Healing?

Sometimes things happen that shake us up, and make us question everything. We have to re-prioritize, make other plans, adjust our views of the world. There's pain, and there's confusion, and there's difficulty. Things aren't as they seemed, and the world turns topsy turvy. I promised I wouldn't talk about personal things in this blog, but I'm making one exception. I have had one of those things happen.

My girlfriend of almost a year (we would have had an anniversary in August) broke up with me over the weekend. It went VERY badly. I took it very badly. I was immature and stupid. I finally deleted her phone numbers from my phones last night and stopped calling. It's been really kind of pathetic. But it was a bad relationship – she had a lot of baggage, and she didn't treat me with much respect. She used me for my money and didn't really give me anything or respect my feelings. She's a very selfish, small person, and I overlooked all that to be her knight in shining armor, which I was. But I guess it got old, being taken care of.

I don't understand a lot of things still. I'm so upset I literally can't feel anything. I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't write except about this. I can kind of work, but I'm just treading water. I'm posting this because I know you've all been here at one time or another and that I'm touching on a common experience.

But can things like this be healthy? Even though it's going to be a long time before I come out of it, I think so. I think back to other breakups from equally toxic women (I have a very poor track record with women) and I see how I grew after I got over feeling betrayed and hurt. I see how I learned to be alone and rely on myself only – I've been alone most of my life, and I can do that. There's a certain comfort in being alone and taking care of yourself. Nobody's ever offered to take care of me, so I don't know anything else. I'm always the caretaker. I also see how smart and capable I am, and how I work very hard and do what I have to do, what needs to be done. I see my morality and ethics, and the way I treat other people. It's only through pain that I realize I'm actually a pretty good person. And I try to be a good person, so I'm accomplishing something.

Of course, I don't feel any of that now; it's all just a series of remote memories I can tap into intellectually but can't access emotionally. I feel dead inside, but it's only been a couple of days. I'm still in the self-abuse phase of things. I'm blaming myself, wondering what's wrong with me and what I did wrong, wishing I could just dry up and blow away. And I have to do that, I have to go through that to get to that good place.

Damn, life is complicated. J