That Breakup Saved You...

I feel this, deeply.

Not everyone gets a love story that ends with such grisley remains that it forces you to change who you are, how you love and what you want.  But I think most of us do.  Now, whether we change or not, that is a whole other question.

Sometimes someone comes along in your life and just fucks you over so badly that you have to look at what you did to contribute to the dumpster fire your life becomes.  Sure, there are lots of things you could call out the other person for:  lying, cheating, lack of care or concern, self centeredness, narcissism, pathology on all the levels.  But after those lists are well made and rehearsed, if you want to avoid another relationship like that, you have to figure out what you did to contribute to the fucking mess you find yourself in...

I was there not that long ago.  The person I “loved” just burned me so hard and much that I had no choice but to walk away.  Block the number and heal the wounds he caused and reopened because I refused to cut off access.  I always think I am way tougher than I am.  I can handle it.  It never occurred to me, before him, why the fuck would I sign up to “handle it”?  Why would I want that kind of deal?

But ending things with him and then getting a ring side seat (through the other woman and all she shared with me) to see how what I thought I had, I never, ever really had.  It was all a lie and manipulation.  All of it.  So I don’t call it love anymore.  I didn’t love him, because I do not believe it possible to love someone who is just using you.  Love requires some mutuality and respect and for me, he had absolutely none.

But once I saw, with very painful clarity, who he really was, it was easy to block him and move on with my life.  I did not engage when he reached out through my children.  I did not respond when he roped other people into contacting me for him.  When I finally said, “that is enough!”  I meant it.  And he remains blocked to this day.

I didn’t know that I needed that breakup.  Which also means I needed that whole fucking debacle I called a relationship.  But I know that while the relationship took me to depths I never wanted to visit, that breakup fucking saved me.  For sure.  Not a doubt in my mind.

For me, the whole of my life, has been about hitting bottom.  I just don’t seem to learn things in other ways.  Now I will say that the longer I am alive and working on myself, the bottoms need not be so low.  But I still seem to need hitting them regardless of their depth.

But leaving him and all his dramatic bullshit behind was a revolutionary act.  I let go of all the savior shit I had been doing when he threatened to kill himself (repeatedly).  I realized that I was not a partner or girlfriend, I was a mark.  And it was all an elaborate con run by someone who was too drunk and fucked up to really keep it going.  And I was too codependent to see what was really going on for a long time.

But once I saw it.  I could not unsee it.  And I have remained faithful to my vision and not allowed all his smoke and mirrors to alter my reality after I “woke up.”  And I can see now, that leaving him and ending that shitshow really did save me.  And it forced me to do some inner work that was well overdue and long needed but I just couldn’t seem to get there on my own.  I had to date him and hit that bottom and then walk away and in so doing, save myself from him and men like him.

That breakup saved me.

And it gave me a new lease on life.  It made how I date and who I date a completely different thing. I took some time off to heal myself wounds so that I didn’t allow all of his trauma to be heaped upon whomever I might date next.  I do believe that there needs to be a time for pallet cleansing, if you will, in dating.  Sometimes that time period is a few months and sometimes it takes years. And sometimes the scars left are permanent.

It took me years to let go of the relationship before him.  I just was so sure that he was THE ONE.  I couldn’t let go.  And all that pain and trauma caused me to have to do some amazing inner work too.  Just very different from him.  He was relatively easy to get over because when you see that it was never, ever what you thought it was, it doesn’t take a great deal of effort to move on.  There was nothing there to begin with...except all the effort you expended for someone who wouldn’t bother to throw a glass of water your way if you were on fire.

Dating in the aftermath of that awful experience has been interesting.  I keep seeing how I got all messed up with him to begin with because those places in me that feel I don’t deserve better are huge and cavernous.  But I did in fact learn my lesson, so when I come across someone who even remotely feels like him or has his issues, I am outta there, fast.  And I don’t look back.

In my careful, thoughtful and remorseful review of him and us and all that went wrong, I have uncovered a great many things.  And have done my best to heal them. I can see where my own issues just played right into his hand.  How I was so misled but how much I just kept going along with it hoping it would get better.  Allowing him access to just lie to me more and more.  To alter my reality to the point of me not having a clue as to what was real and what was not.

My ego really doesn’t like me saying any of this.  She needs me to be all good and complete and never, ever vulnerable.  But I was and I am.  I care deeply about people.  More so than I cared about myself.  I enjoyed getting lost in others so that I could avoid dealing with all the deficiencies I found in myself. And leaving him, helped me stop that shit.

That breakup saved me from him, but it also saved me from myself and my dysfunctional ways of dealing with men, love, sex and my life.  I had to rearrange it all because the pain of how I was living became greater than the pain to change.  And that is the bleeding edge where all change occurs, at least in my life.

I am different now.  I am more cautious.  Less trusting.  I see that there is no way a healthy person wants to move in with you in 4 months.  I see that healthy people do not call it love after two months.  I see that my wound needs me to be picked...and that right there set me up for a great deal of heartbreak because I was never very discerning about who was doing the picking. Now I am. I pick now. I pick me first then I make much better choices about who I pick to date.

I see my own worth today and want to allow in only those people who have also done the work. And in order to find out whether they really have or not, I have to give it and them time.  Time for things to unfold.  Time to move forward while evaluating what I am getting back and what I feel comfortable giving.

That breakup fucking saved me.

And today I can say I am grateful for the whole debacle and its very acutely painful ending...

I am grateful for all I learned that I didn’t really want to along the way.  And that today, I persist as a more healed version of myself than I was before that break up.  A little less susceptible to manipulation than I was before.  A little older and a lot wiser.

And today I remain very grateful to him and his terrible teachings.  He taught me things that I didn’t want to know or ever learn.  But I can see now that leaving him was one of the best things I have ever done. And to some degree, my life started over the day I walked away from all that I could not seem to previously leave behind.

Again...still.