Distraught

The last few days I’ve been distraught. Inconsolable. I am struggling so hard just to keep from cutting. I’ve been just crying and binging and purging and playing video games and watching the Olympics I missed while I was in California. I don’t see my psychiatrist or therapist until next week. I’m struggling just to get through the days. I keep feeling like I made the wrong decision. Today, I took a nap and I received a text message. It woke me up and at first I thought it was him. My heart leapt with joy, only to crash a moment later when I saw it wasn’t him. He hasn’t tried to reach out to me at all since I left and I feel like it means there must be something wrong with me. Or what if I really hurt him by leaving? Or both.

At random moments throughout the day things will remind me of it, and it hurts so much. My facebook feed is still filled with ads congratulating me on my engagement and offering me money of tuxes or photography packages. It feels weird not to have his ring on my finger, and the noticeable absence makes me cry. I just want it all to end. I want to sleep and not wake up. I wish school would start already so I had something productive to focus on.

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Romance is a No-go

I told the guy that I can’t be in a relationship with him. I told him I can’t be the girl he wants me to be. I can’t not be anxious and I can’t not be bipolar and I can’t believe that one day I’ll be instantly healed. I can’t do daily phone calls because phone calls make me anxious and I can’t be there for him the way he wants. I just can’t be what he wants. And being with him just makes me feel inadequate.

Mixed signals

So I got a message from the boy today.

The one I just broke up with because he doesn’t love me and was only in a relationship with me because he felt depressed not being in a relationship?

“I feel like I have such a strong attachment to you that staying away from you is like pulling apart bonded hydrogen atoms in my heart.”

WHAT???

Internal Paradox

After learning about how the boy felt, he asked if I wanted to still be in a relationship. I love him, and I’m secretly an optimist, so I told him that I did, if he did, and that he should think about whether that was something he wanted.

Then, I waited.

I didn’t hear from him for a couple days. I waited, hoping. Hoping he would choose me. Hoping he would realize he loved me. Hoping and waiting. On him.

On the second day, he sent me a message. Unrelated to “us” just a general chatty message. I asked him if that meant he wanted to be friends while he figured out how he felt, and that led to a whole long discussion and I had an epiphany.

I realized, while we were talking, that I didn’t want to be in a relationship with him. I love him, and the thought of being in a relationship with someone I love, but who doesn’t love me and is just keeping me around because he doesn’t NOT want to be in a relationship, that suddenly sounded harder than letting him go.

So I did. I broke things off with him. It hurt. It hurt so much. There were a lot of tears. It felt simultaneously empowering and crushing.

This is the first time I broke up with someone not out of fear, but because I chose to because it was the right thing for me. The first time I didn’t stay with someone out of fear. The first time my relationship decision was thought through and honest and healthy. Ever.

It’s surreal. It hurts. Yet it feels good at the same time.

So last night it really hit me, the impact of the knowledge that the whole time we were together, he didn’t feel anything for me. The deception, the way I feel so used, all our interactions that in hind sight make so much sense given this new information. And I lost it.

I spent a good 8 hours, maybe more, probably closer to 10, binging and purging. It was grueling.

I’ve been too apathetic and depressed lately to do anything. I mean, anything. Even getting out of bed was difficult. Just a little, my binge/purge spree jogged me out of that.

Stupid

I feel stupid. Stupid and used. Manipulated. Lied to.

Mostly stupid.

Hurt. My heart physically hurts.

Blind. Foolish.

But also like I deserved. Every last bit of it.

And so, very stupid.

I guess it’s fair

The boy told me he was only in a relationship with me because he felt depressed not being in a relationship, but he doesn’t really have feelings for me.

I guess he got me back for breaking his heart by breaking mine.

Dealing with adversity

I cut my hair. But just in the middle of the back of my heaf.

Things with the boy and I have been strained. Today I finally worked up the courage to ask what’s going on. He said we needed to “talk” tonight and wouldn’t go into it further. All day my anxiety steadily climbed as I wondered what was going on and why he wouldn’t just tell me and I ran through in my head every horrible thing I’ve ever done and every mistake and every time I haven’t been the kind of person he wishes I were and I got to the point where I was literally dizzy with worry and having trouble breathing. I tried explaining what was going on. He sighed and said nothing. He’s said nothing since.

Icut my hair.

I was afraid if I didn’t, I would cut my skin. I needed a release. I’d already binged and purged all my my food and it wasn’t helping.

I’m supposed to get together with family tomorrow for the championship game. I need to get up early so I can get my hair fixed.

Why I Don’t Like Being in a Relationship

Being in a romantic relationship always sounds nice to me in theory. However, whenever I find myself in one, I don’t enjoy it that much. And it’s completely my own fault. In 2014, I was in relationships with 3 guys. I dated more than that. I am not a casual dater, but when I signed up for an online dating service at the end of 2013, I found myself meeting and dating a lot of people, and liking some of them.

I, however, am terrible in relationships. When I get into a relationship, I start to doubt myself. I start to pick at my appearance. I start to worry about my quirks. I start to wonder whether someone can actually love me. I start to analyze every date, every word, every period of silence. I worry that not responding to a text or facebook message is because they’re tired of me, I’ve done something wrong, I’ve angered them, I hurt them, I…I…I…

It really doesn’t matter how sweet and kind and understanding the guy is. I self-sabotage every relationship. I am not the person who gets dumped, because I always freak out and end relationships. And, of course, dumping people always makes me feel like a terrible person because then I feel like I’m leaving a string of broken hearts in my wake, which makes me even more reluctant to get into another relationship.

All this to say, I was NOT looking to get into another relationship, especially not with “the boy”. We began dating 5 years ago, dated for a year and a half, then I broke it off. About a year after that, we got back together, dated for a year, and then, again, I broke it off.

Early last year, we started talking again. We always gravitate to one another. We were best friends, and I destroyed that, twice, when we broke up. Life isn’t a sitcom where you can conveniently keep all your exes as friends. Hearts get broken and things get awkward and feelings get hurt and it doesn’t work. At least, not at first.

And yet, we always end up talking again. We date other people, we “move on”, and then we end up back together. The truth is, I never stopped loving him. I have loved him for 5 years. Unfortunately, we have different goals for our lives, different core beliefs, and many obstacles that make me worry that it can’t last, which is one reason I keep ending it. Despite my “best efforts” to ruin my dating life, I truly do want to be married and have a family and have someone to grow old with.

So we started talking again. Just short conversations here and there. A birthday card, a quick catching up, and so forth. He was clear, he “couldn’t do this again”, meaning he couldn’t be in a romantic relationship with me again. I had broken his heart twice and he wouldn’t let me in to do that again. But he did.

I don’t know when exactly it happened. I’m not even sure how it happened. Gradually, over time.

Before long he was sending me flowers and using terms of endearment. We took a trip together at the end of November. However, he won’t call us an item. He’ll sleep with me, but he won’t call me his girlfriend. And that refusal to commit, which I understand, worries me. It feeds into my self-doubt and my fears.

Then, when I have situations like the last couple days where he is not in communication with me at all, I fear the worst. Not that he is in trouble, but that i have done something. I have been too clingy. I have been smothering. I have said or done something wrong. I freak out. My anxiety goes through the roof and my behaviors get worse and I know, I just KNOW I’ve messed things up again.

Turns out, he was just really, really sick and hasn’t been up to talking.

When, at the beginning of December, I was incredibly sick and didn’t talk to him for the whole weekend, I didn’t think anything of it. Yet, when he does the same, I go out of my mind with worry over what I have done to make him keep silent.

I am not good in relationships.

No one will love you

I feel so disposable