Not enough

I loved you and

You loved me not enough

Leaving me broken.

TLW

Winter 2022

You allow yourself

Love Again

It feels like torture

It feels like torture

Even when I want to push you out

When I am done with you

When I want nothing else

Even when I am not holding on

You won’t leave me.

You have imprinted on my soul.

I want to move beyond

I want to move forward

But my soul is still holding on

You won’t leave me.

It often hurts

When one realizes they don’t want the love they had back. When you realize you are not holding on to anything, that there is and possibly never was anything real. The illusions you held for so long shattered when she left. The illusion of healing to reconnect ourselves back in love shattered. She never placed your feelings first, though she claims too. Her “role” as the empath, who always places others needs before her own, is actually fueled by narcissism. The exact trait I was trying to avoid, the thought system I had battled for years. I know I am insecure, so did she. I know I am fragile, so did she. I did not know I was vulnerable, but she did. Every phase of the relationship wrought with doubt, while we were saying each other was the one? Doubt mixed with neediness? How does that even work…well it doesn’t. She had the ability to treat me with respect and dignity she claimed to have. Every opportunity that she had to make the choice to treat you and your relationship with respect, she avoided. Every opportunity to do the right thing, to get closure, she avoided because of her own fear, her own emotions. She always did what was best and easiest for her, at the expense of your feelings. That is not empathy it is selfish, self serving. It is about no one but her.

Being able to step back and see this should make me mad, should make feel relief I got out the situation, out of the relationship. Yet, it only serves to hurt me further. It makes me feel more insecure, more broken, more worthless. I reached out multiple times just to be able to move on…to come to actual closure. And she avoided why? At first I saw it as self preservation, shielding herself from the pain the reality of our break meant. That it was just too, difficult for her process, because it was breaking her heart to make this choice. That’s fair that I can understand and accept. I feared she had moved on very early on…couple weeks removed from house hunting and major RV purchase…and she is already falling in love? There was never any indication that this would have been a motive for her, or even a possibility …I mean she was leaving me because she felt “she had too” that she needed to focus on herself and family and not a relationship. She could have said “I found someone else” and she likely would have hurt me by saying that, but that was the respectful, mature right thing to do. Not telling wasn’t for my protection…not telling was her self preservation…she didn’t want feel bad, she didn’t want to feel guilty about herself, she didn’t want to see she was selfish. And most importantly…she did not want to feel ANY of the pain or loss I was suffering with the relationship ending…she wanted to avoid, seek a way to not have to process her own emotions. She can’t be alone so the solution was easy…she is so afraid to be alone, but says she is afraid to need somebody. She hide her pain in the arms of another…it’s not the relationship she has that hurts, it’s the disregard for my emotions, my well being. This shows how broken she is and would have continued to be broken in our relationship, she would have continued to make me feel like I was not enough, I would have continued to worry she would leave, because it felt she was always about too. None of that is how being in love is supposed to look, or feel. Love is not easy, but love is kind. Being aware of how your actions, and decisions affect those you care about is easy. Understanding that protecting yourself and your feelings can cause great pain for another is easy. These qualities must live in the person I love, because they make love easy, because they make it possible to do the work. This is what I thought I had and clearly didn’t, this is what hurts. The blatant disregard for me as a person, let alone the person who she claimed to love…really just hurts.

Pretending

I think I have said this before

I think it’s time to move on

I think I have said this before.

The pieces have started to come back together for me.

I am settled and happy in my Dad role,

I am settled and happy in my co-parent role.

But I am still not settled, I am still not happy.

Because I haven’t moved on,

Instead I have been holding on.

In reality only extending my pain,

In reality deepening my insanity.

It continues to threaten to take me

Away from being me again.

Worked to hard to let this hold me back,

Worked to hard to to get me back.

I think I have said this before,

I think it’s time for me to move on.

It’s that day again 0ct. 22nd

It seems so trivial to hold onto or celebrate the day a love one passed. It seems that’s the not the day you want to remember, the person in that day was not who we remembered and only his soul remained in those final moments. While it marks the day his physical body left this world, it also marks the day his soul was released. His pain was relieved. In those terms it is a day to celebrate the change, but the pain suffered from the loss will always outweigh that of any positive spin we put on it. So it actually just becomes a day to mark and measure our pain? That doesn’t seem right either…probably because their is no right way to grieve. There are actually thousands of “guides” to navigating loss,etc…so I can’t say there is no book on grieving because there are literally thousands and each one will proclaim to have the solution or roadmap…all the while just proving there are a thousand ways to deal. So it comes down to what feels right and what doesn’t feel right. The fist years family all got together and we spent the day together visiting a spot he loved, or just sharing company. Over the years families grew, and the ability to dedicate a day to this became more of a challenge. So it became phone calls, maybe visit lunch/dinner etc…but sometimes nothing. In this crazy social media world, that is where we record our lives in many ways, and a way to share our lives with the world we are “connected” too. As I was comprising what I thought was my annual post on the day of my Dad’s passing, only to realize I didn’t do one last year…there are so many reasons why I may not have, and unfortunately at the time the decision must not have seemed imperative to me because I can’t recall why I didn’t. Which causes to me to reflect on what was happening with me at that time in my life…and my heart breaks. It breaks my heart to think about what was more important to me…and why…why my own well being and happiness could have been such an afterthought…and then breaks my heart again…thinking about what else I neglected: Some of only things that are permanent in this world are losses, once we loss something we will never get that back again. That is what makes loss, grief and moving on so hard. But I have learned if I don’t but myself first in those processes I will be lost, the loss of self is not something I can endure, or survive again.

Life I want

I still think about the life I want. The shared love, connection, touch. The future dreams, the daily life, the respite, the comfort. It’s just you don’t have to be in it anymore. I can start building my dreams on another foundation, because you took ours out from under us. I can find my happiness in a true connection that makes me feel the way I had hoped was true with us. I can have that, and it can be true; and it can be good, and it can be with someone else…because it can’t be you.