The Game Is Over

When my ex, Kevin, left me I had a really difficult time accepting the end. I experienced fits of rage, often toward people who didn't deserve it. It was almost like my mind was subconsciously digging for to be mad about and cling to as a form of release.

While I might have been mildly upset at them for something small, it in no way warranted the amount of wrath they were receiving from me. I was hurt, and in turn I hurt people who mattered. That's the very common cycle. When we feel the most hurt, we are willing to do anything to alleviate our distress, even if it is at the expense of someone who matters. It's not right or fair, I made myself accountable for it.

I was unstable. Blistering angry one second then a crumbled mess of sobbing the next, racked in guilt. I isolated myself to avoid hurting anyone and did it anyway.

One clear point was that I was angry. The reason was much more of a fog. It was disheartening to not have an answer when I needed one. I'm a person who values knowledge, so I always feel like if I don't know an answer, I can find it. My search came up blank, but the answer was already inside me once I stopped denying it.

The source of my anger was simple, but complex and once I started to deal with it, I felt better.

I was angry with him for leaving but I was also angry about what led him to leave. I'd asked him to compromise with me on an issue we were having, one which was fully in his control and he refused and then he left. Not only that but his choice of words in his final message that read "So I've been thinking about this for a while..." All of this time I was trying to keep the relationship progressing only to be shot in the face with the fact he had been trying to save himself.

I was irate that someone who had promised to always work out a problem with me had not only run from the possibility of working it out, but had been batting the idea around for awhile without talking to me, of breaking up. Those type of breakups are some of the worst because they create all types of self doubt. Feeling like you never really know where you stand with anyone because at any given time, they can turn and run no matter how they tell you they feel about you. The fear that it's all fake.

I was angry at him for hurting people that mattered to me. He had become close to some people I considered family while we dated and in the end, he dropped them both without a single word, goodbye, or explanation.

To deal with my anger I wrote like mad. I wrote a letter to him, I wrote a list of his flaws, I wrote rants at him as if I could actually speak to him. It helped for a minute but the anger, the unrelenting aggression always came back.

I had to finally sit down with myself and identify why I was actually angry. It wasn't all to do with him. It was also at me.

That was the hardest part. Dealing with the anger I faced inwardly and the guilt that followed. I blamed myself for blowing over the red flags, the warnings I received. He had a lot of good qualities, but I denied the bad ones, the ones that specifically outlined signs of a person who was not ready and was not relationship material. Signs that would have kept me out of harm's way. For having blind faith it would work this time. I blamed myself for putting valuable friends and family in the path of someone who could so easily and selfishly discard them.

Once I was able to grieve for myself and deal with the war I waged on myself, it started to get better. I was able to rejoin society, even if tentatively.

One of the parts I had to accept along the journey was that what we had, wasn't love. It's not love in the sense of what real love is and for that reason, for myself, I chose not to give it power by calling what I felt for him, love. What he gave me was not love and what I felt for him couldn't have been love given that alone. He doesn't deserve to be able to say he was ever loved by me.

What most people who know me and know that I went through this don't know is that the relationship died long before there was an official end. He had stopped putting effort into the relationship after a month, out of a three month long relationship. He made brief appearances, made no actual effort anymore. Anything I asked of him was a no. I was swallowing everything I wanted out of the relationship, out of him, to prevent a fight and keep him happy so he would stay and he didn't. The first bump in the road was the mountain that split us.

This relationship, I don't feel was love but a strong attachment and it changed me. It's what pushed me to stop silencing my own voice. One of my friends told me they knew one day I would reach this point but they never imagined this would be it. They also added they were upset to see me hurt but they were proud to see me reach the top.

I hope all of you who have gone through what I have reach the top for yourselves. I hope you stop denying red flags and accepting half ass love. Love is a verb and a verb is an action. As long as you remember that, you'll never have to wonder if someone loves you or not.