I’m still broken

(and growing...but broken...)

You know, for the most part I feel really good about where I’m at. I’ve created this beautiful little bubble that’s safe and comforting and positive. And then, when I feel like torturing myself, I think about diving back in to the world of dating and I want to curl up in a little ball and cry.

I’m not going to go in to detail about what happened, but I will say that my ability to trust men has been seriously compromised. As my friend Alissa put it, there’s no more starting out with an abundance of trust, you start with a deficit and you have to build back up your credit . The problem is that I can’t even picture myself in a situation where I’m willing to entertain someone who wants to deposit some trust in the bank. The bank is closed, and sometimes it feels like it will be permanently.

Sometimes when I’m driving, I think about the email I would send to him and how I would make him hurt with my words. Nothing positive could ever come of that and the last thing I want to do is open up the lines of communication. I also don’t trust myself and know that I could cave very easily – or at least one version of myself would cave and I’m still trying to convince her that she’s worth more. This other version of myself tends to be a bit louder when I look at pictures and remember how much I adored him or how sweet he sounded when he told me the things I wanted to hear.

This internal struggle is the worst. I’m angry, sad, feeling guilty, mad at myself, wondering how he’s doing, wanting him to hurt, wanting him to know how much I hurt, trying not to give a shit and then trying to demonstrate some degree of self-compassion on top of all that because I’m allowed to feel all the feelings. It’s fucking exhausting. All this because of a guy who, simply put, was a total asshole.

Side note: Sometimes I hope with my whole heart that he found the inner courage to face his own demons and try to figure out why he behaves this way, but then I redirect that energy to myself so that I can heal because #fuckthat.

It’s hard when you want to shake someone from your life but when you understand that there’s a lesson to be learned from that experience at the same time. I keep trying to mentally close the door and throw away the key, but then I keep going back to look for some kind of clue about what in the actual fuck happened and why! Am I being obsessive or is this normal? Am I broken or growing? Is this productive or setting me back? It’s like the lesson is just at the tip of my tongue and what comes out is this jumbled mass of words (i.e.: this lovely rant) that I can’t shape in to a coherent, meaningful “take-away”.

Uhhhhhhgggggggggggggggggg.

I hope that at some point, I can look at this entire experience with greater clarity and say “Ohhhhh, that’s what got me to where I am now!” I guess in the interim though, I’ll just have to settle for jumbled masses of words and the occasional melt-down while I’m driving.