I love love. I’ll be the first to admit that. I love falling in love, I love being in love, I love the idea of love. There’s something so amazing about it, about how it literally knocks you off your feet and you see something in another human being that completes you in a way you didn’t even know you needed to be completed in in the first place. The way it makes your heart feel as if it’s overflowing and the world becomes Technicolor because you found what you were missing. About two years ago I met the man that I was convinced I was going to spend the rest of my life with. He was kind, sincere, caring and when he would smile it would light up his entire face. For the first time in my life I fell in love in a different way, passionately, deeply and entirely in love. We planned our lives together and dreamed of our futures, we picked out rings and thought of children. We were building a life together and somewhere within all the planning we stopped caring about the present and slowly started taking different roads. In the end, we couldn’t find parallel paths. Our breakup was the best I’ve ever had, we handled it maturely and it ended with a mutual love and respect for one another but before he left he told me that he felt as if he’d lost himself. For days I thought about that statement and whether I felt the same way or not: had we lost ourselves in the relationship or had we simply just lost ourselves? Neither of us were the same people we started out as in the beginning. I thought about the aspects of myself that had disappeared as our relationship progressed and the person I’d become while with him. I had tried to be so many things that I wasn’t in order to make it work that I too had lost myself. I wasn’t the girl anymore that he met that was fiercely confident, who didn’t care what anyone else thought of her, who didn’t cry or get emotional, the girl that was opinionated and independent and who didn’t need a man to make her feel worthy. I’d become a wife before I ever got the ring. We stopped being who we were in order to fit into a mold that we didn’t necessarily want or need to be in. Sometimes I feel as if we try on roles in relationships the same way we try on clothes. Is it so much that love changes us or do we change in order to feel love? In past relationships I’ve been every kind of girl possible. I’ve figured out what does and doesn’t work for me, and who I most definitely do not want to be. I know the kind of woman I want to be, I just don’t always know how to get there. And sometimes I get distracted because relationships can paint such beautiful pictures of a life that they can become like a siren’s song leading me to give something up in order to maintain that love. But ultimately I have a goal and somewhat of a rough idea of how I want my life to be. If I learned anything from this last relationship it’s that I’m not going to settle. On Friday night my best friend forced me to go out, mainly so I’d get out of my house and stop lamenting over the failure of my relationship. The night started out fantastic, I wanted to look good and I felt pretty, I wanted to have fun and I was having a great night. I repeated my personal mantra of the evening (which for some reason was “I am amazing, I have awesome boobs”) over and over. I was happy and smiling and laughing but between all the alcohol and repressed emotions I ended up bawling in the VIP room of some random club. I cried because I missed him, I cried because I missed myself, I cried because I was angry, I cried because I felt betrayed and abandoned, I cried because he wasn’t what I needed, I cried because I couldn’t be anyone other than who I am, I cried because he wasn’t there and wouldn’t ever be again, I cried because I didn’t want him to be there and mainly, I cried because I was crying in public. As Meagan and I walked home in the rain, with me sobbing block after block, we ended up running into one of my ex boyfriends. Initially you’d think running into someone that was still in love with you would be a good ego boost but instead it was just depressing because the only person in the world that I wanted to care about me right then didn’t want me. The worst part of any breakup is the self-deprecation that you inflict upon yourself during the mourning period. You think of all the things that could possibly be wrong with yourself and you blame yourself for the relationships failure. But in reality, all the negative self-talk that you keep repeating to yourself isn’t necessarily true. Granted, it does take two people to make something fail and you have to accept your part in the demise of the relationship, but all of the rest of the lies just cover up the truth, which is simply that this isn’t the relationship you’re meant to be in. Meagan and I went back to her house and I spent half the night throwing up, partly due to stress and partly due to the vile combination of vodka, whiskey and champagne that I’d consumed throughout the evening. Driving home the next morning, hung over and confused, a fleet of black hearses passed me. Thanks God, I saw the sign and I get the metaphor, the relationship is dead. It’s literally dead. I spent the majority of that day in bed, thinking about what I wanted. The only conclusion that I could come to was that this wasn’t what I wanted; I didn’t want to be sad and I didn’t want to be in a relationship that wasn’t fulfilling for either of us. I want to make myself happy and I want to be able to be myself, whether I’m alone or in a new relationship. I lost myself, so I’m on a mission to find what I lost, what makes me happy and eventually who makes me happy. There is no map or strict set of instructions to guide me on this journey, which is honestly frustrating. Instant gratification would be really nice right now. I don’t know what the exact purpose of this blog is yet, or even if anyone’s going to want to read it. I’m petrified that this is terrible, but what I do is write. I write about what I know and that’s exactly what I plan on continuing to do. I can’t provide the perfect advice, I’m not the greatest guide in the dark, I don’t always know exactly how to get from point A to point B: I’m just as lost as anyone else and trying to figure out where I’m going. I don’t have all the answers, just a lot of questions.
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