Hi. It’s the evening when I write this. I have just procrastinated for an hour instead of writing, but I’m here now so at least that’s something. How am I doing? I’m majorly stressed. I’m stressed out of my mind. I am not good at all. But I think and I really do hope that writing about all of what’s going on in my mind right now will help with this.
So what do I want to write about right now? Well, I have a few topics, but they might extend to more than one article. One of the topics is about what work I’m currently doing at the moment and how I should deal with it and make the most of it, another topic is that of my career and my girlfriend — this links to the first topic so hopefully writing out my thoughts on each will help the other. Anyway, let’s get down to it.
What do I mean by my career and my girlfriend? Well, this topic has been on my mind a lot recently, but I’ve been pushed to write about it due to my new book. My new book has pushed me to seek the answers to the following questions: ‘what bullshit have you had to contend with in your life?’; ‘what factors are limiting you right now?; and ‘what was the bad hand which life dealt you?’. I think that I can contribute a partial answer to the middle question. One of the factors which is limiting me right now is my unclear and unhealthy obsession with my girlfriend and my career. Let’s finally get down to what I mean by this. I mean that I am intensely jealous of my girlfriend’s career. I don’t want to be and I am not proud of this at all and I want to sort it out and cure it, but I do need to be perfectly honest with myself in order to do that. I need to face this unpleasant fact about myself: I am jealous of the success of my girlfriend. When I think about her success, my stomach churns. So what exactly is this success that makes my stomach churn? It is the fact that she is currently working a dream job where she is paid to live somewhere lovely and to learn a new language and to experience a new country (yes, she does have some menial duties to attend to, but she also has a great deal of free time). She is working out there. So it’s a wonderful job and I think that I am jealous of that — especially learning a new language. But I think that what hurts me about her doing this job is that she is so dedicated to it. I know that’s an awful thing to say, but I have to articulate how I feel in order to deal with my emotions. What churns my stomach was the fact that her dedication to this job revealed that I, her boyfriend, am not her top priority in life. It revealed that she has a life to get on with and that she is going to get on with it no matter what, with me or without me. I know that is the right thing for her to do, since it is what I should be doing as well — I need to be living out my own life and being independent and pursuing my own career — but learning this after so many months spent so close together and without having developed a career plan of my own is such a painful lesson to learn. Does this mean that I have grown to be dependent on her? Well, I think that the best way of describing it is that our relationship became the focus of my life. She became the most important thing in my life. This was at the expense of my own career progression and me forging my own path. And this was not the same for her. Her going off to a foreign country and her single-minded determination on going there and the independence that she says that she’s found there show me that I was indeed not her greatest priority. I am not the focus of her life. Learning this has been an awful lesson to learn. I need to learn it and doing so will be good for me in the long run, but, my god, it is painful. I have learnt that my greatest priority in life has departed me and that I am not her greatest priority in life. Whereas I lived for her, she did not live for me. She had been working on herself all this time, whereas I had not been working on myself.
Just a brief interlude…I say that I have not been working on myself all of this time; now this requires some explanation. The explanation of why I have not been working on myself requires me to tell the story of my university education. I think that should be in another article.
Where was I? I described one reason why my stomach churns whilst thinking about my girlfriend’s success: the fact that I had her as my greatest focus and that I focused on her without thinking about my career or future, and the fact that she is clearly focused on her career and that that takes priority over me. Yep, that’s a tough pill to swallow. So how should I take my medicine? What should be the proper state of affairs on this point? I think that the proper state of affairs is for us both to have our careers and personal development as our top priorities and for our relationship to come second to those things — but for our relationship to remain important to us still. Our relationship should complement our lives — it should bring us joy in addition to the work that we do. I now remember something that a close friend told me: a relationship should be two whole people coming together, not two halves coming together to make a whole. I think that he was talking about the negative effects of co-dependence. On another thought, I think that what happened to me during university was that I was struggling so much with my academia that I turned to try to help solve another problem — my girlfriend’s problems. I tried to help her as best I could. Perhaps that was my escape from my university hell. Because it was hell for me. But I should write about that at another time.
I’ve been rambling for a while and it’s going to have been almost incomprehensible but I think that it’s good for me. So, in summary, what have I written about? I’ve written that: the issue of ‘my career and my girlfriend’ has been on my mind an unhealthy amount recently; I am jealous of my girlfriend’s success — but I want to cure myself of this; I am jealous of her going to a foreign country and developing herself; I have realised that she was my top priority but I was not hers; I have realised that a relationship should be two ‘whole’s coming together i.e. our personal development should be our top priority. Let’s continue this in another article.
