When You're STILL Sad the Guy is Gone
Even though it's been seven years and you've healed and healed and HEALED ...
Very shortly, it will be seven long years since my last relationship and I got together.
It was a disaster that lasted only four months, and took me this long to recover from. However, my therapist informed me at long last this week, she doesn’t think I need to come back to therapy.
I just wished, at seven years out, that I was happy in my life again.
I didn’t think I ever would be really happy again. For one thing, I used to define “happiness” like a little child. Sort of like, “Mommy, I’m going to grow up and be a movie star!” (How many little children have said that? However, there’s only one Natalie Portman.)
The trouble with that is, once you’ve spent too much of your life looking that way at the world, and then you have to accept the world you really live in, nothing is ever going to come up to what you used to believe was realistic.
And the other trouble is, if the guy had ever been healthy enough, life sure would have felt better with someone in it than with no one.
I don’t have anyone at all. And I’ve accepted that’s the way it’s going to be.
I grew up in an extremely unhealthy family, and for various reasons have had to distance from just about every person. (And every other person lives at an extreme distance.)
I’ve really been scarred by a lot of experiences. During the years most of us were learning how to fit in social situations and how to enjoy other people, I was getting shunned and hit and having gum thrown in my hair at school. I never really learned how to feel comfortable around other people after that.
And those past seven years I’ve existed in an alternate universe. I sure learned an awful lot … about affair-related issues, about relationships, about codependency. I learned how to read astrology, and I learned how to read the tarot.
But the kinds of things I spend my time thinking about are so far removed from most people’s experience (and most people’s experience seems so superficial to me now) that I simply don’t know how to relate anymore to anyone.
I’ve had to broaden my missing-part feeling about that guy being forever gone, into the idea that it’s simply an awareness that I don’t have a family of close loved ones in this life.
I never really did growing up. And then I spent a period of about fifteen years during which I did have a few close friends, and I did have a husband I had a great relationship and friendship with …
And then life moved on, and everyone moved away, and my husband passed away, and that was the end.
At fifty-three, I understood I wasn’t going to find another family. I’m simply too eccentric, and too old.
And I know how much easier and how much more fun life is when you have a close soul tribe to be with.
I just don’t, and won’t, have a close soul tribe.
I needed to stop looking at this long-lost guy and thinking, If only, and understand that I am remembering better times in my life and comparing them to how life feels now. And that has, and had, nothing to do with him.