Back to the swipes
I got my heart broken twice in the span of six months and now i am afraid i am broken and too detached. Where or should i say when does healing and just existing start? What i just wrote doesn’t make any sense to me lol. But yes imagine you built a life with someone for 5 years. Five turbulent, tumultuous years, but five years nonetheless. That is a lot of time to adjust to the idea of a shared life with another person. That is a lot of time to dream a future with lots of shared ideas and experiences.
That is also a lot of time to come to terms with the fact that a person is really not your person but you tamp down those misgivings and contemplate the sunken cost fallacy. You know on some level you should leave but how do you even begin to fathom the idea of starting again and letting someone in again. How? There is all that thinking until you are left without a choice but to literally choose your life and sanity.
I am a Christian, unchurched currently but i still remember the teachings that I grew up with. Things like “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Let’s break those words down. Love your neighbour AS yourself, not more than yourself. Let’s throw in one more for good measure, “the truth will set you free.”
What happens when you get a message from a stranger on facebook at 11:30pm on a random September day that forces you to sit with yourself and have a really tough conversation about just how much love you have for you?
When you finally decide to choose yourself, or at least start to love yourself just as much as other people, no longer loving yourself less than others but just as much, and if i may say so myself, sometimes a little more. But then we get back to the second part, the truth shall set you free. How do you come to terms with the lies. Those you were told and accepted wholesale, and those you told yourself. Those are the worst. Stella Parton has this song, Standard Lie Number 1 that just speaks to this situation. There are some lines in particular:
“But there's a different set of numbers, for the ones I tell myself.
But my lies hurt me so much more than his old stories do.
Cause I know his are lies, and I pretend that mine are true.”
Now that we are done lying to ourselves, how does truthtelling start? Self truthing. How do you start to learn who you are again? Remember when my concern was starting all over again and letting someone else in again? My worry should have been getting to trust myself and know myself again.
What does that even look like?
After at least 8 months, I finally have some answers:
Find what revitalizes you, for me that’s travel and cooking
Become more self-interested (I got that from my very special therapist)
Embrace some solitude and start to get to know you when you are not caught up people-pleasing
Embrace the love around you. And to that end,
Begin to understand that love is not earned, it is a gift freely given.
Just be yourself, of course minus the really negative traits like hate, like not doing your share of the work, like not treating your neighbour as yourself. But seriously be yourself and it would shock you how many people will love all that craziness and also call you out lovingly on your bullshit. It would shock you how much love is around you already and how much you attract.
And when a person shows or tells you who they are a la Maya Angelou, believe them.
Red flags are red so that you can identify them, they are not a signal to colour in your own ideas to change red to purple by mixing in blue.
Selah
