you can feel such dark emotions where you lose your identity and you have no idea who you are anymore. I am in a very good place right now and I feel even writing this narrative has reinforced that good place for me. Writing is therapeutic for me and I use it as an outlet to de-stress. I don’t believe that it is healthy to bottle up your emotions and hide what you are feeling. You need to let it all out, and sometimes the best way of doing that is through writing. As well as feeling upset whilst I wrote this, it also gave me a great sense of pride to look back at the emotional traumas that I have overcome in my life to where I am standing now. Every single moment that I have experienced in my life has lead me to be the person I am today. I am proud of the person I am today, I am proud of what I have accomplished.