Love Letters to a Healing Heart

19: Running Silent

January 21, 2018October 3, 2023 Wanders

Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience, that shall explain and overlook the old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Effective immediately I’m moving all of the recent posts regarding my actions and feelings pertaining to C to a private, subscriber approved WordPress account. This provides greater freedom to openly talk about what is happening and less opportunity for broken gloryhounds and armchair psychologists to hijack a narrative to fuel their ghost stories.

The feedback from people that have navigated this path before me has been invaluable in helping me more honestly plunge into the emotionally treacherous riptides of my life and I need their input to help sort through what is real and what is imagined.

With or without C, I’m going to own my pain and create a life filled with friends and loves embracing all of me, not just the convenient ones. Relationships with people that accept me even on nights were we aren’t able to look pretty and dance.

It’s time I separate the act from the actors.

Over the last fifty-five days, I’ve learned a great deal about myself and C. C knows me and sees me. I know her and see her. We both know each other well enough to know what is happening and why.

As she knows, she is the only one that owns my heart and has been since the day we met. Almost every moment since we met I’ve acted that way. My passionate and imperfect love for her is real. My betrayal had nothing to do with how I value her as a person or in my life. Nothing. My betrayal had nothing to do with K. Nothing. It had everything to do with me trying to avoid pain.

Everything else is a ghost story.

I am eternally grateful the secret is out. I do not need to carry the lie and secret of my betrayal. For the first time in a long-time I am free to speak, act and live more wholly instead of with holes.

People with experience keep saying I’m still hiding, that I should fight for her. I should just go home and camp out until she talks to me. They suggest that her revenge is intended to punish me and strip me of relationships and opportunities I value so that I hurt as badly as she hurts. Her rumormongering, silent treatment and passive aggressiveness are simply coping tools and I should grin and bear it. My goal should be to show her I’m willing to take any heat and abuse she can toss at me.

My thinking is it should be her choice. If she wants me to be her Partner it has to be at her invitation.

I’ve told her since the day we met she has all the power to keep me or pitch me. If I force myself into her life it just becomes one more lie I told her. Fuel for one more ghost story. Anyone that thinks she is a helpless delicate flower doesn’t know a thing about her or us.

In the meantime, I’m leaving the door open to her but I’m finished letting her anger, hurt, and manipulation of history and my anger, hurt, shame, guilt, and fear get in the way of my life. I’ve lived that way too long.

I’m here for now when she is ready but if she needs to curse my name, curse it good.