My “One True Thing” Decimated my Belief that HE was the “ONE”
A step-by-step, existential letter to myself on how to heal:
Step One: Radio silence. Do not react irrationally out of emotion in response to his verbal abuse. Do not engage. Verbal abuse is NEVER okay. Understand with your entire being that his belligerent behavior is not excused by the fact that he was drunk. I’ll say it again: verbal abuse is never okay.
Step Two: Allow yourself time to feel like a complete and utter ass because for the last month you have been posting all over Medium about how this person was your One True Thing (OTT).
Okay, don’t dwell on it too long, but have a little bit of a freak out because your adoration for your OTT is out there on the internet for the rest of eternity, you can’t ever get it back — delete never permanently deletes something off the internet. But hey, that’s okay, because it’s part of your history, and you can’t delete your history either.
Breathe, and remember— everything we do is all about intention. Were your intentions when you wrote about your OTT purely about love, tolerance, forgiveness, and acceptance? Yes, they were.
Were your intentions to share your story so that it might help other people? Yes, they were.
Now smile and know you did a good thing and keep the blogs up so that other people may connect to you through these good intentions. Yes, I know you wanna rip the stories about him down because he hurt you so badly that you can’t breathe, but leave ’em up. You did a good thing girl.
Step 3: Stop feeling embarrassed because you only made it a few weeks as an “official couple” with your OTT.
Learn from this rather than feel shame about it.
What does this all mean? Why did it fail, and fail rather rapidly despite the fact that you thought it was really going to be IT this time…
You have never loved the other Aaron, the belligerent and mean alcoholic who, BY THE WAY, has verbally assaulted you more than once with blinding rage during a drinking bender. No, you don’t love him, you don’t love that. Take your vodka-goggles off girl.
(They’ve been off ‘cuz I’m sober now, and I’m beginning to see things a little differently…)
You have loved what you have wanted him to be in your mind for so long now that the real Aaron and the other Aaron have become conflated, convoluted. But those two people do not match up. They never have. They are incongruous, discordant… and this is his own duality to contend with and battle. You have enough of your own battles with incongruous duality.
You cannot love one and not the other. You have to love the whole. And this is just not going to be possible, despite your best efforts. Love and rage do not mix.
Your idealized version of Aaron does not, cannot include the other Aaron… The other Aaron just unloaded on you, he screamed and yelled at you for everything that you did during your manic episode. It is weeks later, and he is dead-drunk, and he won’t even remember a lot of what he just screamed at you, and GIRL, NONE of this is okay.
What happened to the tolerance and the acceptance and the forgiveness, and…what happened to the love? What happened to Aaron?
Well it’s all still there, he is in there somewhere, buried underneath an ocean of vodka he immerses himself in ad infinitum…
It is not your job to keep looking for a lifeline so that you don’t drown.
You wanted it to work.
You gave your official “I’m all in!!” You signed up to love an alcoholic, because he signed up to love a mentally ill person (that’s you sweetheart).
But what you did not sign up for was abuse and pain.
And better that it happened two weeks into your official coupling rather than two years.
Think about that.
Be grateful this happened when it did. There’s no embarrassment or shame to be had here.
It takes strength to walk away when you just said in your last blog that you were his, and only his…
STEP 4: Embrace your strength and go live your life as an authentic, genuine person you can love. Celebrate the fact that you are able to recognize the intersection of love and enabling, and that you know to GTFO as soon as you see it, and now. When loving someone and enabling them begin to intersect it creates a dysfunctional dynamic called co-dependency, and you are co-dependent no more girl!
**Thanks years of therapy. You actually work.**
Feel good about the fact that you are finally accepting that you and Aaron are just two magnets who perpetually push and pull, push and pull… You have begrudgingly known this all along, come on lady, let’s get fucking real here.
Aren’t you tired of this constant movement towards and away from someone you love? Do you see now that it is better sometimes to let someone go and to love them from afar, where you can be stable and happy and independent of this constant chaos?
Yes, you see it. You are seeing it for the first time, and this is liberating, empowering.
Go on and love yourself, I give you permission to do so. You can love yourself now, really it’s okay, don’t be afraid. You are making good, healthy decisions for yourself, as heart wrenching as they can be to make. Love yourself enough to let him go, just let him go… You’re gonna be just fine.
Now go and spread some love and joy in someone else’s world today who could really use it. Because that is who you really are girl :)
Thank you kindly for reading my work. I appreciate it with everything that I am. Follow me on Twitter ❤
