half-baked and insecure is no way to go through life

[madmoisellestar]

I'm cookie dough. I'm not done baking. I'm not finished becoming who ever the hell it is I'm gonna turn out to be. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day, I turn around and realize I'm ready. I'm cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat m- or enjoy warm, delicious, cookie me, then that's fine

Comments

[lanikei]

Consider that maybe the last thing a guy with control issues wants is a wife who has her own friends, is becoming proud of what her body can do, a career path, and education that catches up to his. Relationships are complicated, so no one thing is the death knell, but maybe it wasn't "too little, too late" and was in fact "too awesome to stand."

[madmoisellestar]

Awww. Thanks for bein' my angry friend. It means a lot.

And... I don't know if I'd co-sign 'too awesome' but I definitely deleted the parts of the draft of this that were about what he brought incomplete into the relationship. And the part where even if it was just my stuff, it's still pretty weak marriage-ing to bail when and how he did. That stuff mostly doesn't matter anymore. It's my mistakes I need to learn from. But I'm still glad someone else will say 'also he's a tool!' when I don't. :)

[lanikei]

Thank you for understanding that I'm purposefully being your angry friend, because I think you err on the 'too nice' side. I don't think he was a dude without redeeming qualities or anything, though I do think he was a tool.

Make it a learning experience for you, sure. But don't let the fault fall too heavy on your shoulders either. Publicly, who cares, but mentally, don't beat yourself up about it. Online it's hard to know where the line is between introspection, navel-gazing, and self-hate/blame, so I will tend towards telling you to shut up and enjoy yourself more often than not.

[madmoisellestar]

Totally understood and much appreciated.

[sihaya09]

Oh, if that's okay with you (because I just didn't know if it was an okay thing for you or not), I will TOTALLY tell you that he is a tool.

[madmoisellestar]

Heh. You're welcome to, if you feel like it, but it's not something I feel like I need to hear a lot.

It's a fine balance, I don't want to sink into sanctifying his memory because I miss him, but I also really don't want to regret or dishonor the time and energy and emotion I poured into him and that relationship. There are exes and relationships where the best I can do is shake my head and plead temporary insanity, but I don't want this to be one. Annnnd there's probably a whole post worth of stuff to say on that...

So my thought with posts like this one is that stuff he did wrong is out of my control and out of my life, thus not worth a ton of mental energy. But stuff I did wrong is stuff I could do better in the future, and that is worth thinking about and learning from.

But if you want to get in on some solidarity insulting, that's totally cool too.