The most commonly asked question is how did this even happen? I had been deemed the good girl my entire life and even flirting with the idea of him was rebellious. His past didn’t bother me. I didn’t think we were starting off in disaster. He was kind, funny, thoughtful. He dropped everything for me in an instant. I had all of his attention all of the time and that was completely new to me. I felt loved and thats really all there was to it.
The second most commonly asked question is why did you stay? It’s so complicated, dynamic, and irrational that I don’t really know if there is an adequate answer. People kept wanting to hear a proper justification for why I kept throwing myself into flames. I felt like I was Hagrid and he was Buckbeak. Everyone else saw him as this monster and there were days where I wholeheartedly agreed and other days where I thought he just needed some compassion.
When he first accused me of making him my little project, I was insulted despite him being right. I had invested so much of my time and energy into him that I needed him to come out on the other side better than how I found him. There had to be a purpose to all of this. And if the reason for this relationship wasn’t so that I could get him down the right path then I really had no clue what the fuck any of this was supposed to mean.
For 2 years, I had made him the center of my life. He hoarded all of my time and focus. I knew damn well that my own life was a mess that needed some fixing, but their was no time or urgency for that. He “needed” me and everything else would have to wait.
I was trying to give directions when I had no idea where my path even began. I was lost, but I thought he was more lost. Except that he wasn’t. He knew very well where he was going and what he was doing. He was making conscious choices and my disapproval of those choices didn’t change that it was his choice to make. I stayed because I thought he needed saving, I left because I learned that people are not yours to save.
When I left, the only thing that I had to focus on was myself and I wasn’t ready. There were no more distractions. No more problems that were bigger than my own. There was just me. Alone and lost. And I had to admit that I didn’t even know where to begin. I had been hiding behind him for years, using him as an excuse and a distraction and now it was finally time for me to put all of that energy into myself.
If I could go back and relive all the days I spent trying to fix him instead of myself, I could have conquered the world by now, but I don’t consider those days wasted. I don’t think it was ever about him. There was a bigger lesson I needed to learn. I had problems with control. I was self righteous. I was putting unrealistic expectations on people and then scorning them when they made choices I didn’t approve of. My friend’s found it difficult to talk to me. I would judge them for being human. And that’s not the friend I want to be. I learned to be compassionate when people lost their way, to lend an ear instead of forcing opinions to problems I didn’t have the answers to. I learned that other people’s lives were not my responsibility or my business. Our relationship forced me to understand that I couldn’t dictate people’s stories. They had to write their own and I have to love them or leave them as they are.
After him, I made two promises to myself. 1. I will never let another relationship distract me from my own life and 2. I will never try to make a person be anything else other than who they are. Love em or leave em. That’s it!
