I feel so fucked up right now. So much upheaval and change in my relationships. Not speaking to my son. Breaking up with the guy I have spent the last year with. Wondering why it is all so messy and dysfunctional. Wondering why I am still so not good at relationships...again, still.
I wonder about all of this but I know the answer. I have had the relationships I have had because I had lessons I needed to learn. My son presenting me with repeated opportunities to do things differently and me just not being able to rise to the occasion...until recently.
My most intimate relationships have faltered and that has been a good thing, painful but good. I can see what I do, what I contribute to the dysfunction, what my role is...and perhaps for the first time, I can see what my role is not. I usually leave a relationship and feel that the entire endeavor’s failure is my fault. I am the one that fucked it up, mostly I have felt this way because the other person(s) have told me so. And I have willingly and without delay picked up that mantle and run with it. Somehow it feels oddly good for things to be my fault.
But I am changing, I am learning. Nothing is ever one person’s fault. Ever. I have been a divorce attorney for over 28 years and I have seen the carnage of relationships gone badly...and I have never seen one where one person had 100% of the blame. It always takes two, always.
So why I have been so wiling to shoulder all of the responsibility for the failure of my relationship was sort of a mystery...until recently. I take it all on because others are very willing to indulge my delusion that it is all my fault and because somehow if it is all me, and not them, then I have some power that I don’t really have.
I am not sure why the last two years have required so much relational carnage for me but I am grateful. I feel like I was stagnant for a long time, just acting out my character defects repeatedly and then landing squarely in the middle of my self created dysfunction and waking the fuck up. And then it was like, “what the fuck am I doing?????”
So what the fuck am I doing?
Working out unhealed trauma I suppose. And it isn’t pretty and I am not proud of it. But I am grateful that it is being worked out, I would prefer a more passive and secretive forum but I don’t think my healing works like that. I have to be there, doing shit in the world and having consequences for all to see. It appears to be the only way to puncture my pride, which as was previously identified as my number one character defect!
I apparently need to display my failures as much as I need to my successes.
It has been a hard, long relational road these past two years. But I see it all now. I see me, and my part and my not my part. And I am letting go, again. I am just allowing the swirling vortex of crap to just be there and to pray, really, pray that I can be of service in all of this and that my suffering and the suffering I have created for others can become different.
I see more clearly, and that for me anyway, is an evolving process...always. And it appears that I still learn best though subtraction. It is what I lose, misplace and confuse that boomerangs back into great opportunities to heal for me. And it all begins when I let go, get out of the way and allow that which is true for me, to just come to pass.
It isn’t as pleasant or as healed as I would like to project but it is real. And real isn’t the same as filtered, or cleaned up. I have been a warning more than I have been an example...that is for sure. And perhaps that is just my way of being of service. Showing you who I am so that you can judge that you would prefer to not be like me. But I will commend myself here that I am at least really showing up and allowing you to see the messy, unhealed parts that I would rather hide. I would like to pretend aren’t there. Or are different, or prettier or better.
They aren’t.
I am flawed. I am recovering. That is the best I got today.
And I am using the tool I have learned gets me over the dysfunction best and most completely...I am letting go, again, still.
