15 – laying on my couch, wishing I was dead. Thinking that he killed me with his words. I don’t know if I love you anymore

It wasn’t him. It was me. I killed me because I didn’t love myself. I was clinically depressed, not eating, sleeping too much, hormonal, waking up with panic attacks, every day, vomiting bile, thinking that there was no reason to exist. If he didn’t love me I didn’t matter. I didn’t know what love was – I thought it meant two parts of something. I believed that you didn’t need to love yourself to be loved by another person. None of that mattered to me because I didn’t want to be alive. I wanted to close my eyes and never wake up. I kept living and eventually, his rejection didn’t matter anymore, or at least I learned to stop picking the scab. It would be years later before I learned what it meant to love myself, to accept who I was, and to believe that I was anyone worth knowing.

34- My marriage disintegrated, and I couldn’t figure out who did what. I blamed him, but every bone in my body that “hated” him, actually just loved him harder. It looked like venom, but I was weaving that web to protect myself from getting hurt. I wanted to fix him, I wanted to repair “us” but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make myself better or him, or the two of us. I had no glue, no words, no cement to mold us into a statue of perfection. I was brought back to being 15 again, and I felt like I didn’t matter.

37- I am alone, I don’t know what happened to me, I miss him, and I miss not being broken. I miss being a part of something, and now it’s gone and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to love myself. I’m learning, and I’m afraid that I’m doing it all wrong. I’m terrified that I fucked up my whole consciousness too much by over-analyzing, being hyper-critical, using too many big words. I blamed him for years when in actuality, it was no one’s “fault.” People are different and we each bring something to the table that is unique and sometimes those two things don’t mix well. I took chemistry in high school and I had to drop the course because I didn’t understand how it worked.

I still don’t understand how things work.

I don’t think I ever fully will because…

There are somethings that we are not meant to “understand” and I can’t logic my way out of these feelings…

And I want to throw them out the window and…

reject them like a broken mannequin part in a factory line but…

I need to feel them so I can move forward, and there’s no shortcut, no detour, nothing can stop this. I am going to drive this race car at varying paces until I get to my destination(s). There are multiple stops along the way. I hope I see you there, and maybe we can have coffee sometime if you remember me.