The Good Things in Life Aren’t Easy’. I don’t know why this song resonates with me but it does, and I have it on a loop on my ipod for the past two weeks, the refrain of which is “So easy to get good things / But the hard ones last”.
When you’ve been through a break-up, you come out of it a different person, much stronger, better equipped to handle anything life throws at you.
Because in life, as in life, as in life: it’s all about the journey, not the destination, the choices we make along the way.
After a break-up, you make more of those decisions.
In an effort to stay distracted, I had made a list of things to do in the next seven years:
Write.
Learn how to play guitar.
Run three half marathons.
And this list, in particular, has given me my best kick in the pants lately. It’s been a long time since I picked up an instrument, but it felt nice to get that exercise kick in the ass that I needed after my month off.
There’s a really good quote that I’ve had taped on the wall over my desk in my bedroom, “You can only run from problems if you’re not happy about where you’re going”. It’s about as simple as it gets, and it’s stuck with me. When you’re feeling down and unhappy, and you’re just stuck in the rut of feeling nothing, you can’t very well motivate yourself to do anything. You need to be happy. And to be happy, you have to know who you are and what you stand for.
I’m still me. I’m still exactly the same person as I was a month ago. Nothing’s changed. But the way that I look at myself and the world around me has completely changed. My outlook has completely changed. And now, I look at the world with different eyes, and I see opportunities everywhere that I was blind to before.
Yes, break-ups suck. Yes, they are awful. But they don’t have to be awful. They can be beautiful. Your pain can make you stronger. It can teach you to appreciate things and people more, you can make you learn how to love yourself again, and you can learn how to become more aware of what you want, and what you deserve, and what you deserve from yourself and others.
I really didn’t want to. You see, it’s funny how life works. I had met this guy (on this blog) a few weeks ago, and it was such a coincidence that I had actually been at a different restaurant the day he and his friend came in that day and ordered the same dishes as me that I had actually ordered three days in a row earlier that week. It made me wonder if the universe was trying to give me a hint that I should go out with them, but I just wasn’t listening. But they actually did look cute together, so I figured if they’re not dating, there’s a reason and I’m supposed to be there. He was fun and interesting and he knew how to play guitar (who am I kidding? He could make a mean guacamole too!). It all sounded amazing, really.
Then we started dating. It started off very well, and I got to like him. A lot. One of my favorite things about him was that he really listened. He really listened to me when I would complain, or vent, or just vent. The problem was that a lot of times he would say, “I understand”, and that’s all I wanted to hear when someone didn’t agree with me. How much should you listen to what someone else is saying? What if they don’t even have the capacity to understand you? How do you know if they understand? And what is “understanding”? I liked the way he listened to me, but the end result was getting in the way. So for the last month, I have decided to just ignore those words. Just like I told him to stop telling me what to do, I told him not to tell me how he feels. And I didn’t respond to his message as quickly as I normally do. The silence felt so comfortable, so sweet, so easy. But then, it’s just hard to get things back to normal again.
After almost a week of silence, he sent me a text asking what was wrong. It wasn’t the text I expected. It wasn’t angry, it wasn’t confrontational. It was a simple “what’s wrong?” And I didn’t want to answer. I didn’t want to respond to him, because I knew that I would feel bad about things, and it would hurt, and that wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I wanted to ignore it and just take it all in. I wanted to keep on ignoring his texts. I really did, because I really didn’t want to talk about it. I just didn’t know how to stop it. Because of course, he would eventually ask me again. And he did. He told me that he wanted to see me, that he would wait for me if I wanted him to. I told him not to, because he’s kind of a huge jerk. I told him not to. I told him I didn’t want to talk to him about it. I told him not to text me anymore, and that’s when things got harder, because he’s a good friend and he wanted to know what was wrong, and all I did was tell him to stop talking.
I eventually told him the whole story. My history, his history. His ex-girlfriend, his friends, the exes, everything. He was quiet on the phone for a long time before telling me that I should talk to my mom. I don’t think that he understood why I kept my pain a secret from her. He couldn’t understand why I couldn’t tell her or tell someone who would help me. To him, I had just been waiting for her to ask what was wrong, but I told him that she never would have asked, and I didn’t tell her because she would have tried to make it better and make me feel better, and she didn’t get it. She didn’t know what my pain was. She wasn’t the right person to tell. She would have said all the wrong things. He didn’t understand why I kept it a secret from my friends either.
I never thought about it before. I was so concerned about my dad and his health, that I was too focused on other things to even worry about myself. I never even told them when my dad broke up with my ex. Now, you could say that that is for the best. That it’s better to let it go, but it’s hard to accept that sometimes the right thing to do isn’t the easy thing to do. It’s hard to accept that sometimes I have to keep something in, to protect myself from letting someone else rip my heart out and break it again.
I guess that I can’t really say why I didn’t tell them. Part of it is fear of what they would say, part of it is that I was just so focused on other things that it wasn’t even a thought that occurred to me. I didn’t really see the big deal. It was just an ex-boyfriend, what’s the big deal about it? I think that I didn’t think about it too much because I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t handle things on my own, so I just ignored the fact that my ex was still out there somewhere, still hurting, still in my life, hurting me.
I can’t say that there was nothing that I thought about, and yes, it hurt me a lot to see him. It hurt me a lot to have to remember what happened and what we used to have and what he was to me. But the thing that hurt the most was the thought of my dad watching my life fall apart, and him having to feel that pain, the same pain I had to live through because of him, because of him, because of him. I couldn’t be mad at him, but I knew that he wasn’t strong enough to understand my pain, that I had to keep it inside for the rest of my life because he just couldn’t handle it. He has never told me that he was hurt by my dad leaving, never told me that he felt like he lost his best friend because of that. I feel like he didn’t understand, and if he would have understood, if he would have let me cry on his shoulder, if he would have cried with me, if he would have felt what I felt, he would have understood. He would have understood how I felt. How the pain lingered in my soul, and how hard it was for me to breathe, even just the slightest of things.
I had finally found someone who understood what I was
