feeling alone
just turned 32. i live alone one town over from my "childhood friends" (read: oldest friend and her high school friends who i became tight with when i moved back to the city). they're nice people. we went on our annual apple picking trip. the youngest and her boyfriend knew i'd just been through a hard breakup and they invited me to get dinner and talk to them (in the past i'd helped the youngest get perspective on a sh*tty ex).
My mother has always been problematically controlling and anxious. Without getting into details, that is continuing to happen. It interrupts what would otherwise be a healthy and productive life. I can't even get a morning coffee without defusing a barrage of texts.
Every day, I want to go back to my ex, whose schizophrenic parent was similarly problematic, and live under his thumb, misunderstood, disappointing, obsessed with myself, numb to all of this, numb to all of the ways my life feels like a referendum on my worth. I am crying every day and I can't even pinpoint a reason. It's everything.
I have no idea what to do or where to start. It's all gotten away from me.
I can't pretend the moment I said this didn't define our relationship:
"Maybe we rushed into things and need to dial it back."
It was a barb in response to:
"I don't know if this will work out because we seem to want very different things, but I will always care about you."
He was finally drunk enough that day to admit that he'd been wondering if he should break up with me. And from that day on, it set the tone of our relationship. I was a stowaway, inexplicably holed up on a vessel that was going in one direction, f*** if I had anything to say about it. Making a single adjustment for me was out of the question.
I understand why he was like that. Protective of what he thought was the integrity of his life. Doesn't make it right. He is over $100K in (not just educational) debt because he is incapable of listening to an authority figure of any kind warn him away from stupid ideas.
I'm a person. I loved someone. I tried not to act like it. He was a person who said things like, "I've wanted to say the L word, but it's too early." It was.
We broke up ostensibly because he hurt me on purpose by giving me the silent treatment when I wanted to talk about a show we were watching, which was confusing; the real reason, though, was that he got meaner and meaner when it became clear that I wasn't breaking up with him, which was so much more painful than just asking for space would have been, or even breaking up would have been. And I'm sick to my stomach that all of this could have been helped if I'd pretended not to have feelings or thoughts. If I'd been dead, he would have loved me.
) (😔)
explain to me why i'm supposed to feel bad for the person who made me a friendly inconsequential puppet in my own life — desireless, bland, manageable — until i ruined it by speaking
