The last weekend workshop I took part in was a workshop on closure. something we all need and seldom get in the way we truly desire. At the time of the workshop, I had JUST broken up with my last boyfriend. So I wrote this closure letter to him--of course never meant to be mailed...simply an exercise.
Most of the content is no longer relevant, but there's one phrase I keep revisiting, because it wasn't so much about him, but more about my own repeating patterns. Anyway. Here's the whole thang:
Tim-How surprisingly difficult it is for me to call you my "ex-boyfriend". Not that you were my boyfriend for such a long amount of time that now the added prefix is a hiccup in my speech...but that I never really had a definition for what we were, so how do I define what we now are?
There was nothing in our coming together that was completely whole--it was always lacking (Clyde's word, that, the "lack"). And now, in a way, it is still the same partiality, the same lack, that exists. But I do need a precise definition, I think, because the limbo is killing me.
We can't have lovely days anymore. We can't have evenings where we trick ourselves into feeling that a beautiful relationship still is there. Because then when we have the conflict and the ugly arguments, the contrast is for me too great. It is jarring and painful and confusing. It is unhealthy and it makes me behave unhealthily.
You are a good person. You are not toxic. But the way we are interacting right now is. Still--how hard is it to rip off that bandaid? Neither one of us wants to do it, but once again I'm finding myself the one whose shoulders that burden falls upon.
I'm a self-sufficient person. As are you. We've both spent so much time in our lives alone and needing no partner. So when we came together, we reveled in that luxury of "ally" perhaps a bit too deeply. Like a starving child, we gulped the feast down far too quickly--and so quickly we were sick.
Now we've got to go it alone once again. And what should be familiar and easy is somehow a challenge neither one of us expected. For me, to suddenly be "without", to have lost my ally, to feel the distance widen and the connection vanish--it has been so very painful.
We've talked about how sad this all is, how we wish it could be different. And we know that it can't be. We've talked about how we have no regrets and how the love still exists even if the reality doesn't work. We've talked about needing the other still in our lives. I do feel that way and I also know that it just isn't good. I cannot be with you and not be with you. I will be able to--but not now. It's wreaking havoc on my body and my mind.
I have no idea what else to say. I feel that it has all been said--in some cases talked to death--and all that's left is now to cope with and tolerate the messy aftermath.
So. Obviously in the intervening couple of months since I wrote this letter, the circumstances have greatly changed. The situation no longer pains me like it did. I have in fact seen him several times without any reverberating emotions. That in itself is a little sad, as it always is when love dies. But it feels wonderful to have let go of something that was very broken. I knew before he and I even started that it wasn't going to last; but I was curious enough to want to find out where it would go. I never expected actual feelings to be stirred!
But the bit that I keep going back to is the part about being a starving child and subsequently overindulging. Not in any literal sense, although my past behaviors mimic that as well, but more so in the energetic frame. It's as if once I get a little taste of something I discover I need or even simply desire, I am bent to go overboard. I meet someone who sparks my interest and I suddenly want to be near them all the time. And that's not just in the romantic realm. I get friend crushes, too. I'll meet some chick I think is just amazing, and I suddenly want to be her BFF. And am hurt when I am most understandably not!
It ain't logical. It feels veeeery young. I know some of the sources, but I'm still digging to find the real root. In the meantime I seek to cope with the feelings that come up in a healthy way, and to continue prodding so that the pattern can eventually fade into nothing.
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