For those that love too much – Part III*

*_{This is the third part of a story I began writing over a year ago to track my healing after a toxic relationship. Each part is what I felt at the time, what I thought and my progress in recovering from self-destructive patterns. Click here to read Part I and Part II.}

You are carrying a lot

of what’s not yours. Lighten the load

by letting it go.

Worship the space

that’s left.

***

^{Five hundred and fifty nine days.}

When I realise that my loving for you is from deep wounding, I can release you, all of a sudden. After two years my mind still wants to love you. It is my abandoning of Self that is frightened to let you go, for I carved my identity out of loving you, out of you having a secure and well defined space within me. If you go, and with the emptying of that space, I will feel like part of me is gone too. 

It’s funny how I have created this world in which us in physical connection is out of reach, in which even words between us aren’t possible as I made sure to remove all channels through which you can talk to me. And yet this energetic bond still holds us so connected, perhaps at opposite ends of country or world, with lives running parallel and not even remotely similar. 

I relied on you, so much, to fill me, to give me a meaning for just Being, to feel so utterly loved and full. I relied so much on you to fill me up until I felt whole. Not knowing, that all along, I was craving for my own attention and loving. And each day, I was dropping pieces of myself. The more I reached out for you, the more I loved you, the more I became numb and indifferent to my world within.   

I gave you a task that no human could fulfil. I’m sorry for that.

I’m sorry for all the times that I gripped to you and refused to let go. I am sorry for all the times I left without a word and came back, only to leave again. And again, and again.

I was in fact confined to a prison that I created myself. I was seemingly stuck in a place which I was refusing to leave. I was stuck in a story that began a long time before we met, a story in which I was longing to be seen and loved, in which I was alone and abandoned, a story within which I chose to stay. I brought us in it. You were now the villain. With no fault of your own, I gave you the task of making me whole again.

We know that in the end, I left, physically – and managed to not come back to you. The mind is deceiving, you see. We can leave a place, a person with our bodies, but our minds and energy could still cling to those places even after years. Our cells could still be living within the story of the past. We think we are letting go, we think that “time heals” but… we are lying to ourselves. Letting go is truly an inner process of detaching our Selves from the jail we built around us. Letting go of the beliefs that keep us prisoners. It requires radical honesty. It requires the dark.

So I chose to see what was keeping me stuck and realised it was not you and your ways, but that story which began long ago. I was still the five year-old girl that was counting the seconds until mum got home, sometimes after midnight. I was the five year old girl that was speaking to dad, but dad was too caught up in his books and writings to hear this small child. I was still the child that was in some ways abandoned, not physically, but emotionally in disconnect, and constant yearning.

Now, truth is, I don’t want you in my head anymore. Or in my heart. Perhaps you’re bored too of being loved by a ghost. 

I tried to fill your space with Others – I tried to love them, so hungry to feel what I felt then, craving to feel feel feel even for one split second that intensity. Each time, I suffocated myself with the lack of space that I created, with a love that was twisted into something deceitful almost, a love that was seeking to occupy a space already taken. 

As I come to this turning point, I am finally ready to release this loving that comes from my self-abandoning. Like mourning for the passing of a loved one, I grieve the little girl that loved you so dearly, knowing that I am not Her anymore. Forgiving you, and forgiving Her too for gripping you so tightly, for her demanding that you make her feel alive with meaning. I forgive you for the twisted contortions, the coldness: you were loving Her in your own small ways. You didn’t know any better. 

And the space that’s left –

I’ll fill it with poems, dark chocolate melting on a summer’s day, aloneness at seaside, prayers, dancing with god, tears of grief and joy, with awe for the life that is possible. This spaciousness is unfamiliar, and the tendency of the heart is to fill it with Something Else quickly.

To the Heart it seems like a sort of death for she thought you were part of her for a while. But the heart is still whole and intact and the soul is dancing with joy at this freeing of self. 

***

^{In my last very short relationship, I was told “you’re too good, you do too much for me”.}

^{I was surprised and took a moment to think about this. It took me down a spiralling journey down through my life so far. I suddenly saw it: I’ve always gave too much. I always loved too much, too hard – everyone else, everything else except myself, except the wounded child inside me that was waiting there for me for so long, waiting for a sign of my returning Home. I realised the ways in which I have been self-sabotaging. I have become the sweet, hard working girl that everyone loves, that tries to fix every relationship and help everyone. I was the councillor, the saviour, the healer, the doctor, the lover, the mother and the father, the sibling, the family to those without one, the home to others. All at once, to everyone. Until one day I realised that although I left a narcissistic relationship two years ago, I was still stuck in it – not physically (because I have not seen him since) but energetically, emotionally. I moved in and out of relationships seeking, seeking to recreate something, seeking to be Loved and feel Whole. Not realising I was doing the opposite – I was making myself smaller, more pleasing. It only takes that one decision to change something. That decision required brutal honesty: facing the dark shadows of my Self to see the Truth – that I was still holding on to a relationship that was dead long ago, that I was loving the ghosts of a dream I had that was non-existent and that despite being more self-loving and nurturing towards my inner life, my mind was still finding ways to self-sabotage. It only takes that one decision: a commitment to cut the chords to our past, but at the same time to pay homage to who we were then.}

^{We didn’t know any better. But now we do.}