God, I'm Actually Invested.

 Officially, every single man I have seriously dated has found their "forever person" in the next person they dated after me. I was about to write that I don't know how that makes me feel. But actually, I know exactly how it makes me feel. I mean, it doesn't take a scientist to figure out that one really, does it? Even if I don't want to be with that person anymore, even if I am glad I am not with them anymore... it makes me feel used. Rejected. Compared-to. Even though I am comparing THEM to my current partner(s)... the thought of them moving on with somebody else and thinking, "Wow, this is so much better than things were with her. I love this person so much more than I ever loved her"... it almost makes me feel sick. 

I feel like I shouldn't still feel this way. Not three years later. Not five years later. Certainly not ten. But regardless, I do. It makes me think... it makes me think what was it about me that made them think that the next person was so much better? Sometimes, I spend too much time thinking about the fact that I spent so much effort on this person... and they maybe became a better version of themselves in some way... and then someone else gets to reap the benefits?

I know I can reframe this. I can reframe it to think... they were ready to move on to the next relationship because of what they learned in ours... and our time together was important to them and their future as if it weren't for me, they may be on a different path, and maybe they wouldn't have ended up meeting this next person that they married or had children with or started a new life with. Maybe if it weren't for me, they wouldn't have learned what they needed to learn to bring into the next relationship. And maybe that's true. But being a stepping stone towards someone else's future enough times? You're just being stepped on and walked all over. I mean... you're welcome?

Semi-Charmed Life

He was living in my house, then. We were all of nineteen, sharing a single bed in my childhood bedroom. His Mum ended up on our front doorstep one day, tears in her eyes, begging for him to please come downstairs and talk to her. I don't know who let her in, exactly. Maybe my sister. He did finally come downstairs. They sat on the stairs for a long time. Talking, crying. My poor sister spent the entire time trying to hold the family dog back from them. I hid in my bedroom. I didn't listen in, I didn't really want to know. All I know is that once I heard the front door click shut, and heard the sound of the dog's nails as she pattered her way across the floorboards, and he returned to my room, he told me that he and his Mum were going to take some time apart for a while. And that was that.

Eventually, things started to feel a little, for lack of a better word - off. He stopped coming home after work. First he started missing dinner, then he was home after 10pm, then 11pm... I knew where he was. Oh, I knew exactly where he was. I was always welcome, he said. But I didn't want to go. I guess that was his justification in the start - that if I wanted to come along, I always could. So if I was choosing not to go, then that was on me and not him.
I definitely saw it coming, when he finally did agree to spend an evening with me, and things just weren't the same anymore. There was an awkwardness in the air that I hadn't really ever felt with him before. He told me how he felt, but I don't remember any of it. Because what he said to me wasn't what really mattered. What mattered, was that he was telling me that he was choosing the dark, smoky back room over me. He was choosing his friends. He was choosing recklessness without my judgement. He was choosing his drugs. But he didn't say that though, of course.

Another Shot of Whiskey

The District Sleeps Alone Tonight

It's Harder to Walk Away

Insecurity

Monkey and the Questions

All These Things That I've Done

There is a story that lives inside of me. It snakes it's way in and out of my consciousness regularly, sometimes settling quietly somewhere in the back of my mind, but it always, always creeps back in. I know what I need to do, I've always known what I need to do - I've known what I've needed to do with this story since before it even happened, I think. I feel that I actually probably could have written this story in 2013, even though it didn't happen until 2017. Sometimes you just know, long before something happens, that it is going to happen. Unfortunately, it did.
I do carry guilt. I know I didn't directly cause anything that happened, and I sure as hell know that I couldn't have stopped it. But I still carry around guilt regardless.
I saw a therapist years ago - one of many - but this particular one did some amazing hypnotherapy work with me which allowed me to see things in a totally different light than I had for a long time. It allowed me to see all of my grief, guilt, shame, sadness as being stuffed into a backpack. I pictured it just as a regular backpack, like the one that you would take to school years ago, and the books inside were so heavy and crammed into the bag that the zips were almost bursting open. Except of course, the bag in my mind was full of all these things that I'd done. Or seen. Or witnessed. Or allowed to happen. And I'm carrying this bag absolutely everywhere that I go. The only time that the bag is ever opened, is to add more things to the bag. Not a single thing from my life I have let go. Not a single thing has ever really, truly been taken out of the bag. In the hypnotherapy session we did, I carried the bag into the bushland and I stopped on a little bridge over a river, and I threw the bag off the bridge and into the water. We recorded that session, and I played it back to myself a few times, reimagining throwing that bag with a lifetimes worth of trauma, into the water and watching it float away. Or sometimes it would sink. But one time, and I have no real memory of actually doing this but I suppose it must have happened, I jumped in after the bag and I dragged it back out of the river - waterlogged and all, and heavier than ever, I put the bag back on. And I've worn it ever since.
I wonder if writing this story - the one that lives inside of me - will help me let go of this forever. But even if I do find a way to finally let this go... who am I without it?