So I haven't posted in what, over a year? And there have been many, many things that have happened, both personally and politically, that I could have blogged about during that time, but I kind of abandoned it.
There are of course compelling things occurring all over the world that need discussion and examination, but right now I feel like being more introspective and personal.
One of the things which I tend not to do is either a) admit my faults, or b) share them. I spend a lot of time examining my actions, and like most people with self-esteem issues I tell myself how awful it was for me to do such things and how I could have or should have done something different. Some of the time I am right, and it leads to productive change, but other times I am wrong and it just leads to self-abuse.
There are a few faults that I would like to discuss in this post, and the first is my tendency to emotionally detach from most people. More specifically, my tendency to hold everyone at arms length unless I decide they are the privileged few who get to see me at my weakest. I don't frequently let people through that barrier and when I do I often push them back out and throw it up again. This prevents me from dealing with my issues in a lot of ways, because erasing one's own support system is not exactly the wisest choice when you're struggling with emotional issues.
The specific story I'm dancing around here is that I was in what was a very powerful relationship for me two years ago which shook me up and spat me out and left me behaving in a pattern I can only call 'crazy ex'. I don't really support calling people crazy so for the purposes of this blog I'll stick with intrusive and inconsiderate, because I see quite clearly the negative results of my behaviours. I don't know if we all go through this at some point, but I was somewhere in a rabbit hole, so desperately in love and unwilling to admit my hurt that I basically steamrolled over a lot of people in attempts to pretend that I was fine and had closure. It was not pretty. I lied, I used people, I purposely tried to stir up trouble, and I ended up doing what I had so often judged people for in the past- I rebounded.
I rebounded so hard that I'm still surprised the WNBA hasn't offered me a contract (Excuse me, I have to use my bad sense of humour to diffuse this).
And in the process I hurt someone whom I had no right to hurt. She had no way of knowing the depths of my attachment, and though she ignored some major hints, it was absolutely my fault for lying through my teeth about how I felt about my recently ended relationship, and the level of contact I continued to have with that person.
There is a chance that if I had not been holding most all of my friends, who are lovely, caring people, at arm's length, that I would not have maligned someone in attempts to soothe my emotional wounds.
As a side note I should say the reason I'm telling this publicly is that I think very often we tend to assume people who are generally 'good' cannot also behave poorly. And that we assume, quite often, that the reverse is also true; that people who have made mistakes and behaved in a reprehensible way in one aspect of their lives must therefor be reprehensible in all aspects of their lives.
Part of the reason I've struggled with this is because of my tendency to assume the latter, in fact, and I have wondered quite a lot if I still have the right to call myself a good person, but I think part of the process of being good is reflecting on what we have done that is not 'good' so that we may learn from it.
Part of the reason I think it was so hard for me to understand that what I was doing was so unquestionably bad is because of this theory of absolutism. I'm a generally good person. Sure, I talk about myself an awful lot, but if I get extra change I give it back, if I find someone's lost property I will find a way to return it to them, I speak up about injustices when I see them happening around me, and I make a concerted effort to respect most people.
But there I was, disrespecting someone. Someone who saw me doing good things, being kind, listening, caring, but being very, very selfish. The juxtaposition was not a good one. I waited a week between being broken up with by someone I was very much in love with and then going on a first date with someone who I did end up loving, albeit badly. That alone speaks volumes.
I'm not sure now how I thought that would go, or how I was so far in denial that I assumed I was fine to start dating, but it happened. And throughout this new relationship I would converse with my prior partner and make unfavourable comparisons in my head. I spent a long time googling what rebound relationships looked like in order to irrationally rationalise my way out of being in one. When I started actually realising what was going on and caring about what I was doing, I tried to end things (multiple times) but I did it in a terrible way. I tried to make her responsible, rather than admitting to myself just what my culpability in the situation was. I would break up with her, then feel that sweeping sense of loneliness, and desperately ask for her back again. I used her as a life raft.
This is not to say that there weren't some parts of the relationship that were enjoyable, or that under better conditions we still wouldn't have been in a relationship, but rather that under the conditions I was experiencing, I created a relationship that had no choice but to become toxic. How does one go about apologising for instating an emotional reign of terror? It's not really like you can find someone you dragged through your emotional crap for a year and say 'gee whiz, I hope you can forgive me', because they don't have to and you don't really deserve their forgiveness.
On the other hand, you do have to forgive yourself. Self-forgiveness, however, doesn't mean you tell yourself you were justified in your behaviour or that what you did was totally a-ok. It means you recognise your behaviour was bad but rather than dwell on the past choose to use the lessons you learned to become a better person in the future. Self-forgiveness is what allows us to be productive. If I incessantly beat myself up into shreds over my actions I would become a much worse and more warped person. Letting go of that indulgent feeling of guilt means I can spend more time improving myself and preventing these sorts of things from happening again. It also stops making what happen about myself. Guilt, in a way, is very selfish. You do something bad and hurt people, and guilt (which I define differently than remorse) is a way of saying 'my pain at doing this is worth more of my mental effort than addressing what pain they feel'. You can feel remorse for doing something without allowing it to become the centre of your focus.
And because I allowed my own feelings of guilt to take over my emotional landscape, I lashed out and made negative choices with both of those people, amongst others. I alienated people I cared deeply about because I was being so incredibly selfish by not forgiving myself, and by not seeking support from the correct sources. When you focus on yourself, you cannot open yourself up to the other person, and you cannot see what they need from you.
This is why I think it's critically important to accept your own weaknesses, because you better yourself and your relationships with others when you deal with what makes you vulnerable. My learning curve on this has been incredibly slow, and continues to be slow, but I am learning, finally.
I can see that these people I have hurt have incredibly complex lives which my guilt erased. When you assume that your actions are the worst things happening to them, when you indulge your guilt by thinking how you must have ruined their lives and shattered them and how awful you are, you're forgetting that most likely they have other things going on. When you forgive yourself you become able to care about them wholly rather than as how they relate to you. And that is the basis of real apologies, when you put what matters to someone else first, rather than what matters to you.
Which is why, painfully, I cannot simply say sorry- because in certain situations you're just inserting yourself where you don't belong, and the best 'apology' is putting the other person first.
