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For the record, I'm not really looking for advice, just pouring out a particular thing that's on my mind because it's weighing on me tonight. I know this is supposed to be a debate forum, but I don't really have anywhere else to go, so if this is inappropriate for this environment and needs to be removed, I understand.
This is something I've been dealing with for a while, but given some recent events, it's been hitting me even harder than usual and I've been having some very scary existential crises all over again. Let me start at the beginning.
It's about a girl. No, it's about the girl. I met her when I was 10 years old. She was 11. We were from very different backgrounds. She was from a poor, divorced, and overall violent, abusive, and dysfunctional family living in the city, whereas I was a middle-class suburbanite child, also from a somewhat dysfunctional family, but in different ways. Somehow, we connected almost instantly. It's the kind of thing that happens in a storybook. We became truer friends than you'd ever meet in your life. And, while she had a few other friends, I really didn't - not any close friends anyway. We were inseparable, we never kept secrets from each other, and we always loved and supported one another. We never had a single fight from when I was 10 until I was, oh, 16 or so. You'll see why that age is significant shortly.
I was there for her through all of the horrible things that happened to her through her life. I was there for her when she was raped. I was there when her friend committed suicide. I was there through all of the jackass boyfriends she went through during that time. And she was there for me during my (comparatively much more miniscule) problems. She never belittled me or talked down to me for not having it as hard as she did, though. She would cry on my shoulder when needed and tell me how glad she was that I was there for her, in her life.
This story is still following a predictable arc, of course. Around the time when I turned 16, we started dating...only to find out we made an absolutely horrible couple. We were two very different people. I was a shy, introspective Christian (still am, in a lot of ways, though not nearly as withdrawn now as I was then) and she was a wild, drug-addled party girl. These two wills simply couldn't resolve with one another, and after 7 months, things just exploded. She was cheating on me, we were fighting all the time, she kept going back to drugs despite telling me she'd kick them...it was just a terrible time. So things ended, of course, after a few huge fights, and we didn't talk anymore...
For, like, 2 months. Then we started talking again, patched things up, and suddenly things were the same as they were before we started dating. We went back to being extremely close friends, with one major difference. The sexual tension between us from that point onward was suffocating. I never gave in fully - I loved her to death, but I didn't trust her enough in that way due to her past infidelities. But I'm not proud of myself for the way I behaved during our friendship from when I was 16 to when I was 20.
During that time, she got married, she got divorced, she had a couple more boyfriends...it never stopped her from coming on to me relentlessly. And while I tried to retain my morals and do the right thing, I'm not going to lie and pretend I didn't both enjoy it and give in to some baser desires on occasion (although I will say that when I was in another relationship, I did keep myself in check, with one very shameful exception). We may not have been actually having sex, but really, in spirit we might as well have been. Like I said, I'm not proud of the way I behaved. But God help me, I just couldn't help myself.
Because with her, there was just this sense of inevitability. As time went on, our passion for each other just grew and grew and grew, and I'm not talking physically. We only got closer and closer in every way with every passing year. It was always more than a friendship, or any relationship. We both knew it, and we both talked about it a lot. It's like we were two halves of one person, separated at birth, who had found each other. We were inseparable, in every way. Neither of us was complete without the other. The fact that we were exact opposites only added to that. Like I said, we just completed each other. For 10 years, it didn't matter whether we were friends, or romantic partners - there was no me or her. It was always just us. And during those brief times when we weren't speaking, there was a crushing sense of emptiness, which is why we threw aside our fights and just ran back to each other and clung to each other as hard as we could, because we needed our other half. This isn't just my own perspective - at the time, she told me as much. It was just as true for both of us.
In summer of 2010, I was working at a factory, and she was working at a retail outlet. We were still madly in love with each other. We had never stopped being madly in love with each other for basically our whole lives. We were both single. This was it. She wanted us to move in together, and at this point, I was more than happy to do so. Although we were still not sleeping together, my former trust issues were long burned away, 4 years removed from the events which caused them to appear. She was also talking about rekindling our romance officially. Like I said, it was inevitable. And she had changed so much, in all the right ways. She wasn't doing drugs anymore, which we both knew were the main catalyst for her lapses in judgment causing her to cheat on me all those years ago. So, at this point, I knew what was going to happen. We were going to get back together, and finally, our 10 year long love story would have its happy ending. We had something so special, and our dramatic history was practically fit for a movie, so it was only proper that we have a Hollywood ending, right?
This was about the time I learned real life isn't like the movies, no matter how much it may set itself up as though it is.
In August of 2010, she told me we needed to talk. She'd been doing some thinking, and she thought we needed to create some distance between us. Obviously, I felt like I'd been run over by a truck, and I prodded her to find out why. She wouldn't give me a very clear answer, but as best I could tell, it was because she wanted to find out who she was outside of us. I wasn't prepared, though, for how different things would be starting then. It seemed almost as though her emotions were suddenly operating on a switch, and she had decided to turn it off. The person I once knew better than I knew myself suddenly became a stranger to me, almost overnight. She felt hardly anything other than basic casual friendship for me anymore. She threw out her plans for us moving in together or becoming a couple again. When we talked, we'd just make small talk about nothing important. I didn't want to rock the boat and make things worse, so I didn't bring up the extreme disconnect we have from each other until recently. All she can say in reference to it is "People change. I've grown up." If I have something important to talk about, she's usually just extremely critical of me. And when I look in her eyes, I see nothing, none of that spark or that warmth or love that she used to have.
And that's the way things are now. Since that time, she's since gotten into a serious relationship with another guy, and we rarely even talk anymore. And I've never learned how to deal with it. When she broke things off, she disconnected herself from me without physically removing herself from my life, somehow, and I haven't figured out how to do that. She found herself without me and didn't need me anymore. But I'm not there, and I don't know how I ever will be. That crushing emptiness I mentioned earlier, that came with separation? I still feel it. She used to feel it, too, not too terribly long ago, but she doesn't anymore. She couldn't care less.
She found a version of herself without me, but I can't find the same. I came to this horrible realization way back in August 2010, when it first happened, but it's still with me today. There is no me without her. I grew up with her as an essential part of my life. We grew up together practically as conjoined twins. She managed to distance herself from that permanently...that just destroys me. I've been in a couple of relationships since this happened, but it's still always been gnawing at me. I feel like I will forever be defined by this. I have no identity outside of this girl, or, at most, I only have half of one. I feel like an incomplete person, a body without a heart. She used to feel the same way when we were apart...but she doesn't anymore.
And so this is my plight. I'm not asking for advice on how to get things back to the same way they used to be - I realize that that is basically impossible, and have resigned myself to that fact. If I'm asking for anything, it's for advice on how to continue on in the wake of the collapse of the only world I've ever known.
I'm sorry if this all seemed terribly melodramatic. I'm in a melodramatic mood tonight, I suppose. I'm sure everybody has been through some heartbreak, and mine just seems particularly terrible or catastrophic because it's happened to me. I've tried therapy, and it hasn't helped. I'm currently on anti-depressants, and sometimes they help, but...it's just too much for my mind to take. At any rate, thank you for reading this if you did. I just needed to get it off my chest.
This is something I've been dealing with for a while, but given some recent events, it's been hitting me even harder than usual and I've been having some very scary existential crises all over again. Let me start at the beginning.
It's about a girl. No, it's about the girl. I met her when I was 10 years old. She was 11. We were from very different backgrounds. She was from a poor, divorced, and overall violent, abusive, and dysfunctional family living in the city, whereas I was a middle-class suburbanite child, also from a somewhat dysfunctional family, but in different ways. Somehow, we connected almost instantly. It's the kind of thing that happens in a storybook. We became truer friends than you'd ever meet in your life. And, while she had a few other friends, I really didn't - not any close friends anyway. We were inseparable, we never kept secrets from each other, and we always loved and supported one another. We never had a single fight from when I was 10 until I was, oh, 16 or so. You'll see why that age is significant shortly.
I was there for her through all of the horrible things that happened to her through her life. I was there for her when she was raped. I was there when her friend committed suicide. I was there through all of the jackass boyfriends she went through during that time. And she was there for me during my (comparatively much more miniscule) problems. She never belittled me or talked down to me for not having it as hard as she did, though. She would cry on my shoulder when needed and tell me how glad she was that I was there for her, in her life.
This story is still following a predictable arc, of course. Around the time when I turned 16, we started dating...only to find out we made an absolutely horrible couple. We were two very different people. I was a shy, introspective Christian (still am, in a lot of ways, though not nearly as withdrawn now as I was then) and she was a wild, drug-addled party girl. These two wills simply couldn't resolve with one another, and after 7 months, things just exploded. She was cheating on me, we were fighting all the time, she kept going back to drugs despite telling me she'd kick them...it was just a terrible time. So things ended, of course, after a few huge fights, and we didn't talk anymore...
For, like, 2 months. Then we started talking again, patched things up, and suddenly things were the same as they were before we started dating. We went back to being extremely close friends, with one major difference. The sexual tension between us from that point onward was suffocating. I never gave in fully - I loved her to death, but I didn't trust her enough in that way due to her past infidelities. But I'm not proud of myself for the way I behaved during our friendship from when I was 16 to when I was 20.
During that time, she got married, she got divorced, she had a couple more boyfriends...it never stopped her from coming on to me relentlessly. And while I tried to retain my morals and do the right thing, I'm not going to lie and pretend I didn't both enjoy it and give in to some baser desires on occasion (although I will say that when I was in another relationship, I did keep myself in check, with one very shameful exception). We may not have been actually having sex, but really, in spirit we might as well have been. Like I said, I'm not proud of the way I behaved. But God help me, I just couldn't help myself.
Because with her, there was just this sense of inevitability. As time went on, our passion for each other just grew and grew and grew, and I'm not talking physically. We only got closer and closer in every way with every passing year. It was always more than a friendship, or any relationship. We both knew it, and we both talked about it a lot. It's like we were two halves of one person, separated at birth, who had found each other. We were inseparable, in every way. Neither of us was complete without the other. The fact that we were exact opposites only added to that. Like I said, we just completed each other. For 10 years, it didn't matter whether we were friends, or romantic partners - there was no me or her. It was always just us. And during those brief times when we weren't speaking, there was a crushing sense of emptiness, which is why we threw aside our fights and just ran back to each other and clung to each other as hard as we could, because we needed our other half. This isn't just my own perspective - at the time, she told me as much. It was just as true for both of us.
In summer of 2010, I was working at a factory, and she was working at a retail outlet. We were still madly in love with each other. We had never stopped being madly in love with each other for basically our whole lives. We were both single. This was it. She wanted us to move in together, and at this point, I was more than happy to do so. Although we were still not sleeping together, my former trust issues were long burned away, 4 years removed from the events which caused them to appear. She was also talking about rekindling our romance officially. Like I said, it was inevitable. And she had changed so much, in all the right ways. She wasn't doing drugs anymore, which we both knew were the main catalyst for her lapses in judgment causing her to cheat on me all those years ago. So, at this point, I knew what was going to happen. We were going to get back together, and finally, our 10 year long love story would have its happy ending. We had something so special, and our dramatic history was practically fit for a movie, so it was only proper that we have a Hollywood ending, right?
This was about the time I learned real life isn't like the movies, no matter how much it may set itself up as though it is.
In August of 2010, she told me we needed to talk. She'd been doing some thinking, and she thought we needed to create some distance between us. Obviously, I felt like I'd been run over by a truck, and I prodded her to find out why. She wouldn't give me a very clear answer, but as best I could tell, it was because she wanted to find out who she was outside of us. I wasn't prepared, though, for how different things would be starting then. It seemed almost as though her emotions were suddenly operating on a switch, and she had decided to turn it off. The person I once knew better than I knew myself suddenly became a stranger to me, almost overnight. She felt hardly anything other than basic casual friendship for me anymore. She threw out her plans for us moving in together or becoming a couple again. When we talked, we'd just make small talk about nothing important. I didn't want to rock the boat and make things worse, so I didn't bring up the extreme disconnect we have from each other until recently. All she can say in reference to it is "People change. I've grown up." If I have something important to talk about, she's usually just extremely critical of me. And when I look in her eyes, I see nothing, none of that spark or that warmth or love that she used to have.
And that's the way things are now. Since that time, she's since gotten into a serious relationship with another guy, and we rarely even talk anymore. And I've never learned how to deal with it. When she broke things off, she disconnected herself from me without physically removing herself from my life, somehow, and I haven't figured out how to do that. She found herself without me and didn't need me anymore. But I'm not there, and I don't know how I ever will be. That crushing emptiness I mentioned earlier, that came with separation? I still feel it. She used to feel it, too, not too terribly long ago, but she doesn't anymore. She couldn't care less.
She found a version of herself without me, but I can't find the same. I came to this horrible realization way back in August 2010, when it first happened, but it's still with me today. There is no me without her. I grew up with her as an essential part of my life. We grew up together practically as conjoined twins. She managed to distance herself from that permanently...that just destroys me. I've been in a couple of relationships since this happened, but it's still always been gnawing at me. I feel like I will forever be defined by this. I have no identity outside of this girl, or, at most, I only have half of one. I feel like an incomplete person, a body without a heart. She used to feel the same way when we were apart...but she doesn't anymore.
And so this is my plight. I'm not asking for advice on how to get things back to the same way they used to be - I realize that that is basically impossible, and have resigned myself to that fact. If I'm asking for anything, it's for advice on how to continue on in the wake of the collapse of the only world I've ever known.
I'm sorry if this all seemed terribly melodramatic. I'm in a melodramatic mood tonight, I suppose. I'm sure everybody has been through some heartbreak, and mine just seems particularly terrible or catastrophic because it's happened to me. I've tried therapy, and it hasn't helped. I'm currently on anti-depressants, and sometimes they help, but...it's just too much for my mind to take. At any rate, thank you for reading this if you did. I just needed to get it off my chest.
With loneliness, as it seems to me it might be a problem too, I find it useful to have the TV going even if you're not watching it, just to fill the house with voices...
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