2015-06-27 09:22:34 ET i wonder if you think of me, or miss me, or regret treating me like something you'd scrape off the bottom of your shoe. i wonder if any of it was real. probably not. everything was built on a false pretense, anyway, and that's not a good foundation for anything meaningful. you lied to me about a lot of things, whether you think of them as lies or not, they were. i asked you point blank if you were over her and ready to move on, i told you i didn't think you were ready for a new relationship, and you said you were. you said you couldn't believe you'd fallen for her manipulations *again* and that you were soooo sorry for putting me through that, and you wouldn't do it again. you said you wouldn't and you fucking did. what a joke. i don't know where all this "unfinished business"/"always intending to get back together with her" stuff came from but you never mentioned any of that to me until it had already happened. if that was the case, why the fuck would you involve me? i don't believe it. i never will. never, not once, did you lead me to believe this is where we'd end up. as far as i knew when i got emotionally involved with you, you were in the process of moving on from her and only wanted to be friends with her. i thought you wanted to move on, to get over your romantic feelings for her. if i'd have known it was all fake i'd never have gotten so invested. if i'd have known you were secretly pining for her i'd have wished you well and deleted your number. you misled me every step of the way and i feel incredibly foolish for caring so much, especially now that i know i mean absolutely nothing to you. it hurts my heart to think that i mean nothing to you, but how could i? how can you think it's acceptable to just stop responding to me? that's how you handle your life? that's how you solve your problems? really? you think that's an acceptable way to treat someone you supposedly care about? that's not a way to treat a stranger, let alone someone you once supposedly loved. how utterly disrespectful and cruel. just when i thought we were doing okay. things weren't ideal, our communications were a little strained, but we were communicating at the very least. if you wanted it to stop, fine, but to not even tell me? to just wash your hands of me and expect me to be the one to take a hint? all i wanted was to know that you're okay. i guess it's safe to assume that you two are back together or fucking or who knows what. you probably feel guilty and can't bring yourself to admit it to me or something, i don't know. i can't wrap my head around you coming to to the conclusion that the best way to handle whatever is going on is to blatantly ignore me. do you have any idea what that does to me? especially while i am in the throes of one of the worst depressive episodes i've ever been through? probably not. do you care? obviously not. but i'll tell you what it does to me. it makes me feel worthless. it makes me feel like everything was a waste, a lie, a sick inside joke between you and her where i am the punchline. it makes me bitter and jealous that you two are up all night together having a great time and i am alone and too depressed to eat or get out of bed and you don't even have the decency to ask if i'm okay or not. it fucks with my sense of self to feel like i was so wrong about you and us. i am usually very sure of myself and my judgments of others, but i have never felt more wrong in my life. i thought i was getting to know the real you but now i feel deceived. i don't know you at all. i don't remember you. none of the things you ever said to me feel real anymore. you seem deceitful and disingenuous and self-serving. all of the nice things you used to say to me about your feelings for me seem like little silver-tongued lies you used to string me along, to keep me around to entertain you and feed your ego until you had the chance to get what you *really* wanted all along. i can't picture laughing with you anymore, all i can picture is you laughing at me. i suppose in the long-run this will be a good thing. it has definitely forced me, against my will (again), to finally snuff the last few embers of my love for you. it's been a bit like being thrust into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim. all of the memories of our embraces and laughter and inside jokes that used to give me butterflies just make me feel cold now. thinking of you used to make my tears flow freely, but now i am able to stop them before a single one is able to spill over and slide down my cheek. all my thoughts of a future with you in my life, any kind of future: friendship, companionship, having a beer once in a while, whatever, have been replaced with a future where i don't think of you at all except to hope that you're miserable and that the both of you get nothing more or less than exactly what you deserve. all the time i spent thinking of ways to help you is now free time that i have to do things that don't make me sad or sentimentally hopeful that you think of me half as much as i think of you. you told me once that it terrified you to think that you'd be reduced to nothing more than a memory to me. did you mean that? i wonder how it would make you feel to know that soon you will not even be a memory. you will be little more than a stain on my past, a dark part of one of the lowest periods of my life, a fleeting thought that leaves a bad taste in my mouth and a scowl on my lips. you will be a sad story i tell when i've had too much to drink and get a little too honest. you will be an annoying throb in my forehead when i see an FMA poster or hear a radiohead song. i will grit my teeth when i move to coralville and think that i once knew a boy who i am now very physically close to, but emotionally further from than ever. i will remember you, but you will not be a memory. memories are reserved for things that i wish to call upon at will, things that i recollect fondly and want to preserve forever. you are not one of those things. our time together is not one of those things. i will remember you begrudgingly because i cannot force my brain to forget you completely, but i will not feel anything when my neurons fire in such a way that your smile or your smell crosses my mind. that is all you will be to me. a series of biochemical processes. how interesting and sad that our "love" can be reduced to an impulse passing across a synapse. maybe it's what you've always wanted. it's not what i wanted, but that's how it will be. good luck with your life. i hope you find happiness and that your life turns out the way you've always dreamt it would. i hope you dream of me and wake up sweating and confused with bile in the back of your throat. i hope you see me on every street corner. i hope the guilt eats you alive. but mostly i just hope you're okay.

an open letter to a dickhead

2015-06-21 15:45:33 ET i wish you knew that i'm not okay. if there was some way to quantify the tears i've cried for you, the hours i've spent staring at the ceiling, maybe you'd be surprised at how deeply i hurt. maybe not. the better question is whether you'd care; whether it'd make a difference or make you consider fully, for the first time in months, how you've treated me like shit, how you continue to treat me like shit, how you single-handedly obliterated something amazing and how i'm just supposed to be okay with that and wish you the best because hey, congrats, you've got everything you wanted and what a pleasure it was to help you out in your time of need, guess i'll just go away now. maybe not. i feel you are unreachable at times. that no matter where you end up, you'll never be truly sorry, you'll never try to understand how i feel, you'll never feel complete remorse for any or all of this. that scares me and makes me angry. it's not fair that i am here alone crying and hyperventilating into my pillow while the two of you are up all night together. i was there for you. she hurt you, she physically abused you, she manipulated and used you and i was there, i was your anchor in the storm. i was there because i wanted to be there, because you needed me, because you asked me to be there and i knew you were not in a good place and i didn't want you to suffer alone, in silence. i gave of myself completely and you took it willingly as long as it suited you. now i am alone and confused and hurting and where the fuck are you? you jumped ship and didn't look back. do you understand how dispensable that makes me feel? how it makes me question that i was ever anything more to you than a rebound? do you get how it makes me so angry that i can barely see straight, to hear you tell me how beautiful and kind and perfect i am, but it's still not enough to warrant a phone call now and then? you fuck with my head by leveraging these extremes against me. i know i am a good person and i know you want good people in your life and i cannot come to terms with you settling for shitty, toxic people. you are worth more and i want so badly to help you but you won't let me and it infuriates me. you are smarter than this. all of this would be easier if we could have actual conversations. do you understand how hard it is for me to move on from this without closure? to force myself to fall out of love with you, to come to terms with you living with your abusive ex-girlfriend, to go from talking to you all day, every day to not at all, without the chance to really tie up any loose ends or see if we could make it work? that's all i wanted. i wanted to see you, to talk to you, because i know if we got together you'd remember why we loved each other in the first place. it's easy for you to brush me under the rug, to tell yourself that my feelings aren't your responsibility because she's way more fucked up than i am and i'm a big girl and i can handle myself and she can't live without you so her needs are more important than mine. what a fucking joke. the bottom line is that she is there and i am here and all you have to do is not pick up your phone and then i'm just a memory. it's easier to make me a memory than it is to confront how much you fucked me over, how you ruined us, for someone who doesn't deserve it and will never, ever be truly grateful or appreciate the role she played in our undoing. fuck you. i am not a memory. i am not an idea or a concept or a tool to be used and discarded after you've broken me. i am a person, a tangible and autonomous being with feelings and emotions and a heart that i gave you, that you wanted, a person who you gave your heart to, a person you made plans for the future with, a person you talked about introducing to your parents. that wasn't fake, even if your nonchalance and constant "i don't know's" make me think it was. you cannot ignore me into un-existence. you cannot continue to ignore everything that's been left unsaid and unresolved between us, it will eat you alive and come back when you least expect it the way your feelings for her did. you need to realize that your actions have consequences outside of yourself, sometimes unintended consequences, but just because they are unintended does not mean you are absolved from responsibility for hurting people. i think it'd have hurt less if you'd died. that's how it feels. we never got a chance to really end things or say our pieces, we just drifted further and further apart because you let her drive a wedge between us and now i barely know you anymore. you don't know me, either. you don't ask about my classes or about my day or about anything that matters at all, because denying me those things dehumanizes me and if i'm just someone you bullshit with from time to time it's easier to keep emotions out of it, isn't it? you don't want to hear that i'm hurting because of you, even if you can guess deep down that i am, and that i have been, and that i will. but i know you are still out there, still laughing with her, still interacting with her, still sleeping five feet away from her. do you ever think of me? do you ever come across things you wish you could share with me? do you ever remember how you told me you'd never put me through this kind of hurt again and that you'd be the person i needed you to be? i don't want you to be that person. i want you to be the person YOU need you to be, and you are not that person right now. it annoys you when i talk about the "new you" because you know i'm right but you don't know how to get back to the person you were discovering when we were together. you know that the you i fell in love with is just a shadow now, but i think that was the real you. this depressed and stressed and confused person is a defense mechanism because you're scared of being hurt and expressing real, raw emotions to someone because it'll make you vulnerable. it's easier for you to detach. i saw inside your walls for a while and it was a pleasure. i loved what i saw, i loved the inside of you that was creative and honest and candid. i miss him. as stupid as it may be, as naive, as pointless, as hurtful, i still hope to see him again. i hope to move past this and show you what it means to be loved because you're you, not because you can give me something or save me from myself. i don't know what i want or expect. if i could i'd use that mind erase-y thing from eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. i swear, i would. forgetting you entirely would be preferable to this existence where i had you and lost you and didn't even get a chance to fight for you because you refuse to let me try. i could be so good to you, i know you want someone to be good to you. you deserve to be treated well, but you have to make up your mind to treat someone else well. you have to let go of your fear of never being good enough. you have to give someone a chance. if you push everyone away because you think they're too good for you, you'll end up with someone who doesn't deserve you and you'll never be satisfied. you are too many things to settle for someone who isn't your equal and doesn't compliment you and bring out the best in you. that's what a healthy relationship is. co-dependence and being with someone because they're a safe choice, because you think they're too pathetic to possibly do any better than you, that's not love. nobody deserves that. i wanted to say all of this, or something resembling it, to you yesterday. i can't say that i'm surprised we didn't talk. "if you want to talk sometime on saturday it might be possible" doesn't inspire much confidence but it was almost guaranteed you wouldn't bother after we hadn't talked all week. i always wonder what you're up to when we go for long periods of time without communicating. i can guess, but i can never be sure. i don't like that. i want to know that you're okay and doing well, and of course i want to know what the fuck is going on with her. you know i think she needs to leave. her being there does neither of you any good. it's been nearly four months. christ, what a mess. fuck this year. you stole 2015 from me, you asshole. the first few months were good but why would i want to remember any of that? it's all a blur now. i don't even feel sure it really happened, sometimes. all of the embraces and the tender whispered words of devotion. did they really occur? the last few months have been my own personal hell and i swear to god i've really felt like i've been burning sometimes. burning alive in my feelings for you. how fucking dare you awaken these things within me and then expect me to suffocate them on a whim. i'm sure the next few months will be like this one, barely talking to you, insanely jealous and bitter at how i've been used as a means to an end, fluctuating between feeling like i'm over it and feeling like i'll burst if i don't hear from you soon. what a shitty year. remember when we made plans together? remember when we were thinking of a future together? where the fuck did it go? i hate you and i love you. i feel sorry for you yet have absolutely no pity for the misery you bring upon yourself. i regret meeting you yet wish we could work things out. i think you are a good person but at times think you and she deserve each other, i think you deserve to wallow in uncertainty and drag each other down. i want you to be happy, but i want you to hurt and suffer the way i have. i want you to think better of yourself but i want you to acknowledge that you need help and that treating people the way you've treated me is an intensely selfish and abhorrent way to interact with others. i want to forget you and i want to see you and i want to hurt you and i want to kiss you. i just want you.

2015-06-09 16:21:36 ET it's been nearly two months since i wrote here last. i guess there is some comfort in the fact that, despite how long each day feels, despite how hard it is to get out of bed, despite how everything seems to have a black and white filter over it... time stops for no one. it marches on relentlessly. two months. i can't believe it. my broken heart is on its way to being mended. it was a festering, putrid wound for a while, but i forced (or tried to... it remains to be seen how successful i was) myself to excise the hurt and now i'm left with a mass of raw, bloody flesh that is a constant reminder of what used to be and what i still wish things were. someday it will be scar tissue and i will be able to look back on these past few months, and probably the next few to come, as a lesson of some sort rather than as nothing more than one of the absolute lowest and most emotionally draining periods of my entire life. someday soon, i hope. i'm back to being in a place where i fear love. i am terrified at how quickly i am willing to open myself to someone and how much of myself i am willing to sacrifice for that person. i am scared that i will always be more sensitive and honest and emotionally open than whoever i'm with and i'll only ever end up being hurt by them. i had myself convinced that being so emotionally candid and forgiving and patient is a good thing but here i am regretting it all and wishing i was colder and more vacant and unavailable. all i can feel right now is that love hurts and it's not worth it. people will disappoint you and betray you. people you thought you knew will surprise you and fade into people you barely recognize. people you used to talk to every day will begin to reach out to you less and less until you're more startled by their attentions than you are by their silence. people can be fickle and unreliable and sometimes, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you give and no matter how far you bend, even so far that you're almost broken, it's still not enough. most of my life i have felt that i'm not *enough* of anything: smart enough, pretty enough, funny enough, thin enough, ambitious enough, caring enough, exciting enough, or just plain GOOD enough for anything or anyone. i am back to those feelings and while i have been through enough therapy and done enough soul searching over the last decade or so to know those things aren't true, old habits die hard and god damn is it comforting to wallow and detest myself for a while, self destructive and ultimately pointless though it may be. i will eternally be my own worst enemy and there is a small bit of satisfaction in knowing that nobody will ever hate me more than i hate me. the worst part of all of this is that i don't *really* want to feel these things. i don't want to hate people and hate love and guard myself from experiencing everything and reacting fully. i'm a romantic at heart. i'm sensitive. i just want to be understood. i want to drown in someone. i have so much to give and the capacity and willingness to accept all of someone else. i want to build and grow and learn with someone. my entire life i've see-sawed between feeling so human i could burst to feeling like some ugly misunderstood alien that will never connect to anyone in a lasting, meaningful way. i fluctuate between wanting to smother people so they can't leave me, like i'm always scared they eventually will, to pushing them away so they won't even get a chance to leave because i'll have done it first. love is ugly. i want so badly to remember that it's beautiful and worth fighting for but i am so exhausted and sick of it right now. all i can think of are the lyrics to title and registration by death cab - "there's no blame for how our love did slowly fade, but now that it's gone, it's like it wasn't there at all." i can't remember what it felt like when he held me, or what his lips felt like on mine. i can't even remember how i felt when he said he loved me or called me beautiful. all i can think of are the tears and the constant fighting and the excuses and empty apologies and broken promises. ugly. what an ugly and isolating and painful and depressing place to be. i hate depression. i hate mental illness and i hate knowing that i will be sick in this way for the rest of my life. i hate that my illness has no specific triggers and that my depressive episodes last as long as they want to last and there is nothing i can do to make it better or make it go away. i hate that so few people understand what it's like to be physically ill with anxiety and despair to the point where literally nothing seems worth it. my depression doesn't make me suicidal, it just makes me so incredibly apathetic that i stop caring about nearly everything and everyone important to me. i don't want to die, i just want to sleep forever. there's a difference, somehow. it's like, if i had a reason to get up and live, i'd do it, but nothing seems compelling enough.

2015-04-18 14:12:40 ET someone that i love is in an abusive relationship and the situation is so fucking delicate that i am at a loss for how to help. i have been googling "how to talk to someone in an abusive relationship" and "how to help someone who doesn't believe they're being abused" and shit like that and it's sort of giving me ideas of what to say and how to approach the subject, but i am still so fucking scared he'll just get angry and think i'm prying and shut the conversation down before it even gets started. what's even more complicated about it is that up until a little over a month ago, he and i were romantically involved and headed toward good things. the bump in the road came in the form of his emotionally, physically, sexually and psychologically abusive ex-girlfriend coming back to town and having no job or place to live. being the good guy that he is, he decided to take her in and fall back on old habits rather than let her be homeless. all the progress he had made in the time they'd been apart, building up his self-esteem, making positive changes, reconnecting with old friends, planning for the future... over the past month i've watched all of that come to a screeching halt. i see him reverting back to the depressed, anxious, confused, exhausted, cynical person he was when i first met him right after they'd broken up. getting a glimpse of the person he is inside, past the walls he's built up... i feel like i can't sit idly by and leave him behind. it's so, so hard for me to deal with this, but i know it's even harder for him, and i am doing everything i can to focus on helping him. i just don't know how. i'm so scared of fucking things up and pushing him away. he's so good at hiding his emotions and putting on a brave face and pretending that he's jazzed to be helping her out, but i can tell that he knows things aren't right. i'm so scared for him. he's become a person i hardly recognize and i realize that this is likely how he was the entire time they were together, i just never got to see it, only hear about it. in the time i knew him, the REAL him, he was radiant. it hurts my very soul to see him as he is now. he walks on eggshells around her all the time because his main motivation for everything now, EVERYTHING, including the people he interacts with, the places he goes, the things he does, is just to prevent her from having a panic attack. he has cut off nearly all contact with me and other female friends because it's easier to remove us from his life than it is to deal with one of her jealous, unstable episodes where she's up all night screaming and crying and begging him to take her to the hospital because she thinks she's dying. all of this is compounded further by the fact that i live two hours away, and seem to be the only person who is fully aware of how dire and delicate and complicated and sad the situation is. his parents have no idea and have never even met his ex, all of his close friends don't live nearby so he can only skype with them, but he can't even discuss what's happening because he lives in a studio apartment and she's always there, listening... his old roommate and best friend knows she's back in town but i have no idea how he feels about the situation. i feel like the only one who can help, but there's so little i can do. i don't know. i just don't know. so, SK, i come to you again... any advice? have you ever been in my position, standing on the sidelines watching and feeling helpless while someone you care about suffers silently? or maybe you've been on the inside, trapped in a situation you weren't sure how to get out of, feeling like you are alone and scared and unsure of who or where to turn to? thank you all. i just want to say thanks. i've gotten some really good advice here over the years and am always grateful to have this place to call home when my brain is overflowing and i need somewhere to put it all. 4 comments

2015-03-13 20:29:04 ET to any polyamorous/open relationship people out there: question: would you entertain a relationship with someone without letting them know you're polyamorous, assume that they're ok with you being polyamorous, or that they are polyamorous? or would you assume intrinsically that they are monogamous (considering that statistically, the majority of people are) and make them very aware that you are polyamorous, ask if they are ok with getting involved with someone who is poly, etc? i feel like that's a pretty big thing to make sure everyone's on board with. i don't think that's something you assume or leave to chance. i'm monogamous and have no interest in any poly/open relationships, no offense to anyone who does, and i would like to have that sort of information disclosed to me before getting involved with someone. i am absolutely crushed right now. 4 comments

Jump to page: [Previous] 1 2 3 4 5 6 » 20 [Next] Back to miss self destruct's page