Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Lions and Sheep

Since I did not do so last night, I guess I can now make a serious post about feels-related things and all.  

I have a terrible headache, probably because I continue to not sleep well and everything.  I did go to movies with roommate and a friend of mine, but I really just wanted to be alone afterwards, otherwise I would have asked if they wanted to get food or anything like that. 

I've never been a person who has had many friends.  Always, I have had a few close friends, and then I had other...almost peripheral friends whom I did not mind hanging out with, but they were kind of just...there.  I did not trust them the way I did my close circle, if that is the proper way to describe it.  My close circle has shrunk over the years, and a large chunk of those in it have left, either from moving away because of jobs, or leaving due to betrayals or just...diverging paths. 

For the time I was with him, the ex was the center of that circle.  One I did not expect to leave. 

But he did.  And with all the decisions he made and actions he took, my worldview became more and more jaded. 

This time last year, I was sad.  Very sad.  But I still had some...hope, almost.  At least, I think.  Hope might not be the right word for it.  I still found myself wanting to be around people, simply because I did not want to be alone.  I did not want to be alone in the state that he left me, so I tried to get close to people, even if it was obvious that I should not have with particular individuals.  Instead of hope, maybe let us just say my cynicism had not been turned up to 11 just yet. 

My loner tendencies gradually increased, hitting a peak after the ex re-contacted me.  

I asked myself over and over again why.  Why did he need to come back?  Even if only in the form of an email?  Despite not hearing his voice in months, I still could hear those words as if he was speaking them.  

And then the back-and-forth started.  It started and made me realize that the hole I thought I had started to crawl out of...I was actually still deep in.  And the path to recovery and the ascend to happiness seemed impossible.  

Hearing this idea that he stopped loving me before he broke up with me...despite what he said when we were together and after...it hit me in ways that I don't even think I can describe now.  

Everything was a lie.  All of it.  

I was never meant to be with him longer than a few months, was I?  I was a flavour of the week, almost.  At least, that is how it seems now.  Once he was tired of me, he tried a new flavour.  And then when he no longer wanted her, another new one.  

More than ever, I have become anti-social.  

Everyone I look at with a jaded and cynical point of view, and as much as I am reminded that it is not my fault he is like that, and that he changes feelings arbitrarily, tossing away the people who love him truly and care about him...and that not everyone is like him...that cynicism and distrust remains.  I want it to go away, but I feel safer on my own.  It is lonely, yes, and sad, but I am safer. 

Even with my roommate telling me that my inability to help him during finals week equates to me not caring...even that has hit me hard.  

The person I want to talk to most of the time when I want to talk to someone...I cannot even say what my feelings are for him anymore.  He has helped me more than people realize or know.  But...I am afraid of him as well.  Despite my thinking that he is sweet and kind, he does act with a sort of arrogance that I think is an act.  And he likes to remind me that he will likely disappoint me.  Sometimes.  Lately he has been especially nice, telling me that I should have friends who do things for me because it is what I deserve and it is nice to be reminded that the world doesn't always suck.  

But...I fear him, because I was incredibly wrong about the ex's true persona.  

I believed the ex to be very sweet and very truthful.  A nice person who would not hurt me, and would not betray me.  I was wrong. 

And it is not the first time I have been so wrong about someone.  He just hit me the hardest, and solidified this idea in my head that I am terrible at judging people.  Or that everyone has an ulterior motive behind the nice words that they tell you. 

Hah, what is funny...is that if I spoke to the ex now about worldviews and everything...I would be a completely different person.  I remember once we were discussing, and I said that I truly did not believe that people were selfish.  I thought that people were kind.  At one point, I pinned him down, and we had been talking about lions and sheep beforehand...how sheep get taken advantage of and everything, basically.  When I pinned him, he told me that he would not do the same to me if I let him up, and I kept laughing and saying that he was tricking me.  Over and over he said that he wasn't.  However, when I let him up, he did just as he said he was not going to do.  And he called me a sheep.  I said that I trusted him, and that is why this happened.  I laughed, but the conversation and him doing that to me actually...upset me.  It did.  It hurt me that he thought, essentially, that I was weak because I trusted him, and because I trusted others.  

Funny...that night and that interaction between us plays perfectly alongside our breakup and subsequent falling out.  The times I had him pinned - when I said that I couldn't talk to him as he was seeing people so soon after me, when I should have obviously seen what was going on behind his bedroom door, for example... - I let go because I trusted him.  I let him up, and he then pinned me down as repayment for my trust.  And then basically (at first, anyway) blamed me for that happening, because I should have realized it was going to happen. 

And that sequence repeating caused me to start believing it completely.  That it was my fault.  Everything.  It was all because I trusted.  It was all because love blinded me.  Stupid, love made me.  Stupid and blind and gullible.  

And if I wanted to not be hurt, I would need to become a lion.  Like he was.  I would need to stop trusting people.  But I could never be a lion, truly, because I could not lie to the people I care about the way he lied to me.  I couldn't.  

But I could at least stop with the unconditional trust.  I could tell myself, in the back of my mind, that no matter who it was, whether they be a friend or family or the person I thought loved me more than anyone else...they had the potential to leave.  To betray.  

And that jaded view contributes to my constant desire to be alone.  

Or rather...it isn't even a desire.  It is almost a need now.  I am exhausted when among people.  Even friends.  Even friends who want to be around me.  

That isolation protects me.  While simultaneously destroying me.  

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