For at least the last ten years, I've written a quote on the board in front of my classroom every week. Because I want them to be meaningful, sometimes it takes forever for me to decide on, or find, a quote to use, and oftentimes I recycle favorites from year to year. This week when school started, neither was the case. I used a brand new one, and despite not having planned on using it, when I picked up my marker because it was time to write a quote, I knew what quote I wanted to use right away.
Yes, that's right. All my hemming and hawing and crying and disbelieving, and my ex-Virgo is my ex-Virgo because of me.
Well, sort of.
I won't go into all the details because those are between me and him. What I will tell you is that my ex-Virgo was doing some shady stuff, and that's not just me saying it was shady. It was shady enough that he has many times said how wrong he was in doing what he was doing and that he never should have done it. That he was the one in the wrong when I, one night the last week of March, snooped through his computer looking for something to explain the feeling of disconnect I'd recently been feeling between us is indisputable and concrete (although, yes, I know snooping is also wrong, and I swear swear swear I'll never in my life do it again because as they say, if you go looking for something, you just might find it). My reaction, however, wasn't exactly in the right.
When I found what I found, I guess you could say I kind of lost my mind. Although it was the middle of the night, I woke him up and started interrogating him, screaming and demanding to look through his phone. After a few hours of back and forth that went on until almost five in the morning, I told him we were over but that I wasn't making him leave, that he could stay until he figured things out. Fast forward two hours to when I found something even more upsetting elswhere on his computer (yes, I was snooping again), and I was singing a different tune.
Once again I woke him up, only this time I told him I wanted him gone. Then. That day. Not even that day. That morning. As in, take your entire life's worth of stuff, pack it up, and get out right the fuck now.
I didn't mean it, of course.
Even as I said the words, I knew I didn't. When he asked me before he called and woke up his friends to come and help him move if I really meant it, I said yes.
But I didn't. I didn't mean it at all.
When he hung up with the first friend he called and asked me if I meant it again, I told him he needed to get the fuck out.
But I didn't want him to go.
I never wanted him to go.
I was just so mad.
I was just so rash.
***
My therapist says I wasn't rash at all. According to her, this was something that had been going on for a long time (it was), and I'd talked to my ex-Virgo about it many times (I had), and I knew something had to change (it did), and this was my way of ensuring it would (boy, has it).
Now, I'm not sitting here justifying what my ex-Virgo did and saying it was okay because there's not a world in which it was. What I am saying is that having been in a relationship with him for as long as I had, what I should have done is calmed down before confronting him or if not that because I was justifiably not calm, not have kicked him out. I should have talked to him, broken up with him even, made him move into the extra room. I should have been more reasonable than I was.
I should have not been rash.
***
I follow an account called the millennial.therapist on Instagram. A few days ago, she posted this:
That night, March 25, I wasn't that. Frustrated and upset and betrayed, I was the opposite of that. In no way was I committed to understanding my ex-Virgo or addressing our issues.
Instead, I was rash.
And you know how I know I was rash despite what my therapist said? A couple days later, after I had time to calm down and assess the fallout, I told my ex-Virgo how sorry I was and told him I wanted to work on things (and now, five months later, I'd work on things still). Despite what he had done, despite not only his dishonesty and betrayal but also his--inability? Refusal?--to move away from what he had betrayed me with or make changes so that I'd start to feel more comfortable with the circumstances surrounding his dishonesty and betrayal--I found us a couple's counselor because I was committed to understanding him, addressing our issues, and making it work.
***
Two months later, on the night of June 2, my ex-Virgo was dishonest with me again, again involving the same thing, the thing we'd been fighting about since the summer before, the thing I'd cried to him about, the thing he'd ignored me about for months, the thing that broke us up, the thing we were trying to get past.
This time, though, I wasn't rash.
After what I'd done the last time, the resulting situation we found ourselves in, I simply told him to go home and call me when he was ready to move forward. I didn't yell. I didn't scream. I just told him to go home.
He didn't.
He begged. He pleaded. He told me how much he loved me. How sorry he was.
I wouldn't budge, and in the morning, after seven hours of back of forth during which I told him some things he didn't like hearing but nothing out of rashness although they're things I wouldn't have said had I not been so upset, he went home.
The next time we talked--no, I'm sorry, text--the next time we text--after having been together for five days less than three years--he told me it was over (perhaps not as bad as the Post-It breakup between Carrie and Berger, but pretty close). We were done. And unlike me, who realized after a few days that I'd been rash and was committed to understanding my partner and addressing issues with him, he meant it.
And so--
and so
and so
and so
and so
I feel like all I'm every doing these days is writing "and so."
And so here I am alone.
And so here I am with everything related to me and my ex-Virgo in a box on the floor in my closet including the J ♡ K ring I finally took off last night, my house scrubbed clean of his memory as if he didn't even exist.
And so here I am watching hours of video game play and cut scenes and listening to some obnoxious-voiced Dokkan guy I used to hate just to feel connected to my ex-Virgo's ghost.
And so here I am in therapy trying to address my temper and impulsivity but doing nothing but crying about my ex-Virgo for an hour every Saturday morning.
And so here I am crying a lot more than for an hour every Saturday morning over someone who was decidedly not committed to addressing issues, understanding, or growing with me.
***
So moral of my story? Next time you're incensed, infuriated, enraged--
stop.
Whatever you're thinking of doing, don't do it. Stop right there in your tracks.
Take a deep breath. Calm the fuck down.
Think about the end result.
Think about the sad, forlorn, rash woman who cries so much, if she put in some effort, she could start mining salt.
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