Most people, if not all, long for only one thing: to love and be loved. Trust human beings to do all crazy stuff just to feel the euphoria love brings…you know, that can't-eat, can't-sleep, reach-for-the-stars, over- the-fence, World Series kind of stuff (It Takes Two, 1995).
But getting butterflies in your stomach isn’t always the ideal scenario. Sometimes it’s better to just be caught in the middle of a stampede than to feel all giddy and tingly inside especially when the person who’s causing you to feel such things is the same person you’re trying to get over from.
But getting butterflies in your stomach isn’t always the ideal scenario. Sometimes it’s better to just be caught in the middle of a stampede than to feel all giddy and tingly inside especially when the person who’s causing you to feel such things is the same person you’re trying to get over from.
*This is usually the part where I start narrating my oh-so heartbreaking encounters the past two months and bombard myself with things I should’ve said and done during those moments where my rationality completely abandoned me, but heck. The reality of life is keeping me from exercising my right to free speech and self-determination (charot!) So what I’ll do with this entry is copy-paste articles that I have read over the weekend which really made my guts churn.
**If you want an article that would slap you awake, here you go.
How The People We Once Loved Become Strangers Again
FEB. 19, 2014
By BRIANNA WIEST
It’s interesting to think about how we make people who used to be everything into nothing again. How we learn to forget. How we force forgetting. What we put in place of them in the interim. The dynamics afterward always tell you more than what the relationship did — grief is a faster teacher than joy – but what does it mean when you cycle out to being strangers again? Because you never really stop knowing each other in that way. Maybe there’s no choice but to make them someone different in your mind, not the person who knew your daily anxieties and what you looked like naked and what made you cry and how much you loved them.
When our lives revolve around someone, they don’t just stop revolving around them even if all that’s left is the grief and pain that comes with their memory. Because you loved them, there will always be parts of them that linger. The memories that are impressed on the places you went and the things you said and the songs you listened to will remain. We all eventually find ourselves standing in the checkout line, hearing one of those songs come on and realizing that all of a sudden, we’re revolving around them again. And maybe we never stopped.
Do you ever really forget your lovers’ birthdays, or all your first times, intimate and not? Do your anniversaries ever become normal days of the year again? Are the things you did and promises you made ever really neutralized? Do they become void now that you’re broken up or do you decidedly ignore them because there’s simply no other choice? The mind tells you to go on, and forces your heart to follow suit I guess.
***If you want an article to tell you that it’s okay to let go, read thisRelated Thought
Can We Choose Who We Love?
The kind of love that centuries of books and plays and stories have regaled us with are the ones in which all expectations are defied in place of love anyway.
I want to believe that you either love someone, in some way, forever, or you never really loved them at all. That once two reactive chemicals cross both are changed. That the wounds we leave in people are sometimes too raw to risk falling back into them. I don’t want to believe that we write each other off because we simply don’t matter anymore. I know love isn’t expendable. I wonder, and maybe hope, if we ever just force it to be out of that necessity.
Maybe it’s just that we’re all at the centers of our own little universes, and sometimes they overlap with other people’s, and that small bit of intersection leaves some part of it changed; that’s where we grow together. The collision can wreck us, change us, shift us; sometimes we become eternally undetachable and connected and other times we decidedly move away because the change required to accept another person’s universe colliding with yours is a safety we don’t want to leave. Either way, it’s inevitable that your universe expands. That you’re left knowing that much more about love and what it can do, and the pain that only a hole in your heart can bring. Whether or not that hole will ever again include the person who made it that way, that’s for you to decide.
We all start as strangers. The choices we make in terms of love are usually ones that seem inevitable anyway. We find people irrationally compelling. We find souls made of the same stuff ours are. We find classmates and partners and neighbors and family friends and cousins and sisters and our lives intersect in a way that makes them feel like they couldn’t have ever been separate. And this is lovely. But the ease and access isn’t what we crave. It isn’t what I’m writing about right now. It isn’t what we revolve around after it’s gone. We are all just waiting for another universe to collide with ours, to change what we can’t ourselves. To fill us, to make us whole. It’s interesting how afterwards, we realize that the storm returns to calm, but the stars are always changed and we don’t choose whose collisions change us. We all start as strangers, but we often forget that we choose who ends up a stranger too.
Getting Over The One You Thought Was The One: When It’s The Right Time To Move On
SEX • EMILY RELLA • FEB 25, 2014 - 9:15AM
Oftentimes — most of the time, actually — there is no bright light or shining, definitive moment that signifies the end of a relationship. People drift apart, things change and we can’t keep in touch with every person through every stage of our lives. But, this ambiguity can make it difficult to decide when enough is enough, and when it’s really time to let go.
I try to teach myself never to give up on anyone, no matter how difficult things may be. But, there’s a difference between giving up on someone and knowing when you have more than you can handle. More importantly, no matter how much you don’t want to admit it, it’s important to know when you have less than you deserve. But, coming to this revelation isn’t easy.
For so long, I convinced myself that the way I was being treated (or in better terms, the way I was being ignored) was just something I had to learn to deal with. I tried to make myself believe that it was okay, because in different ways, we were both wrong. I convinced myself that if I reached out and was made to feel like a fool, I just had to learn to accept that — but I didn’t accept it. I didn’t deserve 10 months of silence, I didn’t deserve to be ignored and I didn’t deserve to be mocked. What I deserved was a conversation — a sober one at that. I deserved a response to the messages I sent and to every effort I made.
Silence is worse than any argument and it screams much louder than any harsh word or accusation. It leaves you with unanswered questions and a constant sense of anxiety and false interpretations. For almost a year, I wished for a break to the silence. One word would have been enough; I wasn’t expecting some grand gesture, or even much at all. I just hoped for something, but got nothing. And that’s not so much sad as it is eye-opening as to who you really are. You can’t expect time to take control of everything and fix what’s been broken without making any concerted effort. Sometimes, time doesn’t heal — it just rips people further apart.
At some point, we come to a crossroads in these relationships when we realize that the person we once knew is no longer the person who stands before us. It’s not necessarily that he or she made some sort of grand, internal transformation, though sometimes, that may be the case. Sometimes, we simply see a difference from what we thought we knew and it becomes nearly impossible to remember who the person (we thought we knew) was before.
I got to a point where I realized that no matter what grandeur and good the future may have held for us, it could never take back the cowardice and apathy that I had seen before. I would never be able to erase that; I could forgive but not forget, and in not being able to forget, I would always see a different person.
All of the things I loved about you had been saturated by this awful darkness and they would be forever tainted; it had come to a point where the bad simply outweighed the good and the memory of the good wasn’t enough to sustain in the present anymore. I had loved you, but I didn’t like you anymore.
Everyone messes up; we are taught to forgive, and as difficult as that can be, we really ought to try. But, I realized that even if I forgave you, you didn’t want to be forgiven. You were indifferent. Even if I chose to come to you and tell you that it was okay and that we could fix it and rebuild, it would have made no difference to you.
You can’t fight for someone who doesn’t want to fight back and you can’t grant forgiveness to someone who doesn’t care about being forgiven; it’s like throwing a tennis ball against a wall and expecting it to stick and not bounce back. Sometimes, letting go of someone means putting an end to a one-sided fight. And when you can recognize it as that, everything becomes much easier.
Letting go doesn’t mean that all of the good goes away. I know that you’re not a bad person; in fact, I still think you’re wonderful. I know that your heart — though you often keep it tucked away and silenced — is big and capable of almost anything for those who you care about. And, of course, I miss you. Letting go of you doesn’t take any of that away.
I’ll admit that there are still parts of me that believe that this story has been left unfinished. There are pages I’ll never be able to read and new chapters that I’ll never get to experience. Part of me still believes that these pages exist somewhere, floating around in the corners of some universe. We just weren’t able to find them and we’re never going to find them because this book has closed — and I’m the one who’s closing it.
Note: Before I shut down my laptop and get some rest, I want to leave a message to two people who are very dear to my heart.
CVB, fuck you and your indecisiveness. If you fucking like me, don’t tell me then leave me behind afterwards. That’s just plain stupid! And if you really want to be friends again, stop being such a douchebag. Ugh. You frustrate the hell out of me.
MAPG, one big GO TO HELL for you. You’re like the king of all assholes. Yes you have a girlfriend now and yes, I do understand that you love her a lot and you like spending time with her. But can you please please please stop rubbing it in my face!? It’s getting pretty irritating. Try to be more sensitive to my feelings. We’re friends right? I think I already made it pretty clear how I feel about her…about the fact that you were able to give her something that I fought so hard for when we were still ‘together’: commitment. So please, let me keep the little self-respect that I still have.
Sources:
http://thoughtcatalog.com/brianna-wiest/2014/02/how-the-people-we-once-loved-become-strangers-again/#vicfVJcTiDIBu83e.01
http://elitedaily.com/dating/sex/getting-over-the-one-you-thought-was-the-one-when-its-the-right-time-to-move-on/
