Dear Internet,
Happy St. Crispian’s Day!
I’ve been obsessed with Eurovision since I was first devirginized by its gloriousness, in 2010, in Amsterdam. I try to catch it every year and if you follow me on Twitter, I give great commentary.
In 2013, Lithuania had a great entry:
The song makes absolutely no sense:
If you don’t know I’m in love with you
When summertime falls It becomes untrue
Because of my shoes I’m wearing today
One is called Love the other is Pain
When I first heard the song, I conflated “pain” for “Spain” which to me sounds a whole lot better.
(It’s been brought to my attention the shoes reference means he walking away from his love or walking towards her. Still doesn’t make sense, which means I enjoy it even more.)
Sitting in my drafts is an entry I worked on all of Saturday night. Prior to writing that, I had read and re-read my paper diary entries and they were all repetitive of the same thoughts:
- I had lost my self-esteem
- I had lost my self-worth
- I had lost my dignity
- I had lost my confidence
- I had given up my own power, willingly
What is interesting is what i’ve lost had no bearing on me going forward. Yes, I was emotionally exhausted and tapped out, but! I got up everyday determined, but struggling, to make it through the day. I take showers, I yoga, I meditate, I apply for jobs, I do my homework. Nothing externally is slacking, but internally I was dying. I was dying for a long time.
The realization of how much I gave up or lost is sobering. How did I get here? Why did I let things happen the way they did? Why wasn’t I control of my own life? It was far easier, I thought, to let others make decisions for me rather than making my own decisions. I let the world dictate who and what I was nary a thought this was harmful to me, to others, but especially to me.
Back to that draft.
I tried to be angry like I was all those years ago, because the end result was the same: He made a unilateral decision to break it off with me on the pretense he was not a factor in my life. Just as he did in 2005 when he broke it off the second time after I told him my mother was just diagnosed with cancer and we were in the midst of chemo, he broke it off when i needed him the most.
That part stung.
But what made me so angry was at myself for not tossing him into the wind when he did the breaking up this time around. No. No, I cried. I cried and held his shirt, that smelled of him, close to will him to come back. I cried, when there were no messages in the morning, willing him to come back. I cried when certain songs came on the radio because I was willing him to come back.
I cried a lot.
And talked to myself a lot in addition to writing in my paper journals. Working shit out of my head. That’s when I started coming to realizations I posited at the beginning of this piece: I was soo fucking angry at myself more so than him breaking it off with me. I stomped around for awhile and silently screamed to get the aggression out. This lack of everything was not me. This was certainly not me. I willed the anger to come thick and fast so I could erase him out of my blood. I cried to TheExHusband every day – how fucked is it another person who proclaims I’m the love of his life is comforting his ex-wife who is still in love with someone else? Who walks her through the stages of denial and grief as they happen? He’s either a saint or a madman, I haven’t decided which.
I needed to get my dignity back.
TheBassist said I could spin this anyway I wanted to make myself feel better; I could vilify him because it “always happens” (I don’t know if he meant me in particular or his ex-loves). I cried I could not vilify him or spin this anyway but all of this was my fault and he was not in the wrong. He couldn’t trust me to save his life because “the plan” kept changing. He didn’t know what was going on from one minute to the next. Which is a lie in itself: the plan never changed and I told him everything as I knew it.
Hoo boy. Was I ever deluding myself.
To sum: He’s a man child who wants the “big love” (as he calls it), he wants “the one” (as he calls it), and he wants all the trappings and delightful things that come with that love. He will tell you women always dump him and he’s never the dumper. He will tell you he doesn’t want anyone who doesn’t resonate. He will tell you a lot of things to paint him into a pretty corner of his own making.
What he won’t tell you is he can never be single too long, he always needs a partner, and I’m betting it won’t be long before he’s on a dating service, despite the fact he told me, “if I can’t have you, I don’t want anyone else.” What he won’t tell you is a lot of those relationships overlap and I know as I was one of them, twice, as he was spinning these tales of great big love to me while he was involved with someone else. What he won’t tell you is that he spun those tales to other women I’ve known about during the years and I was not the only one. What he won’t tell you is that he vilifies his exes, even the rare ones he’s friendly with. What he won’t tell you is one of his best friends convinced me he was cheating on me this time around. TheBassist threw that back in my face about the cheating comment I had said all those months ago. I just — don’t get how you can throw “love” around so easily. I’m the love of your life but you can never be single or not “fall in love” with every woman you sleep with?
He will tell you he, “did his best.” He will tell you, “I kept breaking his heart every time I left and he never knew when I was coming back.” He would tell you, “we were on pause, we’re always on pause. I wait for you, it’s what I do.” He will tell you, “I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for you break it off with me.”
What he won’t tell you is I worked my ass off to get to him when I could but lack of money and no job was the hold up. I had to cut my visits short because I ran out of money and had to go either back to TheExHusband (as a friend, not a lover) or when I had my own apartment (pre-paid for a year when I got my divorce settlement. It was decided by everyone involved it was cheaper, and mentally easier for me to live on my own rather than try and find a place in CT), which made me even more depressed about not being with him and I choose him over making myself whole.
What he won’t do, when the shit hits the floor, is stick around, like an adult, and work on the couple problems. What he won’t do is take criticism about him seriously or even try to defend himself. He locks down and shuts up so the problems, the arguments, the pain, the shit that comes with the other side of relationships is placed in a box and you look like an asshole.
What he won’t do is stop accepting handouts from his family, and me, and get a fucking job; he uses his depression as a crutch which drove me insane. You can go to school full time, play 3-4 gigs a month, but you can’t get a piddly part-time job to pay for gas and coffee when you don’t have any gigs? He’s all about “taking care of his business” but he spends any random cash he has on toys, not thinking about he may need gas or coffee in the future and gets angry when you point this out to him.
e.g. On my birthday we were out at the mall. He bought his children (two of whom have jobs) a video game. He bought me — nothing. Not even a card, handmade or otherwise, but when his children didn’t make him a card for any holiday, he was “devastated” and “heartbroken.” When I brought up the hypocrisy between how they treated him and how he treated me, he would muse that he “thought about it later about the awfulness” of the way he treated me but he never rectified the situation.
What he didn’t do was defend me. In the beginning, I was the “Michigan girl” the one who everyone knew about, even his exes. None of them were me, none of them loved him like I loved him. None of them got him. But when I started breaking down, when I was a hot mess and I kept leaving and WHY I was leaving he never told them; his friends started turning away from me. I saw burgeoning friendships disappear. When I pointed out what was going on, he said he didn’t need to explain anything to anyone as it was his business and not theirs. I saw the look in their eyes when we did hang out with some of them. I was a terrible person for doing what I did and how dare I break the heart of a man so beloved by many, but hardly, if any, knew what was going on because it was easier for them to disparage me rather than understand me. I felt awful and even more of an outsider. I felt on guard. I felt like a pawn in his game.
His friends will tell you he is a great guy. He’s one in a million. His friends will tell you he will do anything for them. They will tell you all these great qualities about him. They believe in this guy, they do. He praises them constantly when he was down himself. When all was said and done, they were there for him.
I understand that but I don’t/didn’t understand is why he kept throwing me under the bus.
They were never in a relationship with him. Their perception of him and their knowledge of him is vastly different than mine of him.
He dumped me over Facebook. A year together and I get dumped over FB. When I called begging to be taken back, a moment of weakness on my part, he was contrite but then said, “Well it’s your preferred method of communication.” No? No. I’m a phone girl. I am an old. We used to Skype every night and if not, phone calls. We used messenger and texting as a method of touching base during the day. Not for deep conversations. Are you fucking kidding me? I sniffled through “I couldn’t bear it you date someone else!,” and his reply was, “Then stop following me on Facebook.”
It seemed wholly unfair he could follow me or check on my life, unbeknownst to me, on how and what I’m doing, but I could not interact with his or had to take what he was doing, “going on with his life.”
To that end, I unfriended him on Facebook, archived our conversations so I don’t have to see them, and deleted all of his texts. I am in the process of moving the zillion of pictures of us/him to a folder far far down in my NAS so I can forget about it.
To be fair, there were a few lines of “to be fair” about him; but not today. Today I don’t want to think about his random positive and good things he has done. Or my own fair shake in this. No. This needed to get out, to be said.
Last night, I unfriended him, but sent him a message he know how to find me. Today I am angry. Tomorrow this may all change. Tomorrow I may be contrite and wish I had never said these things. Tomorrow, I may feel the repercussions on what I said. Tomorrow I will love him with the light of a thousand suns and yearn for him to come back. Tomorrow I may hear from him he’s never coming back. I may be angry or relived or sad.
Love is like that; I will, of course, be devastated, hurt, confused, and pissed off. But that is how life rolls and that is what you work towards: happiness, wholeness, togetherness. You don’t throw that away because your life is “too stressful” or because you don’t want to deal with the problems.
But today! I will be angry. I will take a shower, yoga, meditate, and I will apply for jobs.
But right now, I will angrily use a leaf blower, use a hack/chain saw on wood, and throw the wood into the wood chipper.
Now I will start to get my dignity back.
xoxo,
Lisa
This Day in Lisa Universe: 2001