Emotional Purging

Remember back in May when I wrote that post about that guy who turned out to be king of the douche colony? Yeah, so do I.

I took tonight out to do some emotional purging. I scoured through my Facebook and read every message, wall post, whatever I could find from him. (I do find it annoying though that one cannot see wall-to-wall if you are no longer FB friends with the person) I didn't delete them because I feel like this is an ongoing process. It's not something that is going to happen once and then I will be magically cured. Its been about two months since it all ended and I've been dealing with it really well. Every so often he'll creep back into my thoughts and then I remember how everything ended. The only reason I chose today to purge is because my dad asked me if we still talked. A simple "He doesn't exist." kept my parents from prying but a part of me wanted to tell them. I wanted to say this jerk took total advantage of my fragile emotional state. But what would that have done? Absolutely nothing.

This healing process is a process for me and me alone. Every few months I will sit and look back at all of those ridiculously sappy "I love you's" and "You're beautifuls" and everything that could have been a total lie. It's not like I'll ever find out the truth. And I think that's my main reason for this emotional purging. I'll never find out the truth. I won't get to find out if any of those "I love you's" or "you're beautifuls" were true. Because reading back that message it's hard to tell how much of it was true and how much of it was a defense mechanism. It's hard to tell someone the truth. It's hard to hear the truth. And I also know that it's hard to look at your own reflection after you've heard the truth. So who knows? But I will purge and I will reflect and I will keep positive (except for those few comments that will make me scream "You jerk!" at my computer screen. hey, a little yelling is healthy =P)

Goodbye to You, Goodbye to Everything I Thought I Knew

What do you when the one part of your life you believe in most turns out to be the biggest lie? I recently found out. The one person in my life who I though I could trust completely betrayed me more than anyone could. I gave him my entire heart and I found out that it all meant nothing.

The whole backstory is long and complicated but let's say it all started 3 years ago. That was when I emotionally gave myself away completely. This all comes down to the betrayal of my deepest feelings. I told someone I thought was a great guy that I loved him and when he said he felt the same way, life seemed perfect.

Fast forward 3 years. There were a lot of things that happened during that time; good and bad. I shared a lot of secrets and broke down a lot of my emotional walls. He was theone person who I could always tell the truth. It wasn't always easy and sometimes he had to force it out of me, but I always told him. It hasn't been terribly easy for me to talk about how I am feeling but I knew he wouldn't judge me. And after a long time of keeping it inside I finally let out the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

First off, it is really hard to talk to someone who won't answer your phone calls. And then when I finally did get in touch with him (via text mesage), he talked to me with so much malice and contempt that I was shocked, angry and most of all hurt. How could someone that claimed to care about me talk to me like that? I was upset for the remainder of my evening and so in my cloud of negative feelings, I wrote him a letter. One that calmly and clearly articulated all of the things I was feeling at that moment and things I had been holding in for months and years. I didn't get overly emotional considering how angry I had been initally and managed to keep myself in check. But it was the first time I had been 100% completely honest with him about everything I had felt. It wasn't pretty but it was true. Sometimes it takes an inciting incident to force you to confront the truth. That's what happened for me. It was always bubbling just under the surface...like a boiling pot of water if you will. But as soon as it got too close to the top, I'd put a lid on the pot and say that I would deal with it later.

Let me just say that I've done a lot of growing up and changing in the 3 years that I had let this boy into my heart. It was easy, with us living in two different states it gave both of us the space needed to grow up. But no matter how much I grew up or changed, I never felt any differently about him. Those of you who know the situation know all of the details of this and I'd like to not put that on here because I don't want it to affect the way he's portrayed in this. So when I finally got fed up enough with his games to cut him out of my heart, I knew it was serious. And in the letter I addressed a lot of things that he had done in the past that weren't right. I mean, I had addressed them before but it was always in passing or not terribly seriously. This time I really gave my honest feelings about things. I don't think it was easy for him to read but I could have never anticipated his response...ever.

It was worse than a punch in the stomach. I felt like all of the air had been sucked out of my body with a vacuum and that someone was holding a pillow over my face to keep me from ever breathing again. He told me his honest truth and it was way more honest than I expected it to be. Wait, actually I don't think it was more honest, but the honesty came from a place completely opposite of where I expected. I expected something more equal to what I had written. Honest and to the point but civil. That is not what it was. It was painful. He said he never cared about me. Not as a friend and certainly not as anything more. He was just a narcissistic jerk who made me believe that he cared about me to gain my trust and pray on my emotional weakness to get the ego boost he "needed". That is not an easy pill to swallow. Especially in the first couple of sentences. It only got worse from there. I'm not going into too much detail; its still kinda painful to think about. But it really hurts when someone who you cared for and trusted tells you to "get a life" more than once. That still hurts pretty badly.

I'm sure that he got a huge laugh out of the poor little emotionally shattered girl that he played for a fool for 3 years. And I know that I'm angry about that I don't think I'll ever stop being angry. People have tried to tell me that I will but I'm sorry, that's not something that you ever forget. It was the day my world came crashing down around me. And I'll admit that I was stupid for sticking around when he obviously treated me like garbage. I've come to grips with the reality of my fault in the whole affair. But no matter how stupid you are, no one deserves to hear that. Every sentence was like a new slap in the face. Reading it, I felt nauseous, angry, hurt, shocked...I pretty much ran the gamut on the emotional front. But it was a few weeks ago and I have stopped having the dreams where I see him in the street and attack him with the knife I was carrying in my purse just in case that opportunity presented itself. I'm not that angry anymore. But I'll never get my final goodbye. For him it was easy to just pretend that I never existed, because to him, I never really mattered. For me, it's going to take time. Every day I let go a little more.

So, to answer my own question...what do you do in that situation? You get up, take a deep breath and you keep living. It's not easy but I owe it to myself.

Where is Your Heart?

Hello world and thank you Kelly Clarkson for providing me with an easy title. So, here's the new blog! My first request too!! Even though I'm sure this is something I would have written about sooner or later...love. Oh yes, I'm going there. Its time kiddos. It's a new year and time for a new perspective on life yes? Kay, well here goes.

My good friend asked me to write a blog about "love, heartache and pain." Hello! Three words I'm very familiar with. So I put on the Kelly Clarkson (who is also very familiar with these three words) and I'm getting to work.

Now, I'm my very humbled and honest opinion, you can't have good true love without heartache and pain first. I mean, how will you be able to appreciate the good stuff without the bad stuff right? I know this much from experience. Hell, who doesn't? Half of the conversations I have with my girlfriends is about men. The men we love, the men we used to love, the ones we could have loved, the ones we spurned, the ones who spurned us...you get the picture. As singer Willa Ford so brilliantly said "Fuck the men, let's drink to us!" It is so amazing that so much of our lives as women can be marked by the men that were apart of it. 'Sex and the City' is one of my favorite shows and Carrie Bradshaw's life on the show is really marked by her three big relationships: Big, Aiden and the Russian. You know what? I think I'm going to ease into this thrilling look at love by talking about my favorite show.

'Sex and the City' is practically a woman's guide. A handbook for life and love in New York City some may say. I mean, I definitely know a lot of girls who look at their lives through the lens of Carrie and Co. Hell, I do it all the time! First, Carrie has Mr. Big. Big never really goes away though does he? I know the feeling Carrie. The Mr. Big type is the guy who keeps ripping your heart out, pounding it flat with a meat cleaver and handing it back to you. And while you know that he's toxic and no good for you; you also know that he's your destiny so you keep going back for another pounding. Mr. Big serves Carrie her heart on a tray more times than we can keep track of. Calling her his "friend" in front of his mother, not being able to ever tell her she's "The One", marrying the idiot stick figure with no soul (the much younger Natasha), the affair, showing up just as Carrie thinks her life is finally going the way she wants it to (pre-Paris), coming to her rescue, leaving her at the altar (if you haven't seen the movie by now, what the hell are you waiting for?!) and then finally he manages to sit right and fly straight. Should Carrie have stuck around for all of that? No. But she did because Mr. Big was her destiny. But it proves that you have to deal with the bad to get to the good.

I have plenty of girlfriends who have man problems. I mean, what woman doesn't right? But sitting around and talking about it (usually over food or coffee or both) is the only way we can deal with and work through our issues. Now I've heard some seriously cringe worthy stories from my girls. The crazy stalker who called 6 times a day and showed up at my friend's house only to get chased away by her family; the alcoholic drug addict who caused a scene at my friend's place of work, the straight boy who acts gayer than any gay we've ever met (seriously), or better yet, the guy you think is the love of your life who turns out to be gay, the mixed message sender, the commitment phobe, and a sordid amount of other tales that would be pages and pages to tell. My personal favorite is the guy who tells you he loves you but you can't be together so he dates some wholly inappropriate girl (one with some nasal issues) or someone who has something in common with you (like your knack with the sarcastic comments, your wit when armed with a pen or your love for the stage) in a backward, lame attempt to get over you and/or make you ridiculously jealous. This last issue I can speak of from personal experience.

Now the reason I think my friend asked me to write about this subject is because she is dealing with separation anxiety. She is forced to be away from her boyfriend who she cares about more than she'll let on for longer than she'd like and it's killing her. Hence the pain and heartache part of love. It sucks to be apart from the person you love, no matter what the circumstances are for your separation. When you're forced to be away from your love, you don't really feel completely whole. It always feels like something is gnawing away at your insides and you just can't get it to stop. There is a constant dull pain deep down inside of you that no amount of social interaction, chocolate or booze will ever dull. It is truly one of the most unbearable feelings in the world. And yet when you can't change it, you are forced to deal with it. It's like being stuck between a rock and a hard place; there is no happy alternative. It's really just a matter of how long you can stick it out whether it be six months or three years. Again, this I know for personal experience.

The thing is when you begin to picture your life without that person and you can't. I had a friend who said that she knows the man who is her soulmate because there have been times when she's literally wanted to kill him but then in the next moment couldn't imagine her life without him. I had to say that I totally agreed with this statement. Or in a less extreme situation, when you can just imagine being with someone for a long time. Maybe not forever, but for the forseeable future. What do you do when that person is suddenly not there anymore? If it's time, or distance or circumstance that keeps that person away, their absence throws you into a tailspin of how to suddenly deal with your life and where they fit into it. You know that no matter what the circumstance, you aren't giving them up without a fight. Its hard because there will be mornings where you will wake up and ask yourself: "what the hell are you thinking by sticking around?" but others where you can't imagine being any other place, no matter how much it's killing you.

Please let me tell you, it will kill you. That pang you feel in your heart every time you think about him, that incurable dull ache, the dreams that haunt you at night, the moments where you can't stop smiling...its all going to get to you after awhile. The only thing I can say from experience is that it will get easier. You'll learn how to handle the good feelings and the bad. Or if you can't be with him, you'll learn how to get over being without him. You'll still love him of course but you'll be able to keep the thoughts from haunting you and making you want to rip all of the hair out of your head. You'll be able to look at him clearly an objectively again and tell him when he's done something that makes you happy or unhappy. It all comes with time.

And if it doesn't work out and you are forced to sit and put back together the pieces of your broken heart, you can do what another friend used to do. Picture all of your exes singing *NSYNC's "I Want You Back" to you. It will definitely induce a good chuckle.

But I leave you with these last thoughts. Remember, what's meant to be will be and if it wasn't, its because there's something better out there. Love takes time but you can't have great love without great heartbreak, heartache and pain.