I should be dead instead.
Today is what would've been my boyfriend's ex-girlfriend's 26th birthday. She died three years ago and I have a very complex relationship with her. Her and my boyfriend dated for like four years long distance before him and I got together, and she died six months before we started dating but I knew him for two years beforehand. I genuinely hated her, I wanted her out of the picture and so when she died, I blamed myself for it. I felt like it was my fault because I so desperately wanted her out of the picture. I've struggled with this for years, and I thought I was finally over it but today has brought everything back to the surface ten times stronger than before. My boyfriend's mother has been posting shit about her all day, sharing music she liked and tagging her inactive facebook page and saying things about "my sweet angel!" "I miss you so much!" and all these heart emojis. It makes me want to vomit. It makes me feel like shit. I will never be as good as her, I will never make my boyfriend as happy as she did, I will never be as pure and wonderful and innocent as she was, I will never measure up to her and all of this is just one big reminder of that. I hate her but more than anything I hate myself. I feel guilty. She was sooo sweet and sooo special and all of this other crap, I feel like this is some backwards fairytale where the princess dies and the villain gets the happy ending. I don't deserve anything that I have. I don't deserve to be with this guy who I love, and to live with him, and to have plans for a future with him. She deserved all of this. I'm the one who should be dead instead. She should be living out all of this while I rot six feet undergound. I just hate myself so much and I want to die even though I'm too chicken to do anything about it. I don't know what to do, I can't handle this anymore, the demons in my head won't shut up and I'm convinced I'm never going to get any relief from this, I'm just stuck living with this neverending insanity in my head for the rest of my life. It just never freaking ends.
@myaekingheart
That is really hard to deal with! Someone who dies young is always going to be perfect, because they are frozen at that moment in time. There is the tendancy to idealize the dead, because no one is going to talk about the times they were kind of awful - and EVERYONE is awful sometimes. You're right, you can't compete with the dead, especially a young woman who dies tragically.
Of course, it wasn't your fault she died, but I can understand how complicated it makes things when you really disliked her and wished she was gone, and then she died and you ended up with her boyfriend. It's complicated even in just a regular breakup, when you knew the ex. It's much easier to handle someone's exes when you never knew them at all.
I had a friend who met a man who lost his "true love" in his early 20s in a terrible car accident. They were both injured, but she was permanently injured and her parents blamed him and never let him see her again. When my friend got together with him, I thought it must be so hard to live in that shadow. She was his perfect love that he had lost tragically. But you know what? Years passed, and they got married and had kids. Eventually that ideal woman he had lost became a distant memory, because he had a reality built over years with my friend.
I hope it's a little easier now that the birthday is passed, and you can focus on your healing journey (it IS a journey, and sometimes it's brutally hard, but healing IS possible), and building the life you want to live.