I’ve spent the last couple of days really thinking about why I’m doing this. There are a few really good reasons and I’ll get to those eventually, but I think the main reason has to be the fact I need to do something now that I am one person again. I am no longer a part of a couple.
It’s been a really difficult 18 months. If I am completely honest with myself.
I gave myself entirely to someone and in the end, they pulled the proverbial rug out of from under me, ripped the rose coloured glasses off my face and left me standing in a puddle with the neon colours of real life glaring me in the face.
I was one of those girls who always told herself that she’d never let herself become totally absorbed in a relationship that she would let everything else that mattered to her disappear. I mocked those girls, felt sorry for them because they were going to spend their lives chasing an impossible dream and never living for themselves. And yet, strangely I became exactly like them. I don’t know if I can necessarily sympathize with them, because somewhere in the back of my mind, the entire time I was with this person I knew what I was doing. I knew I was throwing it all away on them and I didn’t care.
To help you understand the whole picture, I will show you what I saw, or at least imagined.
I had just come home from university, six whole months I spent searching for the girl I wanted to be. I was just getting back in the swing of being out of school, having to work and having to live at home again when He messaged me on Facebook wanting to get together for coffee. My family had just moved to the city and I had no one local I knew so I didn’t see why I couldn’t get back into contact with Him. We’d always been friends, flirted and wanted more from the other person and I was starved emotionally for some sort of affection that didn’t come from my parents (who were more than loving - I must emphasize this). We met up and it was like we became joined at the hip. We hung out together all the time, and we eventually became exclusive. I was so in love. He loved me! I had previously imagined myself unlovable by anyone, I was overly tall for a woman, larger than most tall woman proportion wise, loud and opinonated and I had never had anyone show romantic interest before him, how could it not be love!
Within six months, we were living together. Against what everyone wanted for me, I gave up going back to school (for which I had already been accepted and was supposed to start September ’08) I was going to make it work. He had a job at the time, He was really turning out to be someone I saw myself being with for a long time. We moved alot, but we had too because money was hard to find when you have no education and you’re a young couple trying to make it in the big leagues. He quit his job because it was too demanding and He went to a lesser paying profession because it made Him happier and if He was happy, then I was happy. He liked to smoke a little pot now and then and because I loved Him, I did too because if it didn’t hurt Him, then it wouldn’t hurt me and it was something we could have together. We eventually were so broke we couldn’t afford our apartment so we moved into my parents, and within 3 months, my parents had had enough of him and made us leave. By this time He was unemployed, and I was the only one working. He’d decided He was going to start His own business in airbrushing. He was, and still is, a fantastic artist so I fully believed He could do it. He was taking a government program and it would be set by Christmas. We argued some, but what couples didn’t? I never believed anything was wrong. I had spending problems, that was why we were always broke, thats why we couldn’t afford the weed anymore and why He was irritable or upset. I was too impatient to wait till His business was set up to get a car so it was my fault we had to pay insurance on two vehicles. When His car broke down, it was my fault that He couldn’t get His fixed because my insurance was too much. Come September 2009, we were again living at my parents, and by October He couldn’t handle the stress of my parents and moved out. We opted to try and make it work long distance as He was moving back to His hometown which was about 25 minutes away from mine. I drove down regularly and we went for coffee all the time. Come December, I found Him at His stepdads in bed with another girl. I begged him to tell me the truth – did He sleep with her? He said no, nothing had happened and I believed him, because thats what good girlfriends do right? Middle of December I found an apartment in the North end of Town so that we could once again live together but He was reluctant to move in again. He didn’t want to deal with my parents (who by this time were no longer supportive of our relationship) and two days before christmas He calls me to tell me that it’s over.
I was crushed. The one person I truly believed loved me was telling me it was over because I “never loved him enough.” I “never supported him.” I couldn’t sleep for a week, I wouldn’t eat because I felt sick. I cried in quiet because I didn’t want anyone to see how truly deep I was hurting.
While the events of what I described are true, what my heart told my head was completely different. This is what really happened.
He quit his job because the guys at work razzed him about me. He never trusted me completely and was quick to blame me, when I was often the only one working to pay the rent. He never got his business running, which was my fault too because I never helped him. He never wanted to have sex. He never wanted me to hang out with his friends, he never had enough man-time and he lied to me. He had slept with her. The latter information I found out after he broke up with me.
This has really shook up my life in ways I can’t even explain fully. I know now that I left myself get sucked in by someone who was only looking to suck the life out of me. I think he did love me in a way, he loved the idea of me. But I was too demanding, too much of this, or too much of that I was never “enough”.
What has really come to light in the last few weeks for me is how much that relationship cost ME. I gave up two years of school, because had I gone to back to school in 2008, I would be 2 years away from a degree and working as a teacher. I gave up my relationship with my mother, who is my best friend. We’ve only just started to get our relationship back after he left the picture. I sacrificed my happiness always. He never did anything for me, I was always the one doing. I gave and gave and gave even when I got nothing back. I smiled happily while he took pieces of me and ate them for breakfast.
How, you might ask, could I let myself get used this way? The only reason I can honestly say is that I didn’t love myself. I thought I was fat, ugly, undesirable, too tall. You name it, I thought I was it. I had no self respect, self esteem or self love.
Thats what led me to this journey of weightloss. I want to love myself. That is my ultimate goal. My tangible goal is to lose weight, but what I really want is to love myself, to be happy with myself again. I want to thank him for breaking my heart, for tearing me down to such a level that I can objectively look at myself and realize how much damage I have done to myself. I know in my head that I am someone worth loving, that I am a desirable person it’s just time for me to make my heart believe it.
This is why I am doing this. I just had to get it out there. It’s been bottled up inside for way too long.
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