I can hardly believe that it’s been a month since me and Mr. C last spoke. I put on a good game face about me and Mr. C’s breakup, but I get really sad about it from time to time. Yes, I miss him and what we had, but the thoughts that hurt me the most are the ones that sound something like:
- He wasn’t in love with me.
- I wasn’t the one for him.
- He just wasn’t that into me.
And when I call my friend JJ to pour my heart out, he tries to help me see it in another way. “Just tell yourself he wasn’t ready. Just because you think something doesn’t make it the absolute truth.” But I resist anything that sounds like a rationalization for why our relationship didn’t work out. I find a strange comfort in the harshest reasoning, the ones that keep me from holding on to something and someone that I felt like wasn’t holding on to me.
But then I started reading Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, and I realized how so much of the suffering I am experiencing is rooted in my ego. Our breakup isn’t good or bad. It just is. And my making the breakup about me rather than just seeing it as yet another impermanent part of life is what is really causing me to suffer. I know I said a few posts ago that I didn’t take the breakup personally. And I really thought I didn’t. But obviously I did. Very personally. But that really is the wrong way to think about it–or rather the way that is going to cause me more pain rather than allow me to accept the pain that comes with a breakup and move on.
The second realization I had was that all relationships have to end–even marriages when someone leaves, dies, or becomes mentally and emotionally absent. Rather than wallow about the end of a relationship, I’m opening my heart to all the things I learned. And if I consider me and Mr. C’s relationship to be a vehicle of learning for me, thank God I learned some life lessons with a pretty great boyfriend and not a terrible one (and I’ve had a few bad ones). I think of me and Mr. C’s relationship as the spoonful of sugar that helped the medicine go down.
Photo Credit: “Medicine” by Leonid Mamchenkov via Flickr
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Great post. This part was especially intriguing: “And my making the breakup about me rather than just seeing it as yet another impermanent part of life is what is really causing me to suffer.”
The impermanence of all things is a lesson that is hard for the majority of us to learn no matter the nature of the relationship, whether it’s personal or business. Wayne Dyer has written a lot about this. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his work. So in the end, I think, we’re left cherishing what we have while we have it. The rest is beyond our control.
Excellent entry!
I am engaged in research of human rights and violations of international law. I am a woman as well and what helps me cope and “get over” myself in terms of a breakup’s emotional shrapnel is viewing my breakup as a minute, trivial, microscopic event in an ocean of bigger, more note-worthy events and tragedies in the world we live in. When I think of the REAL kind of suffering caused by world-scale poverty, malnourishment, epidemic disease and war then my breakup feels like a pinch on the arm. Something not worth my emotional grief and wasted efforts. It makes realize I am fully capable of diverting that energy into real, positive change where it is needed. Try it! It works for me.
Best wishes with everything and thanks for your active engagement and advice sharing on CrazyGirl Nation!
I really think it’s only logical that you feel that way. Whether you wanted to or not, you exposed parts of yourself to him which is very personal just because of the fact they’re in association with you. So don’t feel bad and just look at this time as being a natural stage of healing after a breakup. I hardly have any experience in this area, so I’m really just speaking from observations I have made from your blogs and life in general (so don’t quote me lol). But good luck with the healing process.