He was my everything. Being with him made me so happy I didn’t quite know how to act. I wasn’t good enough for him. I often hated myself and cried and had frequent emotional breakdowns where I knew beyond a doubt that I was hateful, mean, hopeless, and totally without value. I couldn’t understand why he would want to stay with someone like me, who acted up the way I did for seemingly no reason whatsoever. I feared I was too needy. I feared I was too pathetic. I feared no one would want me since I didn’t even like myself and I kept being such a bitch. I came up with a hundred, give or take a million, introspective guesses why I was so messed up, but none ever got me any closer to happiness. They reinforced my self-loathing and the problem escalated.
One night, sometime after midnight as usual, I felt another attack of helpless unhappiness coming on. He was stretched out on his bed, a thick dark-blue cover pulled up to his waist, propped up on one elbow with a dated laptop open next to him, absorbed in what he was reading. I had been sitting in a chair, legs propped up on the bed, intermittently reading one of my favorite books. I told him I felt wrong. He looked up from his web comic, concern shifting the tilt of his eyebrows and a slight crease dividing the two. “Wrong?” he asked me. “Like how?”
But I didn’t know how. I was just a stupid, hopeless creature who brought sadness and unease into the bedroom with me half the nights I spent with him. I talked on and on, trying to figure it out. He prompted me with questions, tried to comfort me with sad eyes and a hand rubbing up and down my leg. I didn’t want to see his eyes looking at me. I didn’t want him to touch me: a hateful thing who couldn’t be happy with every reason in the world to be blissful and who couldn’t love herself no matter how hard she tried. Eventually I couldn’t take staring at my knees, feeling him watch me, eyes willing me to find contentment somehow. I glued my eyes to the floor, got up from where I was sitting, and closed myself up in the small, windowless bathroom with the door that doesn’t lock. I sat on the toilet and stared at the tub, not really seeing it, and tried to figure out why I couldn’t be happy and why I couldn’t stand myself. My ears rang loudly as I sat in the quiet of my tiny, self-made world of confusion and malcontent.
I sat there staring and thinking and listening to the whine in my ears and the small noises the shifting toilet seat made that seemed unbearably loud in that small room. I thought. And thought. And understood. I don’t know why or how exactly I came to know it, but I finally hit upon the real reason for my months of incredible imbalance. Perhaps it was a revelation straight from God; I believe it must be so, because I was so clueless. It was so simple. I could even fix it.
I missed my friends. Those loyal friends from high school that I barely saw now that I had started college. Those wonderful girls who knew me, had known, me for years. Those blessed people whose love made me feel worth something and brought out the best in me. I had unknowingly been trying to fill the hole left by their absence with my boyfriend’s love. His was wonderful and fulfilling in its own way, but it was a different type of love than what my friends and I shared. No matter how glorious our romantic love was, it could never ever fill the gap where my friend’s love should be. I had been frustrated and unhappy because his love wasn’t enough and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why.
He was my everything. His hugeness in my life made me small, unbalanced, and unhappy. But I have my own friends who love me and who I need to be around more because they are crucial to my happiness. They can never be replaced by romantic love and their company is as essential to me as shelter and food. I have my own interests and goals apart from my boyfriend. He is not my everything. He is a wonderful part of my life, but still just a part of a much larger life. I am balanced now. I am happy now. I know all the pieces that make up my everything and they are many and varied, just the way I like them.
No comments:
Post a Comment