…Of All Sad Words of Tongue or Pen, the saddest are these: “What Might Have Been”

I have a lot of frustrating days.

Entirely too many of them, actually.

Days when all I want is for things to be the way they used to be—

Before the bar whore (BTBW, for short).

But there is no going back to those days.

I know this. 

I do.

Today, I’m sitting at my job, which is awesome. I’m surrounded by engaging co-workers, in a bright, multi-windowed office that is all my own, my ass perched on a comfy desk chair, with all these exciting challenges to conquer.

And I am here ruminating on all the reasons I have to be at peace…

It would be even more awesome if I wasn’t plagued by this seemingly never-ending emotional upheaval.  I know my life is completely out of balance and I need to figure out how to get past these antagonistic emotions this regular chaos creates in me.  They are foreign to me and I do not like them…I so don’t know the who that is me much anymore, not like I used to anyhow.

Being the reflective type that I am, I am working on digging deep within myself to find the root of this pesky hostility that has been sabotaging my efforts to move forward; or in any direction, truth be told.  I mean, I know where it stems from—and if common sense were common, I’d not be writing about all this shitstorm because he’d have listened to sense and reason. 

Honestly, most days, the middle of nowhere seems like a really good place to go.

Then there are the days where my rational brain resists all attempts to make any kind of resolution at all, simply because logic and emotion have been out of whack like they have never been BTBW. Days that I feel powerless; unable to push through the disillusionment, anger and utter distaste for what he chose.  I refer to those as angsty-schmangsty days.

They aren’t pretty.

At all.

Those are the days when I have so personalized the loss, the rejection and, the feelings of abandonment (my core issue) that I fail to see the obvious--that it doesn’t have all that much to do with me as it does with him.  He just wasn’t ready to hold “us” sacred and safe.

Logically and realistically I understand that it’s not about me.  Truly, I do.  But my emotional side?  It has claimed superiority over logic (for now, but I expect not forever)…and when your brain is at war with itself—it’s never very pleasant. 

Just sayin’…

Maybe this happened because deep down he was scared of this whole new world we were making…maybe it shone too bright on the dark places he wasn’t ready to confront in himself…maybe “we” as I knew it just wasn’t a priority to him…or maybe, the relationship wasn’t practical and it screwed with the organizational structure of his mind and his reality. 

Who really even knows?

His decisions don’t define him as a “good” or a “bad” person. Nor do they define me...even if they did, in fact, damn near wreck me for a while there.  On the other hand, my own decisions help to remind me that I am still in control of my life and my heart. The consequences of my decisions serve as a wake-up call to remember who I really am, and all that he gave up.  It still makes me sad, BUT there is a gift in every decision I have ever made—and I ask myself what the gift is and embrace it.  

Then I listen to my heart—and even still, all too often, it’s still Tripp’s name that echoes there.

*sigh*

It’s difficult because I had a very well-constructed protective barrier around my heart and all its emotional scarring, and was quite adept at warding off anybody that triggered that almost unconscious trepidation of letting anyone in.  Then, almost miraculously, I did let someone in—completely—and it was terrifying, but at the same time it was wholly freeing.  I did this with little reservation after the initial fear, and he accepted me completely (I thought) for who I was and what my life experiences made me.

All the baggage just seemed to drift away as we moved forward in what would become our intertwined lives.  And once I decide to love, though, it was done without reservation or condition.  My love is a gift that I don’t just throw at any and everyone.  To have that gift unceremoniously thrown back at me as not quite good enough (I mean if it was enough, he’d never have had the BW experience, amiright?)—well, that made for some severe mind-fucking that nobody deserves.

It also made for some serious self-image deficits for awhile, ESPECIALLY after seeing her face come across my FaceBook for the first time as “someone I might know”.  (FaceBook is the devil incarnate, just saying.)  When, for the first time, you see the face of the reason for so much of your internal damage, and that face is not at all like your own—and no comparisons can even be drawn except maybe that we’re both females…it destroyed, for a time, the confidence I had in myself and the belief in the attractiveness that people around me say I have.  

Could so many people be so wrong? I am coming out of that struggle with my battered self-image, and I am beginning to like what I see in the mirror again (I used to recognize myself--ain’t it funny how reflections change?)…and now when her face pops up on my newsfeed, it’s more an annoyance than the ruination it was before (most of the time anyhow).  Just one more step towards complete and utter indifference regarding the filthy BW, I guess.

My therapist is definitely worth his weight in gold.  Not that he is encouraging indifference, but he is very adept at letting me figure things out on my own—no one will ever be able to say my therapist made me think a certain way or that he put ideas/realizations into my head.  He allows me the freedom to be ridiculous in my musings; while I work on my issues…it’s definitely bringing me back to a much happier place, and working towards peace within myself.  It’s good…it’s really, REALLY hard coming face to face with a lot of my demons, but totally worth it (this is only admitted after days of “recovery” after a session…LOL!)  My people, my tribe if you will, though—they are the first to tell me how much progress I have made and how happy they are to see the girl they knew starting to come back. 

Thank God.

So anyhow, up until that day (that evening actually since it was around dinnertime when he tried to confess via messenger, 2/23/2015 for those who care to know), the night of the barwhore confessional, the undefined emptiness that I’d been carrying was filled, almost perfectly and completely, to utterly decimated…gone in less than a minute’s declaration of guilt, shame, and remorse, replaced instantly instead with a gaping void that threatened to swallow me whole, and with that admission of his—everything I knew to be good and right in the world had been completely laid to waste.

Why?

Simply because I trusted him…I NEVER trust, not completely and never easily…trust is what got you battered and bruised—and it seems whenever I did fully trust, I regretted it.  I ascribe to the idea of love all (or at least tolerate them), hate none (or at least don’t kill them), and trust very few.  All with good reason--and reinforced yet again.  

There came a point when I trusted him so wholly and implicitly that he became the emotional safe place that I had been sorely lacking most of my life.  He is still, in so many ways, that safe place for me, and that is the real crux of my problem.  Even my therapist is at a loss, for the time being, as to what course of action should be taken to help me fully heal without overly upsetting the delicate balance I have worked so hard to achieve to this point.  What do you do when your cornerstone fails you? Pull the wrong thread in the tapestry and it falls apart…I don’t want to lose me or the progress I have made emotionally—I was a pretty decent, if imperfect, human being and I liked myself well enough before all this.  But no matter how broken my heart can get, the universe doesn’t stop spinning for my pain.

Drive on, bitches. Drive on.