45. | Forgive yourself, Soma!

I was going to write this post yesterday, but something got in the way. I watched the movie The Bucket List, which is shown in the picture used for My bucket list post. Just a little bit of the beginning. I ended up watching the entire movie, so I didn’t get to write it. Of course, I didn’t regret doing so.

I’ve seen this movie several times, but it always has a big impact on me, and I still found ideas in it that I hadn’t noticed before.

Yesterday’s thought was when Edward (Jack Nicholson) talks about his friend Carter (Morgan Freeman) and their relationship at his funeral. At that moment, Edward says the following: “I am deeply proud that this man found it worthy to be with me!”

This morning, as I begin to write, I realize that this sentence has brought up yet another synchronicity regarding yesterday and my life in general. Yesterday morning, I started listening to a new book. It is important to note that it ended up not being the one I had planned. This is because I did not pay attention to the format of the book I chose to download to my phone for the playback software. So I was forced to start the next one in line. And that turned out to be Stephen King’s book, You like it darker.

At the beginning of this book, one of the characters tells about himself and his friend, in the following picture: “Butch and I were friends, not lovers, and during the weeks we spent in the forest, we experienced the purest form of that friendship. Which is a kind of love.” I also have two friends with whom I hike regularly. With one of them, we do a big hike once a year. We were for example in Tyrol, Prague, Athens, once we walked around Lake Balaton in 5 days. With the other one, we go on a hike several times a year where we spend one or more nights in the forest. For example, with him three years ago in the winter we built a forest shelter tent out of leaves and slept in it in the middle of the forest.

I met this friend of mine for 10 minutes yesterday and mentioned it, then gave him the book to look for these sentences in it.

So, when I have said on several occasions that I am grateful for the great relationships I have in my life, I am thinking of these and other great friends.

However, I will now add to my previous thoughts that I am grateful for these friendships and deeply proud that these people consider me worthy of being with them.

They are considered worthy to be with me!

After the long introduction, we have reached what I want to write about today.

My current life is full of My sweet suffering. Despite all the beauty of my current life and all my faith in my dream, it is full of pain.

It hurts that a person who is very important to me no longer found me worthy of being with me. She no longer found me worthy of dreaming with me and living her life with me. I was not valuable enough to be my wife despite the promise we made to each other. It’s horrible that this woman said goodbye to the special relationship between us with a Messenger message. I think it will hurt for the rest of my life that she didn’t even consider me worthy of looking into my eyes and hugging me one last time. Not to mention that she didn’t even honor me with an explanation as to why or for whom!

I’ve been suffering from insomnia for the past two months. It’s a strange but not unfamiliar feeling to spend my days awake with dream of future, and the time I could be dreaming I spend tossing and turning.

I am a rational, analytical and from above controlled person. In the last two months I have discovered a lot of questions about myself and I have found my own answers to most of them. I have discovered the blockages in my personality, the repetitive patterns in my actions and the involuntary repetition of learned examples. I am happy about these realizations because I have been given a chance by myself not to make these mistakes next time.

Weeks ago, I was able to articulate that my former partner didn’t treat me well. She abused my love. She kept hiding something or someone from me, she wasn’t honest with me, she hid herself from me. She used my energy, my time, my money in a way that she wasn’t at all sure about our relationship and perhaps didn’t even experience or accept for a single moment what the last phase of our relationship was about. I lived next to a woman who couldn’t or wouldn’t overcome her own obstacles, who even put his cat before me in her thoughts.

When I found these thoughts, I hoped that my insomnia would go away. After all, I had the answer. The answer is that I cannot desire a woman who did not treat me well. I had to formulate the idea that I loved a woman I idealized. However, this woman is not the same as the one who lived by my side at the end of our relationship.

In vain did she wrap reality in sentences that tried to make reality more beautiful, but in the end it did not work. These were kindnesses with which we tried to reframe reality. This reframing will also hurt me for the rest of my life.

After my divorce from my wife, my first thoughts were that I only wanted to be with someone who could take responsibility for herself and her actions. It was a bitter disappointment that for the second time I chose a woman who took no responsibility for herself, for me, or for our relationship.

I quickly found her responsibility and placed it on our map.

What about my feelings?

I tossed and turned. I didn’t understand, because my strong desires for the woman should have been driven away by the realization of reality. Why doesn’t the answer work? Why can’t I sleep?

On Monday, I realized that I hadn’t yet expressed to myself how I felt about this pain during the past long weeks. On Monday, I had to tell myself what my feelings were.

I am deeply disappointed. I am sad and hurt. I am hurt that the woman who once told me, knowing the circumstances of my divorce and marriage, that “what happened to you is horrible and that this shouldn’t happen to anyone,” ended up doing to me the same thing she had warned me against earlier.

It is a cold and lingering feeling that someone who knows my innermost being treats me like this. Someone to whom I showed my whole self ended up thinking my life was a game. She hurt me much more deeply than my wife. My wife didn’t know me. She wasn’t even curious about me, neither she nor I knew how I could open up to someone I loved. My ex-partner knew, she experienced it. She’s a much bigger disappointment than the other woman. She’s the love of my life and the disappointment of my life at the same time.

So the most characteristic word for my feelings is disappointment.

After betraying my trust, they also managed to destroy my faith in her, even though I really had that in she until the last moment.

What’s wrong with her is that we couldn’t make our paths one. That we couldn’t live up to the potential of our special relationship, that we didn’t dare to dream together. And somewhere, the feeling is bitter that I had to give up this dream for a dream. That’s why I put it this way: I paid a high price for being brave now.

My responsibility

Despite all this, I still couldn’t sleep. Even though there were already two markers on my map. His responsibility and my feelings.

Because I couldn’t stop thinking about why I couldn’t find peace, I called a friend of mine yesterday. She’s also going through a breakup, and I felt that her female perspective might help me find the answer if I asked her the right question.

After we talked for a while about our similar journeys and feelings, this answer came to me in an interesting form.

– I think the biggest reason for your disappointment is that you didn’t trust your own intuition. Or that you didn’t pay much attention to these signs. Because you knew there were problems, you just didn’t want to notice it. You didn’t want to face this pain you’re going through now.
– So, you’re saying that maybe I’m disappointed in myself?
– Yes, I think so. And this is the hardest thing to accept and understand.
– I think it really helped. Maybe it’s not the disappointment in her that’s the biggest, but in myself. Why did I let this happen to me?
– Yes. Why didn’t you value yourself enough to say no. I’m a more valuable person than this and I deserve better than this. This is the hardest thing, Soma. Because here you have to face yourself hard. Because by qualifying her actions, a kind of avoidance of responsibility also appears.

From here on, I won’t quote the conversation, although the sentences that continued in the dialogue roughly followed my current thoughts.

I was able to say weeks ago that despite the fact that seven years ago I said that I would now put myself first in my own life, I still didn’t do it. I also had to confront myself with the fact that although I had drawn clear boundaries – especially in areas related to relationships, I repeatedly crossed these boundaries and did not keep them.

I was looking for a responsible partner by my side without being responsible myself. At that moment, I truly realized that disappointment in myself was the real cause of my despair. Why did I let someone do this to me again? Why did I cross my clearly defined boundaries? Why did I let someone play with my deepest feelings? Why didn’t I pay attention to the signs that I clearly saw?

I wasn’t responsible for myself! I didn’t recognize that I was deceiving myself.

Moreover, the recognition of these self-reflections is also helped to be covered up by the rather strong mask that supports today’s self-help and self-knowledge path. How many times do I hear from helpers that you shouldn’t blame yourself! They just forget to add that it’s okay to confront your mistakes. This would be very important, because the advice “don’t blame yourself!” is only half a tool in itself. Because by doing so, I am avoiding responsibility. Yes, I am to blame. I made many mistakes and I am grateful that I finally recognized these mistakes.

What is more important is that after recognizing the mistake, within a minute I said to myself, “Forgive yourself, Soma!” And with that thought, I forgave myself for my actions.

With that, I feel like I have found my peace in this story.

Yes, I was indeed disappointed in myself more than in a former partner. And ultimately, that is all I am responsible for, that is all I owe an explanation for, and that is all I could learn from.

Despite all the beauty of our story, it ended yesterday. And let me end this article by continuing Edward’s quote above: “In the end, I think I can safely say that we both bring joy to each other’s lives.”