108: Never Not Broken
“When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, “Darling, I care about your suffering,” a deep healing begins.”
Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha
To be clear, C, my Love of loves, I care about your suffering. The suffering I caused. The pain I inflicted. The loss you experienced. I care not out of shame or guilt but out of passion and love. I care because it is what my Truth would have me do.
Every day since my betrayal of C started my perception of self-became more and more warped. By the Reveal, I was barely hanging on.
K’s call to C broke me lose from all my secrets and lies. K’s gift provided a much-needed push towards redeeming some form of self-respect and power.
Reading every day, talking to others, counseling, Lexapro, and writing helped keep me going but they are only Band-Aids. If it wasn’t for you, and my other friends, I probably would have died and disappeared by now. I would have preferred to work it out with C but she is gone.
On more than one occasion though, I have been near a total breakdown. Anxiety, humiliation, loneliness, shame, remorse, rumormongering, manipulative trolling, and C’s silence pushed me to the edge of giving up.
Giving up hope. Giving up life. Especially in the first 60 days.
I read the letters and talk with the betrayed spouses and I assume they also speak to C’s pain. As such, I grieve over the pain, humiliations, and loss I’ve inflicted onto C’s life. Being an emotional empath I don’t just know the hurt. It isn’t an intellectual process. It is an emotional response. I feel C’s hurt.
It burns my heart.
I’ll never know completely what C experienced but talking and listening to other betrayed Partners I learn and feel for them – and for C. Of course, C refuses to share anything with me except what can be communicated to me by silence, rumormongering, and trolls.
I feel her anger, rage, and vindictiveness. I feel the intention of those actions too. Empathy sets me on fire.
Assuming C meant that she loved me, that she thought she was going to spend the rest of her life with me, and that I belong to her (and her to me) I feel the humiliation, hurt, loneliness, confusion, and despair my behavior causes her.
And for those reasons, the truth is, although trying, I’ve been unable to forgive myself. I broke my best friend, lover, and Partner. How do you forgive yourself for that?
Setting aside her possible motivations (an educated guess) or her possible intentions (all speculation) I have to choose to believe she cared and loved me. The alternatives to believing she loved me are too Ugly for me to emotionally carry today.
I’ve tried over and over and over to loving reach out to C, to let her know I feel, I care, I know. Every act is twisted into something it isn’t and used to feed the Trolls who strike at me with lances.
I hurt. I’m just a person and had losses too. It is why I tried so hard to keep my betrayal and lies secret.
C’s six months of silent treatment and other recent choices reinforces another truth: C will not forgive me.
This morning several people contacted me wanting to know if I was in Columbus over the weekend. I thought it was odd and ignored the questions. Only later I discovered C’s car was damaged during the Columbus Art Fair and that people are implying that I am responsible.
C’s response isn’t, “S would never do that.” Her response is she doesn’t “think” I would do something like that.
It is soul crushing to know my betrayal, secret-keeping, and escalating series of lies has caused my Love of loves, my best friend, my Partner to even consider I might be capable of doing something so ugly, childish, and vindictive acts to her or her things. As I said this morning, I don’t take my hurt out on other people or things, I take it out on myself.
Taken together, the weight of all of these losses and feelings finally broke me this week. I feel nothing but sadness, loneliness, despair, and emptiness today.
I have nothing to offer anyone…not even myself. I feel hollow now.
I understand I needed to be broken…and I am. “More vulnerability, not less isn’t the way to a healed heart,” wrote Mark Nepo. However, I just feel vulnerable. I don’t feel my heart. I don’t feel healed.
I simply feel stupid, alone, sad, and broken. I know I am Never Not Broken but this week, all things taken into account, I find no future in that message. However, I’m going to keep moving forward, there are no other options.
SIDEBAR: This will be my last self-revealing post for a while. I have nothing to add…
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